The Short Parliament, as it was called, was soon dissolved. It was ready to grant supplies if the King would come to terms with the Scots, and this Charles refused to do.

A new war was the result. The Scots invaded England, defeated a large part of the Royal Army at Newburn, and /occupied Northumberland and Durham. Charles had neither an army nor a people behind his back, and he was forced to treat with the invaders. The feelings of the English nation were expressed in the Petition of the Twelve Peers for a New Parliament, laid before the King on August 28, 1640 (No. 24, p. 134). In addition to the piled-up grievances of the past eleven years, was the new one that Charles was believed to have purposed making himself master of England as well as of Scotland by means of an Irish army led into England by Strafford, and paid by subsidies granted by the Irish Parliament. So utterly powerless was Charles before the demands of the Scots for compensation for the expenses of invading England that, on September 7, he summoned a Great Council, or an assembly of the House of Lords alone (No. 25, p. 136), to meet at York to advise him and to guarantee a loan. On November 7, the Long Parliament met at Westminster.

III. From the meeting of the Long Parliament to the
outbreak of the Civil War.

[1640-1642.]

For the first time in the reign of Charles I, a Parliament met with an armed force behind it. Though the Scottish army, which continued to occupy the northern counties till August 1641, was not directly in its service, it depended for its support upon the money voted by the English Parliament, and would consequently have placed itself at the disposition of Parliament if Charles had threatened a dissolution. Charles was therefore no longer in a position to refuse his assent to Bills of which he disapproved, and the series of Constitutional Acts passed during the first

ten months of the existence of the Long Parliament (Nov. 1640-August 1641), bear witness to the direction taken by it in constitutional matters. The Triennial Act (No. 27, p. 144), enacting that Parliament was to meet at least once in three years, and appointing a machinery by which it might be brought together when that period had elapsed, if the Crown neglected to summon it, struck at Charles's late system of governing without summoning Parliament until it suited him to do so, but it did nothing to secure the attention of the King to the wishes of the Houses. Whilst measures were being prepared to give effect to the further changes necessary to diminish the King's authority, the attention of the Houses and of the country was fully occupied by the impeachment, which was ultimately turned into the attainder of the Earl of Strafford.

No great constitutional change can take place without giving dire offence to those at whose expense the change is made, and Parliament had therefore from the very beginning of its existence to take into account the extreme probability that Charles, if he should ever regain power, would attempt to set at naught all that it might do. Against this, they attempted to provide by striking at his ministers, especially at Strafford, whom they knew to have been, for some time, his chief adviser, and whom they regarded as the main supporter of his arbitrary government in the past, and also as the man who was likely from his ability and strength of will to be most dangerous to them in the future, in the event of an attempted reaction. They imagined that if he were condemned and executed no other minister would be found daring enough to carry out the orders of a King who was bent upon reducing Parliament to subjection. They therefore impeached him as a traitor, on the ground that his many arbitrary acts furnished evidence of a settled purpose to place the King above the law, and that such a purpose was tantamount to treason; because, whilst it was apparently directed to strengthening

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the King, it in reality weakened him by depriving him of the hearts of his subjects.

Whether it was justifiable or not to put Strafford to death for actions which had never before been held to be treasonable, it is certain that the Commons, in imagining that Strafford's death would end their troubles, under-estimated the gravity of the situation. They imagined that the King, in breaking through what they called the fundamental laws, had been led astray by wicked counsel, and that they might therefore fairly expect that when his counsellors were punished or removed, he would readily acquiesce in changes which would leave him all the legal power necessary for the well-being of the State.

Such a view of the case was, however, far from being accurate. As a matter of fact, the Constitutional arrangements bequeathed by the Tudors to the Stuarts had broken down, and Charles could argue that he had but perpetuated the leadership of the Tudors in the only way which the ambition of the House of Commons left open to him, and that therefore every attempt now made to subject him to Parliament was a violation of those constitutional rights which he ought to exercise for the good of the nation. It is true that an ideally great man might have been enlightened by the failure of his projects, but Charles was very far from being ideally great, and it was therefore certain that he would regard the designs of the Commons as ruinous to the well-being of the kingdom as well as to his own authority. The circumstances of Strafford's trial increased his irritation, and he had recourse to intrigues with the English army which still remained on foot in Yorkshire, hoping to engage it in his cause against the pretensions of Parliament. It was against these intrigues that the Protestation (No. 28, p. 155) was directed. It was drawn up by Pym, and was taken by every member of both Houses as a token of their determination to resist any forcible interference with their proceedings. It was rapidly followed by

the King's assent, given under stress of mob violence, to the Act for Strafford's attainder (No. 29, p. 156).

On the day on which the King's assent to Strafford's death was given, he also consented to an Act against the dissolution of the Long Parliament without its own consent (No. 30, p. 158). It was the first Act which indicated the new issues which had been opened by the manifest reluctance of Charles to accept that diminution of his power on which Parliament insisted. Taking into account the largeness of the changes proposed, together with the character of the King from whom power was to be abstracted, it is hardly possible to avoid the conclusion that nothing short of a change of Kings would meet the difficulties of the situation. Only a King who had never known what it was to exercise the old powers would feel himself at his ease under the new restrictions.

However reasonable such a conclusion may be, it was not only impossible, but undesirable, that it should be acted on at once. Great as was both physically and morally the injury inflicted on the country by the attempt of Parliament to continue working with Charles, the nation had more to gain from the effort to preserve the continuity of its traditions than it had to lose from the immediate evil results of its mistake. If that generation of Englishmen was slow to realise the truth in this matter, and suffered great calamities in consequence, its very tenacity in holding firm to the impossible solution of a compromise with Charles I, gave better results even to itself than would have ensued if it had been quick to discern the truth. A nation which easily casts itself loose from the traditions of the past loses steadiness of purpose, and ultimately, wearied by excitement, falls into the arms of despotism.

In spite, therefore, of the appearance of chaos in the history of the years 1640-1649, the forces which directed events are easily to be traced. During the first months of the Long Parliament there is the resolution-whilst retaining

the Kingship-to transfer the general direction of government from the King to Parliament and more especially to the House of Commons, a resolution which at first seems capable of being carried out by the abolition of the institutions which had given an exceptional position to the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns. Later on there is the gradual awakening of a part of the nation to the truth that it is impossible to carry out the new system in combination with Charles, and this leads to the putting forth by Parlia ment of a claim to sovereignty really incompatible with Kingship. Even those, however, who are most ready to break with the past, strive hard to maintain political continuity by a succession of proposed compromises, not one of which is accepted by both parties.

The Tonnage and Poundage Act, which became law on June 22 (No. 31, p. 159), bears the impress of the first of these movements. On the one hand, whilst it asserts the illegality of the levy of Customs-duties without a Parlia mentary grant, it gives to Charles not merely the Tonnage and Poundage given to his father, but also 'such other sums of money as have been imposed upon any merchandise either outward or inward by pretext of any letters patent, commission under the Great Seal of England or Privy Seal, since the first year of his late Majesty King James, of blessed memory, and which were continued and paid at the beginning of this present Parliament' (p. 161). In other words, it followed the precedent of the abortive Bill of 1610 (see p. xviii) by including the Impositions in the grant, and thus enabled the King 'to live of his own' in time of peace. On the other hand, it shows how greatly Charles was distrusted by limiting the grant to less than two months, from May 25 to July 15 (p. 161).

The circumstances which caused this distrust are revealed in the Ten Propositions (No. 32, p. 163). The English army was still under arms in Yorkshire, and though it was about to be disbanded, the King proposed to visit Scotland with