Parliament Challenges Charles I

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 131-132:

Charles’s military preparations stopped. If he had been planning a coup against Parliament, then it had been outflanked. With his chief adviser under guard, the king was drastically weakened.

Now that [Thomas Wentworth, Earl of] Strafford was out of the way, and on the 25th had been moved to the Tower through a jeering crowd, Parliament could turn to business. Top of the agenda was the staging of huge public rehabilitations for those who had suffered during the king’s Personal Rule.

On the 16th, Bishop John Williams was released from the Tower by the Lords. Even before that, after an emotional speech by a rather scruffy East Anglian MP called Oliver Cromwell, orders had been made for the release of Alexander Leighton and a spirited young polemicist named John Lilburne – imprisoned in 1638 for importing ‘scandalous’ books from the Netherlands. The biggest celebration, though, came on the 28th, when – on a crisp sunny Saturday – Henry Burton and William Prynne returned from imprisonment to the capital. Church bells chimed amid a chorus of cheers as the men processed slowly through town. There were so many followers, throwing flowers and herbs from their gardens, that it took the procession a reported three hours to pass Charing Cross.

Now, as winter approached, the work of unpicking Charles’s government could begin. ‘[T]here was never, I dare say, so busy a time in England,’ wrote one correspondent. Soon, though, Londoners staged a stunning intervention which threatened to disturb the whole project. On 11 December, braving the icy cold, a delegation of some 1,500 citizens crowded into Westminster Hall bringing with them a printed petition, signed by 10,000. It blamed the bishops for everything from problems in the cloth industry, to ‘whoredoms and adulteries’, to the ‘swarming of lascivious, idle and unprofitable books’. It asked not just for reform of religious abuses, but that the episcopacy itself be abolished, ‘with all its dependencies, roots and branches’. Here was the potential for a complete radicalisation of the reform agenda. More to the point, the sight of so many ordinary Londoners, petitioning publicly for the uprooting of the ecclesiastical order was staggering.

For now, Parliament carried on, confining itself to attacking the worst excesses of Archbishop Laud. Just five days after the London petition, the Canons of 1640 were declared illegal; Laud himself was impeached two days after that, and detained. The most far-reaching proposal in Parliament, though, was not a religious one. It came in the last week of December when, on Christmas Eve, the Devonian MP William Strode introduced a bill mandating annual Parliaments: if passed, it would ensure Parliament’s permanent sitting. The gauntlet had been thrown.