Sarah on the Long Parliament

The Long Parliament (Sarah Rusher)

Parliamentary propaganda, 1643

The Long Parliament was reluctantly assembled in November of 1640 by an utterly bankrupt King Charles I just weeks after the defeat of the English in the Bishops’ Wars against Scotland. King Charles I only intended for the parliament to pass financial bills that would grant him additional funds. The Long Parliament, however, did much more than that. From the outset, the king faced a body profoundly mistrustful of his intentions. The early sessions of the Long Parliament were dominated by attempts to limit the King’s autocracy. John Pym lead the opposition initially, focusing criticism upon the King’s advisors rather than the King himself. This proved to be effective. Within weeks of the Long Parliament first assembling, Archbishop Laud and the Earl of Strafford were both denounced as evil councilors, impeached, and subsequently executed. In 1641, the Long Parliament carried out a series of reforms that abolished the courts of Star Chamber, High Commission, and all other institutions and financial measures of dubious legality that had allowed King Charles to circumvent the common law and rule without calling a Parliament during his eleven-year Personal Rule (1629-1640). These were important steps towards the establishment of the constitutional monarchy and the parliamentary democracy of modern Britain. The Long Parliament received its name from the fact that, by an Act of Parliament passed in May of 1641, it could not be dissolved without its own consent, and those members did not agree to its dissolution until March of 1660—twenty years after it was first assembled. The Long Parliament sat through the First Civil War and it was both expelled and restored twice.

In October of 1641, the Irish Uprising called the issue of whether the armed forces should be controlled by the King or by Parliament to attention. John Pym and his supporters drafted the Grand Remonstrance, which listed over one-hundred and fifty perceived misdeeds of Charles’ reign, in an attempt to undermine confidence in the King and his remaining advisors. Tensions between Parliament and the King grew until January 1642, when the King made a failed attempt to arrest five members of the House of Commons whom he regarded as his primary opponents in Parliament. By March of 1642, the Long Parliament decreed that its own ordinances were valid and legally binding without any assent from the King and they passed the Militia Ordinance, which placed the command of each county’s armed forces in the hands of their supporters. The result was the outbreak of the First Civil War (1642-6), through which the Long Parliament sat. Divisions grew over this time period between the Presbyterians, who wanted a swift end to the war and were willing to negotiate with Charles I, and the Independents, who wanted a vigorous prosecution of the war so that they would be able to force their terms on a defeated King. These divisions had already been present in the Long Parliament and were a holdover from disagreements about how the Church should be organized.

Works Cited

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Long Parliament.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 July 2014, www.britannica.com/topic/Long-Parliament

Plant, David. “The Long Parliament.” BCWProject, bcw-project.org/church-and-state/first-civil-war/long-parliament.

“The Long Parliament.” UK Parliament, www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/parliamentaryauthority/civilwar/overview/longparliament/.