Introduction

The context of the petitions

When the peers and elected representatives of the political nation gathered in November 1640 for the start of what would be called retrospectively the Long Parliament, they were largely united in a desire for reform in both church and state. The Short Parliament, only three weeks old when its brief life was ended by Charles I in May of the same year, had articulated a long list of concerns and complaints which had accumulated during the previous eleven years in which Caroline England had been governed without the benefit of parliament. This period of the personal rule had also been a time in which the king had promoted the career of William Laud (archbishop of Canterbury from 1633) as well as his programme of church reforms. Unquestionably, Laud and his supporters set out to change the liturgical ethos of the reformed Church of England; more disputably among both historians and contemporaries, he also attempted a profound theological revolution in its understanding of how men and women receive the grace necessary to achieve salvation.1 In 1640 there was a profound mismatch between the king's view of what parliament was for and that of parliamentarians. Charles needed money to fight a war against his own Scottish subjects; his English subjects, however, were more concerned about developments in their kingdom since the last time parliament had sat in 1629. Charles's political misjudgment in dissolving the Short Parliament, which, despite a genuine sense of grievance, still displayed some sense of confidence in the monarch, meant that from the outset of the Long Parliament the king and his advisers were faced, particularly in the case of the lower house, with a bonly of M.P.s with a heavy sense of grievance in political and religious matters and a profound lack of trust in their king.

In the months preceding the outbreak of civil war in England, parliament experienced an unprecedented amount of petitioning activity, addressing issues and concerns from the local to the international, from the pragmatic to the fundamentals of salvation. At the outset of the Long Parliament, the almost universal hostility among English protestants towards the religious policies of Archbishop William Laud during the 1630s transformed itself into an attack by some on the perceived twin pillars of the Church of England as established by law: government by bishops and the Book of Common Prayer.