• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1409 0

Sir Phelim O’Neill published what purported to be a commission to him from the King. His purpose was to claim support for his Irish aims, by claiming to act to preserve the King from the hostility of Puritans and Parliament.24 The impact on Charles’s prospects in England could hardly have been worse. The rebellion fused with the already extant fear that Charles was either untrustworthy or in the hands of a papist plot which aimed to extinguish English liberties and to corrupt the English church. These and similar responses in Scotland persuaded the Old English that the prospects for Catholics in Ireland were dismal and in December 1641 they declared their support for the Ulster rising. O’Neill’s tactics therefore triggered an unhealthy set of reactions with apocalyptic views in England and Scotland of the Irish and of Catholics. The result was to transform what was perceived to be a Catholic rising against Protestants into an actual rising of Catholics against Protestants.

Little more than two months after news of the Irish rising reached London any pretence of normal parliamentary government had collapsed. At the point when news of the rising reached London, parliamentary commissioners were in Edinburgh with the King. They were sent Additional Instructions about the necessary armed response to the Irish rebellion which could hardly have been more inflammatory. The seventh instruction attributed the great ‘miseries, burdens and distempers’ in the King’s dominions over recent years to the ‘cunning, false and malicious practices’ of men close to the King’s counsels. This party had been ‘favourers of Popery, superstition and innovation, subverters of religion, honour and justice’ and ‘factors for promoting the designs’ of hostile foreign powers. Not only this, but they had also sought to disrupt the relationship between the King and his parliament. Money granted by Parliament had been spent unprofitably, or on schemes which were positively detrimental to the state, and while Parliament had laboured to purge ‘corruptions’ and restore ‘decays’ in church and state this same party had laboured to suppress the liberty of Parliament. In response to the power of this group, and the threat that it posed to Parliament and religion, Parliament had to attach strings to any money granted to deal with the Irish rising. The eighth instruction, accordingly, called for the King to change his counsels, listening to such men ‘as shall be approved by his Parliament… that so his people may with courage and confidence undergo the charge and hazard of this war’. This was a crucial escalation from the Ten Propositions of June, which had asked the King to remove counsellors unsound on ‘religion, liberty, [and] good government’, and to replace them with men ‘his people and parliament may have just cause to confide in’. The new demand, for active approval by Parliament of the advisers, was accompanied by a threat that made an important distinction, by citing the ‘trust which we owe to the state and to those whom we represent’. That could, potentially, justify their finding another way of ‘securing ourselves from such mischievous counsels and designs’ and giving control of money for Ireland to ‘such persons of honour and fidelity as we have cause to confide in’.25

On the same day, 8 November, Pym tabled what has become known as the Grand Remonstrance. A committee on the state of the kingdom had been at work on ‘a remonstrance of all the present evils and grievances of the kingdom, to present to the King’ as early as January. While Pym sought to maintain a sense of impending crisis in Westminster, it was clear by early August that it was not shared in the provinces, and the original committee of twenty-four was replaced by a committee of eight, which evidently made rapid progress. In the autumn one more meeting sufficed to add thirty-four clauses relating to the second army plot and the Irish rising. In the subsequent debates eight more clauses were added, and six were enlarged, but the Grand Remonstrance as we have it was largely the view of the world