whole weight of the crown the attempt of William Laud (q.v.),
since 1633 archbishop of Canterbury, to enforce conformity to
The Church.
the ritual prescribed by the Prayer Book. At the same
time offence was given to the Puritans by an order
that every clergyman should read the Declaration
of Sports, in which the king directed that no one should be
prevented from dancing or shooting at the butts on Sunday
afternoon. Many of the clergy were suspended or deprived,
many emigrated to Holland or New England, and of those who
remained a large part bore the yoke with feelings of ill-concealed
dissatisfaction. Suspicion was easily aroused that a deep plot
existed, of which Laud was believed to be the centre, for carrying
the nation over to the Church of Rome, a suspicion which
seemed to be converted into a certainty when it was known
that Panzani and Conn, two agents of the pope, had access to
Charles, and that in 1637 there was a sudden accession to the
number of converts to the Roman Catholic Church amongst the
lords and ladies of the court.
In the summer of 1638 Charles had long ceased to reign in the affections of his subjects. But their traditionary loyalty had not yet failed, and if he had not called on them for fresh exertions, it is possible that the coming revolution would have been long delayed. Men were Charles and Scotland. ready to shout applause in honour of Puritan martyrs like Prynne, Burton and Bastwick, whose ears were cut off in 1637, or in honour of the lawyers who argued such a case as that of Hampden. But no signs of active resistance had yet appeared. Unluckily for Charles, he was likely to stand in need of the active co-operation of Englishmen. He had attempted to force a new Prayer Book upon the Scottish nation. A riot at Edinburgh in 1637 quickly led to national resistance, and when in November 1638 the general assembly at Glasgow set Charles’s orders at defiance, he was compelled to choose between tame submission and immediate war. In 1639 he gathered an English force, and marched towards the border. But English laymen, though asked to supply the money which he needed for the support of his army, deliberately kept it in their pockets, and the contributions of the clergy and of official persons were not sufficient to enable him to keep his troops long in the field. The king, therefore, thought it best to agree to terms of pacification. Misunderstandings broke out as to the interpretation of the treaty, and Charles having discovered that the Scots were intriguing with France, fancied that England, in hatred of its ancient foe, would now be ready to rally to his standard. After an interval of eleven years, in April 1640 he once more called a parliament.
The Short Parliament, as it was called, demanded redress of grievances, the abandonment of the claim to levy ship-money, and a complete change in the ecclesiastical system. Charles thought that it would not be worth while even to conquer Scotland on such terms, and dissolved The Short Parliament. parliament. A fresh war with Scotland followed. Wentworth, now earl of Strafford, became the leading adviser of the king. With all the energy of his disposition he threw himself into Charles’s plans, and left no stone unturned to furnish the new expedition with supplies and money. But no skilfulness of a commander can avail when soldiers are determined not to fight. The Scots crossed the Tweed, and Charles’s army was well pleased to fly before them. In a short time the The Scottish invasion. whole of Northumberland and Durham were in the hands of the invaders. Charles was obliged to leave these two counties in their hands as a pledge for the payment of their expenses; and he was also obliged to summon parliament to grant him the supplies which he needed for that object.
When the Long Parliament met in November 1640 it was in
a position in which no parliament had been before. Though
nominally the Houses did not command a single
soldier, they had in reality the whole Scottish army at
their back. By refusing supplies they would put it
The Long Parliament.
Attainder of Strafford.
out of the king’s power to fulfil his engagements to
that army, and it would immediately pursue its onward march
to claim its rights. Hence there was scarcely anything which
the king could venture to deny the Commons. Under Pym’s
leadership, they began by asking the head of Strafford. Nominally
he was accused of a number of acts of oppression
in the north of England and in Ireland. His real
offence lay in his attempt to make the king absolute,
and in the design with which he was credited of intending
to bring over an Irish army to crush the liberties of England.
If he had been a man of moderate abilities he might have escaped.
But the Commons feared his commanding genius too much to
let him go free. They began with an impeachment. Difficulties
arose, and the impeachment was turned into a bill of attainder.
The king abandoned his minister, and the execution of Strafford
left Charles without a single man of supreme ability on his side.
Then came rapidly a succession of blows at the supports by
which the Tudor monarchy had been upheld. The courts of
star chamber and high commission and the council of the north
were abolished. The raising of tonnage and poundage without
a parliamentary grant was declared illegal. The judges who
had given obnoxious decisions were called to answer for their
fault and were taught that they were responsible to the House
of Commons as well as the king. Finally a bill was passed providing
that the existing House should not be dissolved without its
own consent.
It was clearly a revolutionary position which the House had assumed. But it was assumed because it was impossible to expect that a king who had ruled as Charles had ruled could take up a new position as the exponent of the feelings which were represented in the Commons. As long as Charles lived he could not be otherwise than an object of suspicion; and yet if he were dethroned there was no one available to fill his place. There arose therefore two parties in the House, one ready to trust the king, the other disinclined to put any confidence in him at all. The division was the sharper because it coincided with a difference in matters of religion. Scarcely any one wished to see the Laudian ceremonies upheld. But the members who favoured the king, and who formed a considerable minority, wished to see a certain liberty of religious thought, together with a return under a modified Episcopacy to the forms of worship which prevailed before Laud had taken the church in hand. The other side, which had the majority by a few votes, wished to see the Puritan creed prevail in all its strictness, and were favourable to the establishment of the Presbyterian discipline. The king by his unwise action threw power into the hands of his opponents. He listened with tolerable calmness to their Grand Remonstrance, but his attempt to seize the five members whom he accused of high treason made a good understanding impossible. The Scottish army had been paid off some months before, and civil war was the only means of deciding the quarrel.
At first the fortune of war wavered. Edgehill was a drawn battle (1642), and the campaign of 1643, though it was on the whole favourable to the king, gave no decisive results. Before the year was at an end parliament invited a new Scottish army to intervene in England. As an The civil war. inducement, the Solemn League and Covenant was signed by all Parliamentarian Englishmen, the terms of which were interpreted by the Scots to bind England to submit to Presbyterianism, though the most important clauses had been purposely left vague, so as to afford a loophole of escape. The battle of Marston Moor, with the defeat of the Royalist forces in the north, was the result. But the battle did not improve the position of the Scots. They had been repulsed, and Presbyterians and Independents. the victory was justly ascribed to the English contingent. The composition of that contingent was such as to have a special political significance. Its leader was Oliver Cromwell. It was formed by men who were fierce Puritan enthusiasts, and who for the very reason that the intensity of their religion separated them from the mass of their countrymen, had learnt to uphold with all the energy of zeal the doctrine that neither church nor state had a right to interfere with the forms of worship which each congregation might select for itself (see Congregationalism and Cromwell, Oliver). The principle advocated by the army, and opposed by the Scots and the
