CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE PERSONAL RULE

THE PERSONAL RULE OF THE KING WAS NOT SET UP COVERTLY OR BY degrees. Charles openly proclaimed his intention. “We have showed,” he said, “by our frequent meeting our people, our love to the use of Parliaments; yet, the late abuse having for the present driven us unwillingly out of that course, we shall account it presumption for any to prescribe any time unto us for Parliaments, the calling, continuing, and dissolving of which is always in our own power, and shall be more inclinable to meet in Parliament again, when our people shall see more clearly into our interests and actions and when such as have bred this interruption shall have received their condign punishment.”

This policy required other large measures. First, there must be peace with France and Spain. Without the support of Parliament Charles had not the strength to carry on foreign wars. It was not difficult to obtain peace. Indeed both the French and Spanish Governments showed their contempt of English exertions when they voluntarily returned the prisoners they had taken at La Rochelle and in the Netherlands. The second condition was the gaining of some at least of the Parliamentary leaders. Upon this there must have been a long discussion. In those days there were few men who did not seek the favour of the Crown. Some sought it by subservience, and others by opposition. Eliot was regarded as irreconcilable, but Sir Henry Savile, Thomas Digges, and Wentworth were deemed both possible and serviceable acquisitions. Digges had proved himself willing to endure prison for the Parliamentary case; he thawed somewhat readily in the royal sunshine. But Wentworth was the man of all others most worth winning. In the debates upon the Petition of Right he had taken a line marked by certain restraints. Behind the fierce invective of the Parliamentarian there had been noticed a certain willingness not to exclude the other side of the argument. His abilities were obviously of the first order, and so were his ambitions. His sombre force might mar or make the system the King now sought to establish.

To Wentworth therefore the King turned. Indeed, even before the death of Buckingham this champion of Parliament had made distinct overtures, all couched in dignified and reasonable guise. The securing of Wentworth had now become essential to the Personal Rule. Wentworth was more than willing. He knew he judged better than most other men; he was a born administrator; all he wanted was scope for his endeavours. In December 1628 he became Lord President of the Council of the North and a member of the Privy Council. From this moment he not only abandoned all the ideas of which he had been the ablest exponent, but all the friends who had fought at his side. He sailed on in power and favour while Eliot, his rival but for long his comrade, was condemned for contempt of the King’s Government and languished to his death in the Tower. The very force of Wentworth’s practical mind led him to a theme which was the exact contrary of all he had previously espoused. Elaborate explanations have been offered to mitigate the suddenness of this transformation. We are invited to regard him as the only man who could have achieved the reunion of Parliament and the monarchy. Allowance must be made for the different values assigned in those days to royal favour and public duty. As Ranke justly but severely observes: “The statesmen of England have always been distinguished from those of other countries by the combination of their activity in the Council and in the Cabinet with an activity in Parliament, without which they cannot win their way into the other sphere. . . . But there was as yet no clear consciousness of the rule, infinitely important for the moral and political development of remarkable men, that the activity of a Minister must be harmonious and consistent with his activity as a Member of Parliament. In the case of Wentworth especially it is clear that he opposed the Government of that day, by which he was kept down, only in order to make himself necessary to it. His natural inclination was, as he once avowed, to live not under the frown but under the smile of his sovereign. The words of opposition to the Government had hardly died away from his lips when, at the invitation of that Government, he joined it, although no change had been introduced into its policy.” This was the reason why a hatred centred upon Wentworth different from that which even incompetence attracted to other Ministers. He was “the Satan of the Apostasy,” “the lost Archangel,” “the suborned traitor to the cause of Parliament.” No administrative achievements, no address in business, no eloquence, no magnitude of personality, could atone to his former friends for his desertion. And they had eleven years to think about it all.

Savile and Digges had already accepted office; and a couple of eminent lawyers whose opinions had been adverse to the Crown were also persuaded to sing the opposite tune. Wentworth therefore was enlisted by the King. The lesser figures of the Parliamentary movement either suffered ill usage at the royal hands or, like Holles, Hazelrigg, and Pym, were allowed to brood and fume in obscurity.

But the third and least sentimental condition of the Personal Rule was dominant—money. How to get the money? First, an extreme frugality must be practised by the executive—no wars, no adventures of any kind, no disturbances; all State action reduced to a minimum; quietness by all means. These were the inevitable rules of King Charles’s new system. Looking back, the modern eye may discern in this arbitrary regime some at least of those results at which Bright and Cobden aimed in the nineteenth century. The executive was at its weakest. All foreign enterprise was therefore barred. The Crown had to make shift with what it could scrape from old taxes. There even was in the Victorian day a casual saying, “An old tax is no tax.” The wealth gained by national toil fructified in the pockets of the people. Peace reigned throughout the land. No large question could be stirred. The King, with his elegant, dignified Court, whose figures are portrayed by the pencil of Van Dyck, whose manners and whose morals were an example to all, reigned on the smallest scale. He was a despot, but an unarmed despot. No standing army enforced his decrees. There was more tolerance towards religious differences in the King’s circle than anywhere else in the land. He sincerely believed, his judges vehemently asserted, and his people found it difficult to deny, that he was ruling according to many of the old customs of the realm. It is a travesty to represent this period of Personal Rule as a time of tyranny in any effective sense. In later years, under the yoke of Cromwell’s Major-Generals, all England looked back to these placid thirties as an age of ease and tranquillity. But man has never sought tranquillity alone. His nature drives him forward to fortunes which, for better or for worse, are different from those which it is in his power to pause and enjoy.

The Prerogative of the Crown offered a wide and vaguely defined field within which taxes could be raised. The King, supported by his judges, strained all expedients to the limit. He not only persisted in levying tonnage and poundage, to which every one had become accustomed, but he raised or varied the rates upon certain articles. He empowered commissioners to confirm, at a price, defective titles to lands and to commute frauds in their sale. He profited greatly by exercising the Crown’s rights of wardship over the estates of heirs who were minors. He mulcted all persons who had not obeyed the summons to receive knighthood at his coronation. Their attendance had long been regarded as a mere form; their absence now opened a source of revenue. He organised into a system the sporadic monopolies in which Queen Elizabeth and his father, to the resentment of Parliament, had indulged. Loopholes in the existing Act against monopolies enabled Charles to make new and more profitable grants, many of them to corporations, in which courtiers and landowners participated. This was in practice a system of indirect taxation farmed out through deeply interested tax-gatherers. Large sums of money were paid for each concession, and a handsome due was yielded upon each year’s trading. Those who benefited were all for the Personal Rule, while the many who did not swelled the opposition. The growth of London was widely viewed with apprehension. With its suburbs it numbered some two hundred thousand people. The plague lurked in their congested habitations, and public opinion had supported strict rules against new buildings. Nevertheless many had built houses and London and other cities grew. The King’s commissioners now came along with the hard alternative, demolish or ransom. In some cases the poor, ill-housed society tore down the structures it had raised; in most they paid the fine.

Meanwhile Wentworth, now Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, had, by a combination of tact and authority, reduced that kingdom to a greater submission to the British Crown than ever before or since. He assuaged internal feuds; he established order and prosperity; and with an undoubted measure of general acquiescence he produced an Irish army and a substantial Irish subvention for the upkeep of Charles’s crown. His repute in history must rest upon his Irish administration. At the end of seven years he stood at the head of a country which he had disciplined and exploited, but which, without any apparent violent measures or bloodshed, lay docile in his hands.

By all these means under a modest frugal regime King Charles managed to do without a Parliament. Hungry forces still lay in shadow. All the ideas which they cherished and championed stirred in their minds, but they had no focus, no expression. The difficulties of travel, the dangers of gathering at any point, the pleasant, easy life of peaceful England, oppressed their movement. Many who would have been vehement if the chance had come their way were content to live their life from day to day. The land was good; springtime, summertime, autumn, had their joys; in the winter there was the Yule log and new amusements. Agriculture and fox hunting cast their compulsive or soothing balms upon restless spirits. Harvests were now abundant and the rise in prices had almost ceased. There was no longer a working-class problem. The Poor Law was administered with exceptional humanity. Ordinary gentlefolk might have no share in national government, but they were still lords on their own estates. In Quarter Sessions they ruled the shires, and as long as they kept clear of the law and paid their taxes with a grunt they were left in peace. It required an intense effort by the Parliamentary party to rouse in them under such conditions a national feeling and concern for the State. The malcontents looked about for points which would inflame the inert forces of the nation.

Presently Charles’s lawyers and sleuth-hounds drew attention to an anomaly which had grown with the passage of years. According to the immemorial laws of England—perhaps of Alfred the Great—the whole land should pay for the upkeep of the Fleet. However, for a long time only the maritime counties had paid for the Navy. Yet was not this Navy the shield of all the peace and freedom which thrived in Britain? Why should not all pay where all benefited? There never was a juster demand made of its subjects by an island state than that all counties should share alike in the upkeep of the Fleet. Put properly to a loyal Parliament, it would have passed, with general consent, on its merits apart from ancient tradition. But the abuse of letting the inland counties go untaxed had grown into a custom not broken by Queen Elizabeth even in the days of the Armada. The project commended itself to the King. In August 1635 he levied “Ship Money” upon the whole country.

Forthwith a Buckinghamshire gentleman, a former Member of Parliament, solidly active against the Crown, stood forth among many others and refused to pay. His assessment was no more than twenty shillings; but upon the principle that even the best of taxes could be levied only with the consent of Parliament he faced the distraint and imprisonment which were the penalties of contumacy. John Hampden’s refusal was selected by both sides as a test case. The Parliamentarians, who had no other means of expression, saw in it a trial upon which all eyes would be directed, and welcomed a martyr whose sacrifice would disturb the public tameness. They wished to hear the people groan at tyranny. The Crown, on the other hand, was encouraged by the logic of its argument. The case of Hampden therefore became famous at once and for ever. An obelisk at Princes Risborough records to this day his valiant assertion that the inland counties have no concern for the Royal Navy, except in so far as Parliament shall require them to pay. The Crown prevailed. The judges were justified in their decision. It does not even appear that the law was strained. But the grievance ran far and wide. Ninety per cent of ship money was eventually collected for the year 1637, but only 20 per cent for 1639. Everywhere persons of property looked up from their pleasant life and began to use again the language of the Petition of Right.

Yet this alone would not have sufficed to rouse the country. The Parliamentary party knew that upon the constitutional issue alone they could not succeed. They therefore continued to foster religious agitation as the surest means of waking England from its apathy. Here emerges the figure of the man who of all others was Charles’s evil genius—William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a convinced Anglican, wholehearted in his opposition both to Rome and to Geneva, and a leader in the movement away from Calvinism. But he had an itch for politics, had been a confidant of Buckingham, was indeed the reputed author of Buckingham’s most successful speeches. He stepped with agility from an academic career at Oxford into national politics and the King’s Council at a time when religious affairs were considered paramount. The Elizabethan settlement was dependent on the State. By itself the Church had not the strength to bear the strain. An informal compact therefore grew up between the secular and spiritual aspects of government, whereby the State sustained the Church in its property and the Church preached the duty of obedience and the Divine Right of Kings.

Laud by no means initiated this compact, but he set himself with untimely vigour to enforce it. Among his innovations was the railing off of the altar, and a new emphasis on ceremony and the dignity of the clergy. The gulf between clergy and congregation was widened and the role of authority visibly enhanced. Thus the King’s religious ideas marched in step with his politics and resentments multiplied. Laud now found a new source of revenue for the Crown. Under the statutes of Elizabeth everyone was obliged to go to church; they might think as they liked, but they must conform in public worship. This practice had fallen into widespread disuse. Some did not trouble to go; to others it was abhorrent. Now all over England men and women found themselves haled before the justices for not attending church, and fined one shilling a time. Here indeed was something that ordinary men and women could understand. This was no question for lawyers and judges in the court of the Exchequer; it was something new and something teasing. The Puritans, already chafed, regarded it as persecution; they talked at large about the fires of Smithfield, to which this broad downward path must assuredly lead. The Parliamentary agitation which had been conducted during all these years with so much difficulty gained a widespread accession of strength at a time when the King’s difficulties had already massed themselves into a stack.

The prosecutions before the Prerogative courts of Prynne and other Puritan writers, and the pillorying, branding, and cropping of ears which they suffered in punishment, were isolated blots upon a regime mild and good-natured compared with that of other countries in the recent past or the approaching future.¹ Indeed it is by no means certain that, left to herself, England would have broken into revolt. It was in Scotland, the home of the Stuarts and Charles’s birth-place, that the torch was lighted which began the vast conflagration. Laud was dissatisfied with the spiritual conditions prevailing in the Northern kingdom, and he moved the King to make some effort to improve them. The Scots must adopt the English Prayer Book, and enter broadly into communion with their English brethren.

Besides the desire for uniformity in religious ceremonies throughout the whole Island, King Charles had practical and secular aims. His father had re-established bishops in Scotland with the aim of disciplining the outspoken Presbyterian ministers. James had also adroitly backed the Scottish nobles in their resistance to the pretensions of the Kirk. Charles on his accession had alienated the nobles by an Act which sought to take away from them all the Church lands they had acquired since the Reformation. Furthermore, he was determined to reform the system of collecting tithes, which had largely fallen into their hands. The burden on the smaller landholders was to be reduced and the stipends of the clergy increased. Charles’s plans for reinforcing episcopacy in Scotland thus drove the Scottish nobles into opposition. The bishops, for their part, as agents of the distant King, found themselves increasingly disliked by their own clergy as well as by the landowners. In order to strengthen the hands of the Scottish bishops a new exposition of Canon Law was framed emphasising the position of the Crown, and a new Prayer Book or Liturgy was drawn up in London to regulate the forms of public worship in Scotland. These books were promulgated in the year 1636. No one appears to have foreseen the consequences.

Charles and his advisers had no thought of challenging doctrine, still less of taking any step towards Popery. They desired to assert the Protestant High Church view. They defined with new stress the Royal Supremacy, and they prescribed, especially in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, a somewhat more elaborate ritual. Thus in their course they affronted at the same time the property interests of the powerful, the religious convictions of all classes, and the independent spirit of the Scottish nation. The resentment excited was general, and was immediately turned into the channels of most violent prejudice. The Scottish people believed, and were told by their native leaders to believe, that they were to be forced by the royal authority to take the first fatal steps towards Roman Catholicism. Every tenet, every word, of the new Prayer Book was scanned with profound suspicion. Was not the King married to a Popish wife, who practised idolatry in her private chapel? Were not Papists tolerated throughout England in a manner increasingly dangerous to the Protestant faith? Was there not a design to pave the way to Rome?

When in July 1637 the dignitaries of Scottish Church and State were gathered in St. Giles’s Church in Edinburgh for the first solemn reading of the new Prayer Book it was evident that many ministers of religion and substantial laymen from all over Scotland had come into the city. An outburst of fury and insult overwhelmed the Dean when he sought to read the new dispensation. A woman of the poorer classes even threw her footstool at the wolf in sheep’s clothing now revealed in their midst. The ceremony became a riot. A surge of passion swept the ancient capital before which the episcopal and royal authorities trembled. Edinburgh had defied the Crown, and no force was found to resist it. King Charles was startled by the news. He tried to reassure his Scottish subjects. He dwelt in forcible terms upon his hatred of Popery, and professed himself willing to amend the new Prayer Book. But this was vain: only the immediate withdrawal of the offensive book could have availed. Instead a long argument on minor points began, with repeated concessions on the part of the King and growing anger throughout Scotland. Once again we see in a long period of wordy contention and legal interchanges the prelude to a violent convulsion. The Scots, shrewdly advised by their men of law, cast their resistance into the form of a Petition, a Grand Supplication, under the pressure of which the new Prayer Book was withdrawn. But too late. A tempest was blowing which bore men forward. Respect and loyalty were still professed to the King; the blast beat upon the bishops. At length the whole original policy of the King was withdrawn. It had served only to raise a counter-movement, which grew in intensity. All through the year 1637 King Charles was in appearance conceding and virtually apologising, though at the same time he was meditating the use of force. Meanwhile the Scottish nation was forming a union which challenged existing conditions both in Church and State.

At the beginning of 1638 the Petition was abandoned for the signing of a Covenant. There was little new in this Covenant. Much of it merely repeated the confession of faith agreed upon by all fifty years before under King James VI. At that time, amid the stress of the religious wars in Europe, there had been a desire to testify against the power and misdeeds of Rome. But the Covenant now became the solemn bond of a whole nation. All who signed pledged themselves to “adhere to and defend the aforesaid true religion, and forbear the practice of all novations in the matter of the worship of God till they be tried and allowed in free Assemblies and in Parliaments.” Whatever was done against the weakest among them was to be the concern of all. On February 28, 1638, the Covenant was read in the Church of Blackfriars in Edinburgh. The Earl of Sutherland, the first to sign his name thereto, was followed by a long list of notables who felt themselves borne forward upon what is described as the “demoniacal frenzy” of the populace. The scroll was signed in the church by many who cut a vein for their ink, and copies were taken for signature to nearly every town and village. It embodied the unalterable resolve of a whole people to perish rather than submit to Popery. Nothing of this sort had ever been intended or dreamed of by the King; but this was the storm he had aroused.

He met it by a fresh semblance of concessions. The Marquis of Hamilton, an experienced Scottish statesman, who was to follow his King to the scaffold, was sent to the North as lay commissioner, with the supreme aim of making friends again. Hamilton fought for nothing more than some show of dignity to cover the temporary royal retreat. He was expostulating with a whirlwind. It was agreed that a General Assembly should be convoked. The Committee of the Covenanters, sitting in Edinburgh, set themselves to organise the elections as elections had never been managed before. The Assembly which met in St. Mungo’s Cathedral in Glasgow was found to be dominated by the religious convictions of the Northern kingdom, supported by a formidable lay element, who, surrounded by fervent adherents of all classes, sat armed with sword and dagger in the middle of the church.

Before Charles sent Hamilton to Scotland they had had a significant conversation. The King had said that if the reconciliation failed Hamilton should collect troops and put down rebellion. “But,” said Hamilton, “what if there be not enough troops found in the country for this purpose?” “Then,” answered Charles, “power shall come from England, and I will myself come in person with them, being resolved to hazard rather my life than to suffer the supreme authority to be contemned.” This occasion now arose. The King was confronted with a hostile and organised Assembly, gathered to adjust religious differences, but now led by armed lay elders, whose aims were definitely political and whose demand was the actual and virtual abolition of the Episcopacy. He ordered the dissolution of the Assembly. That body declared itself resolved to continue in permanent session. They took this step with full knowledge of what it meant. The refusal of the General Assembly of Scotland in November 1638 to dissolve upon the demand of the King’s commissioner has been compared to that of the French National Assembly in 1789, when for the first time the members resisted the royal will. The facts and circumstances no doubt were different; but both events led by unbroken chains of causation to the same end, namely, the solemn beheading of a king.

Hamilton, the baffled peacemaker, returned to Whitehall, full of self-reproach for the advice he had given to the King. He now declared himself in favour of drastic measures. The matter was long debated in the King’s Council. On the one hand, it was asked, why draw the sword upon a whole people who still proclaimed their love and reverence for the Crown? And how levy war upon them without money or armed forces and without the support of a united England? Moreover, Charles’ Ministers could not fail to see the deadly recoil of the Scottish revolt upon the English situation, so outwardly calm, so tense and brittle. If this succeeded where would it stop? The royal authority, supported by the courts of law, had reigned, not without challenge, but effectually, for more than ten years without a Parliament. Here in the North was open defiance. Laud in England and Wentworth in Ireland were in constant correspondence, and to stamp it out while time remained was the mood of both. That mood prevailed, and both King and Covenanters looked about for arms and means of war.

Force was now to be invoked. The King’s Council turned its eyes to Wentworth’s troops in Ireland, and even to Spain. There was talk of hiring two thousand Spanish infantry to form the nucleus around which the well-affected in Scotland, of whom there were many, especially in the Eastern Highlands, might gather. But the Covenanters had far better resources overseas. The famous part played by the Scots brigades and by Scottish generals under Gustavus Adolphus in Germany had left Scotland with an incomparable military reserve. Alexander Leslie had risen in the Thirty Years War to the rank of Field-Marshal. He felt himself called upon to return and fight the same quarrel on his native soil. To him it was but a flanking operation in the vast conflict of the Protestants with the Catholic Church. The appeal of Scotland to her warriors abroad was not in vain. Back they flowed in thousands: trained officers and men, the hardened, experienced leaders of many harsh campaigns. They became instantly the core of a disciplined army, with an organised, competent staff and an outstanding, capable Commander-in-Chief. The nobles of Scotland bowed to Leslie’s military reputation. They obeyed his orders. Their personal rivalries were allayed. In a few months, and long before any effective preparations could be made in the South, Scotland had the strongest armed force in the Island. It had military knowledge and good officers. It had more: it was inspired with earnest, slowly roused, and now fanatical religious passion. The preachers, sword at side, carbine in hand, aided the drill-sergeants with their exhortations. The soldiers stood ranked in humble supplication, chanting their psalms. Over all there was a rigorous restraint, not only in religious but political opinion. They still had reverence for the King. They would even on occasion cheer his name. But their banners displayed the motto “For Christ’s Crown, and the Covenant.” The lines of antagonism were drawn with cold, pedantic, inflexible resolve. In May 1639 this army, about twenty thousand strong, stood upon the Scottish Border opposite the weaker, ill-disciplined, and uncertain forces which Charles and his advisers had gathered.

It was clear from the first that in the King’s camp there was no united desire to make war upon the Scots; on the contrary, parleys were set on foot in a good spirit, and on June 18 the so-called “Pacification of Berwick” was agreed. The Scots promised to disband their army and restore the royal castles which they had seized. The King agreed to the summoning in the following August both of a General Assembly and of a Parliament; that these should henceforth be regularly summoned, and that one should have the decision of ecclesiastical and the other of temporal affairs. He declined to recognise the enactments of the Assembly at Glasgow, because they reflected upon his duty as a sovereign; but for the time being he accepted the abolition of the Episcopacy. So far had he travelled since the gay plan of a High Church Liturgy. Charles however thought of the Pacification as a device to gain time, and the Covenanters were soon convinced of this. The spirit of independence was now aroused throughout Scotland. Wrath was expressed at the restoration of the royal fortresses, and fears at the dispersal of the Scottish army. Hamilton, returning to Scotland, found himself in a world of rising antagonism. The Scottish Parliament, which met in Edinburgh at the end of August 1639, claimed forthwith that the King’s Privy Council should be responsible to it, and that the King should follow its advice in appointing commanders of troops, and especially of fortresses. They repudiated the jurisdiction of the Treasury, particularly in the coinage, which was being debased; and they even required that honours and dignities should be bestowed in accordance with their wishes. When these intentions became apparent Hamilton could only at first temporise by adjournments, and finally by a prorogation until June 1640. Before the Assembly dispersed it left in full authority a powerful and representative committee, which was in fact the Government of Scotland.

In the complicated pattern of Western Europe the Scots were not only the ardent partisans of Protestantism, but the friends of France against the Austro-Spanish combination. They viewed the neutral and isolationist foreign policy of King Charles as unduly favouring the Catholic interest. They now sought to revive in an intimate form their traditional association with France. By the end of 1639 Charles saw himself confronted with an independent State and Government in the North, which, though it paid formal homage to him as King, was resolved to pursue its own policy both at home and abroad. It thus challenged not only the King’s Prerogative, but the integrity of his dominions. He felt bound to fight. But how?

Hamilton, back from Scotland, posed the hard question, “If the Kingly way be taken, how money may be levied, and if that be feasible without a Parliament?” Wentworth was now summoned from Ireland to strengthen the Council. His repute at Court stood high. He had restored not only order but the appearance of loyalty throughout Ireland. Irish sympathies lay upon the Catholic side. Ruling as an enlightened despot, the Lord Deputy had raised and was paying and training an Irish army of eight thousand men. He believed himself capable of enforcing upon Scotland, and later upon England, the system of autocratic rule which had brought him success in the sister island. “Thorough” was his maxim; and we have no means of judging how far he would have pushed on in success. He now threw his weight in favor of war with Scotland. He hoped, once fighting started, to arouse the old antagonism of the English against the Scots. He dreamed of a new Flodden; and he was fully prepared to use his Irish army in Scotland whenever it might be necessary.

At this decisive moment England’s monarchy might well have conformed to the absolutism which was becoming general throughout Europe. Events however took a different turn. The King was by no means resolved to depart from the ancient laws, as he understood them. He had a respect for tradition both in Church and State, of which Wentworth, the ruthless, capable adventurer, whose personal force grew with the crisis, was devoid. But Wentworth saw clearly enough that the royal revenues were not sufficient to support the cost of the campaign. He concluded therefore that Parliament must be summoned. In his over-confidence he thought that the Commons would prove manageable. He was wrong. But a momentous step was taken. After nearly eleven years of Personal Rule the King issued writs for a new Parliament, and elections were held throughout England. This opened the world-famous struggle of Parliament against the King. The Parliamentary forces, though without public expression, had been neither impotent nor idle. Under a mild despotism they had established a strong control of local government in many parts of the country. When suddenly elections were held they were immediately able to secure a Parliament which began where its predecessor had left off. More than this, they presented the issues of 1629 with the pent-up anger and embitterment of eleven years of gag and muzzle. Charles had now to come back cap in hand to those very forces which he had disdainfully dismissed. The membership had been changed by time and fortune. Only a quarter of the former Members reappeared. Eliot was dead in the Tower; Wentworth was now Earl of Strafford and the King’s First Minister. But of the old lot one man stood forth, competent, instructed, and avenging. From the moment when the new, afterwards called the Short, Parliament met, Pym was the central figure. “He had observed the errors and mistakes in government,” his contemporary Clarendon wrote of him, “and knew well how to make them appear greater than they were.” In a long, majestic oration he restated the main case and the added griefs. Charles and his chief counsellors, Strafford and Laud, found no comfort from the new assembly. On the contrary, they were met by such a temper that by an act of extreme imprudence it was dissolved after a few days. Its calling had only served to excite and engage the whole of England in the controversy.

The expedient of calling Parliament had clearly failed and “Thorough” became for Strafford the order of the day. The Scottish army was on the Border, and only weak, ill-disciplined forces could be mustered against it. To place armed men in the field both money and a cause were needed. Neither could be found. Many of the great nobles gave or loaned money to the King for the defence of the realm. Catholic England, silent, banned, but still grateful, made its contribution, secretly given and received. But what did these poor sums avail for a war?

Strafford wished to bring over his Irish troops, but fear of the reactions which this step might provoke paralysed the Council. As Lord President of the North he harangued the nobility at York in rugged, violent terms. The reception was cool and disappointing. Presently the Scots crossed the Tweed in good order. The cavalry stood upstream to break the current while the foot waded across. They met with no opposition until they reached the Tyne. Then, as before the Pacification of Berwick, the two hosts faced one another. The Scottish leaders were encouraged in their invasion by the Parliamentary and Puritan movements throughout England, and in the centre of this combination stood Pym. For some days little happened, but one morning a Scottish horseman, watering his horse in the river, came too near the English outposts. Some one pulled a trigger; the shot went home; the imprudent rider was wounded; all the Scots cannon fired and all the English army fled. A contemporary wrote that “Never so many ran from so few with less ado.” The English soldiers explained volubly that their flight was not due to fear of the Scots, but to their own discontents, mentioning especially that they had had no pay. This did not prevent the Scottish army arriving swiftly before the gates of Newcastle. Here the Scots generals declared that they stood for the liberties of England, and appealed for aid from all who agreed with the Parliamentary and Puritan cause. The magistrates however were only induced to open their gates on the blunt reminder that newcastle was in fact a conquered city. Meanwhile Strafford at York was frantically striving to form a front against the invasion, vainly hoping that the insult to English soil would produce the longed-for revival of the national spirit, trying without success to gain a majority upon the Council for the importation of Irish troops.

At this time many of the lords who were now meeting in London pressed on the King the proposal to summon a Magnum Concilium, which was an assembly of the Peers without the Commons. Centuries had passed since it had been convoked, but was not here a crisis which demanded it? Charles agreed, but this antique body could only recommend that Parliament should be called. The King could not defend the country himself. Only Parliament could save the land from what had now become an act of Scottish aggression. At this moment King Charles’ moral position was at its worst. He had plumbed the depths of personal failure. His enemies, while compassing and finally achieving his destruction, now built and rebuilt for him a party and a cause for which any man could die.