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make new law, so the Privy Council could issue executive orders in the King’s absence. Now, it was claimed, Parliament acting as the King’s Great Council could make such orders. While the King had been in Scotland the previous August, Parliament had passed five ordinances with this logic, and the constitutional principle does not appear to have caused outrage even though the fifth order, for disarming recusants, arguably went beyond existing law.4 On the other hand, this constitutional device coincided with more aggressive claims for Commons influence over policy, and this political issue did cause dissent – resentment against the growing pretensions of ‘King Pym’, the programme suggested by the Ten Propositions and the Commons order of 8 September for the purification of the churches.5 The proposals put forward in the fevered aftermath of the attempt on the Five Members accelerated this process. In the Lords there was considerable disquiet about these developments, and active opposition to the national imposition of the Protestation.6

These measures were taken against a background of continuing crowd activity in London and a renewed round of county petitioning strengthened Pym’s hand: on 25 January he personally delivered four massive county petitions to the Lords, throwing the weight of the Commons behind their demands (among which were the removal of bishops and popish lords from the upper House). Some London petitions were now making a connection between the failure to reach a political settlement and the decay of trade, and between January and March eleven counties and six towns petitioned Parliament on this issue. Clothworkers in Essex, Suffolk and the West Riding were among those who made this connection, and with some justification. Fearing forced loans and debasement of the coinage in the summer of 1641 many merchants had avoided tying up their capital in stocks of cloth. This, in turn, meant that work in clothing districts dried up and these conditions apparently persisted through the winter. In Essex, at least, this sectional economic interest fused with anti-Catholicism and popular parliamentarianism. In London, the slump led to the intervention of ‘poor labouring men, known by the name of porters, the lowest members of the City of London’.7

On 31 January, for the first time in this crisis, a petition was presented by women, specifically ‘many poor and distressed women in and about London’. To some extent these petitioners stayed within the bounds of the public role afforded to women by claiming that because of the slump they could not feed their families. Women had an established role in this sense, and were frequently prominent in food riots for this reason: as the family members most involved in the food market it was they who were most aware of corruption and exploitation within it. Petitioning on behalf of their families, and in these terms, avoided any challenge to the patriarchal assumptions governing political participation. But this posture could not conceal the fact that these women were making direct political interventions in a less than deferential way. Like the clothworkers and porters they attributed the slump to the political crisis, arguing that a popish plot existed to plunge England into a war, once Ireland had been overrun. This line of argument led to the extraordinary spectacle of poor women attending the Houses demanding that the kingdom be put in a posture of defence, that popish lords and bishops should be excluded from the House of Lords and that those who were hindering reformation should be identified and punished. The following day, 400 women attended the Houses for an answer and became involved in a scuffle with the Earl of Lennox. ‘Away with these women, we were best to have a parliament of women,’ he apparently said, only to have his staff broken as they tried to block his path. Philip Skippon, who was guarding the House, was told that for every woman there today there would be 500 the following day, since they might as well die there as at home, and they had also apparently