The Parliament of April 1640 (The Short Parliament)

In the afternoon of 13 April 1640, after hearing a sermon in Westminster Abbey, Charles I briefly addressed the Lords and Commons to open the first Parliament in 11 years. After so many years in which government business had been conducted without recourse to a legislative assembly, mostly to the king’s satisfaction, there was a wariness towards Parliament on the part of the king and his advisers from the outset. Writs of summons had been sent out two months previously. From the king’s perspective, the Parliament had only one purpose: to provide funds to renew the war with the Scots, the bitter fruit of his attempt from 1636 to impose the Book of Common Prayer on the Presbyterian Scottish kirk. So spectacular was the failure of this policy that it had brought into being the Covenanter movement, initially a defensive expression of resistance, but soon a vehicle for open revolt against an unpopular and alien English government. Armed hostilities on a major scale between the two nations were averted by the uneasy truce of the Pacification of Berwick (June 1639), but Charles was in no mood to back down. In his address to the newly-assembled Commons, Lord Keeper Finch, voicing the will of the king, explicitly identified the granting of subsidies as the king’s sole reason for their summons, warned Members against undue interference in government, and vaguely promised future consideration of grievances ‘towards winter’. This message might have dampened the expectations of the generality of Members, who no doubt shared the widespread public interest in the remarkable return of a body so long ago dismissed.

The more determined Members could afford to take a more calculated view. The war in the north had been provoked by the king’s imposition on the Scottish church of a new liturgy, particularly a prayer book that seemed like the English Book of Common Prayer. Attempts to resolve matters in a Scottish context had failed. The Parliament at Westminster had been summoned after the king had suffered a series of political setbacks in Scotland, in Kirk general assembly and Edinburgh parliament.