Expectations and Attitudes, November 1640 (AQA A-Level History): Revision Notes

Expectations and Attitudes, November 1640

Charles's position when Parliament assembled

In November 1640, Parliament convened because Charles had been left with no alternative. The Treaty of Ripon had placed him under urgent financial pressure, and he recognised that he would need to make concessions to obtain the necessary funding. Nevertheless, Charles hoped that traditional loyalty and anti-Scottish sentiment would enable him to rally support and restrict concessions to what he found acceptable.

Once the Scottish threat had been contained and his room for manoeuvre restored, Charles anticipated some possibility of undoing the effects of any agreements. However, he was wholly unprepared for the determined, well-organised and sustained opposition he now encountered.

Pym's junto

Modern historians often explain the slide from crisis to civil war using terms such as 'opposition', 'sides' and 'parties', though these terms do not accurately reflect seventeenth-century parliamentary dynamics. Factions among the nobility and rivalry between ministers were normal features of political life, but the idea of opposition to the King approached treason.

Charles did face a coherently organised group of MPs, connected to certain members of the Lords, who had developed a conspiracy to defeat his most cherished plans and impose their own. The historian Conrad Russell described this group as 'Pym's junto', reflecting John Pym's leadership and the somewhat conspiratorial character of the group.

Russell's activities in opposing Charles and his 'evil counsellors' led some historians to accept the contemporary Royalist interpretation that the junto's members plotted and schemed to manipulate Parliament in pursuit of their own ambitions. Evidence suggests they maintained contact with the Scots during spring and summer 1640 and that part of their strategy involved replacing Charles's advisers with their own representatives. In May 1641, a scheme to appoint the Earl of Bedford as chief adviser to the King, with Pym as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was terminated by Bedford's death from fever.

However, it can be argued that nothing unusual or underhand occurred in planning to replace unsatisfactory advisers with better alternatives. A willingness to contribute to the King's government was entirely natural among those seeking political influence. This approach was precisely what Strafford had pursued in 1628. He had advocated that the manipulation of Parliament constituted a necessary strategy – long employed by monarchs through Privy Councillors in both Houses – if the King was to be pressured into addressing grievances and abandoning his plans for government in Church and State.

Most members arrived at Westminster desiring change but possessing little understanding of how to achieve it. What requires explanation regarding 'Pym's junto' and its associates is not their willingness to employ political tactics in pursuit of their cause, but their capacity to do so effectively.

Key figure: John Pym (1583–1643)

Born in Somerset, Pym came from a wealthy landowning family and received his education at Oxford. He spent his early years managing his estates in Somerset before being elected to Parliament in 1621. Pym participated in every Parliament until his death from cancer in 1643.

By 1640 he had become an experienced parliamentarian, an effective speaker and a skilful tactician, which enabled him to lead and manage the opposition campaign in the Commons. The group associated with Pym between 1640 and 1642 was not formally organised, making it difficult to distinguish clearly between members and associates. However, Pym maintained several trusted allies. Their experience in the Short Parliament of April 1640, which Charles had quickly dissolved, meant they were better prepared when Parliament reassembled in November for what became the Long Parliament, lasting nearly twenty years.

Organisation and tactics

Most opposition leaders had served as MPs in the 1620s, many having been supporters and protégés of Sir Edward Coke, who had formulated the Petition of Right in 1628. Pym, in particular, learned extensively from Coke's management of parliamentary opinion during the Commons Protestation of 1621 and the Petition of Right. After Parliament was dissolved in 1629, some contacts had been maintained through business and family connections.

Pym worked as a lawyer and agent for the Earl of Bedford. In 1629, Bedford, Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke and the Earl of Warwick founded a trading company named the Providence Island Company, established to trade with American colonies and attack Spanish shipping and property in the West Indies. Both Pym and John Hampden were included as co-directors. These men almost certainly helped organise the Ship Money case, in which Hampden employed as his counsel another of Bedford's agents, Oliver St John.

Hampden himself maintained extensive contacts of blood and inter-marriage in Buckinghamshire and East Anglia, including the MP for Cambridge in 1640, Oliver Cromwell. Whilst these contacts provided a foundation contributing to the group's coherence, they alone do not explain its effectiveness or impact.

The brief calling and dissolution of Parliament in April 1640 gave them an opportunity to meet and develop awareness of the tactics needed to avoid repeating its failure, as well as establishing useful contacts with the Scots through Nathaniel Fiennes, MP, son of Lord Saye and Sele, who had been in communication with the Covenanters since 1639.

It is reasonable to suggest that the opposition group, as such, took shape at this time and that its planned strategy for the Long Parliament was based on the experience of its predecessor in April. When Parliament assembled in November, Pym launched an attack on existing grievances and established the group in positions of influence by proposing various committees with his associates as members and chairmen. From that base, they were able to put forward proposals and influence debates.

The need for parliamentary unity

It is essential to consider the relationship of this group to other members of the Long Parliament. It is difficult to support the Royalist perception that they tricked and manipulated an assembly of innocents into supporting strategies that members did not understand. Nevertheless, there existed a clear difference in political perception between men like Pym and the average country member.

According to Clarendon, he met Pym in Westminster 'some days before the Parliament' and was told by Pym that:

'[T]hey must now be of another temper than they were the last Parliament ... that they now had an opportunity to make their country happy, by removing all grievances and pulling up the causes of them by the roots, if all men would do their duties.'

This suggests more radical measures than those envisaged by the Yorkshire MP, Sir Henry Slingsby, who left home on 2 November commenting that:

'Great expectance there is of a happy Parliament, where the subject may have a total redress of all his grievances.'

Whilst the two men shared a concern for the redress of grievances, there existed a substantial difference in their political awareness of what it would take to achieve it.

It could be argued, therefore, that the opposition leaders differed from most MPs in their political experience, the depth and intensity of their opposition and possibly the importance of religion in their concerns. However, it should be remembered that it is difficult to make effective generalisations because the Long Parliament was, above all, an assembly of individuals and local factions rather than a coherent political body.

The county petitions (traditionally sent from each county at the beginning of a parliament) that arrived at Westminster on this occasion demonstrated that there existed widespread concern with grievances and a demand for the reversal of Charles's policies in Church and State. To this extent the opposition leaders were part of, and in tune with, the electorate that they represented.

In terms of strategies for achieving their aims, however, they were far more advanced and radical in their thinking than most members on whose support they had to rely. They would therefore need to proceed carefully, at a pace and in a direction that they could make acceptable to the varied and often cautious representatives of the political nation around them.