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By Root 1306 0

the charges against the Five Members and agreeing to place the command of the Tower of London in the hands of Sir John Conyers. Even in this mood, however, the Militia Ordinance was impossible for him to accept, but he signalled this only with a fairly moderate prevarication. By the time Henrietta Maria was safely embarked, on 23 February, Charles had made spectacular concessions, and London’s streets were quiet once again. Pym pressed on, however, securing the passage of the Militia Ordinance on 5 March.14 These measures were hardly likely to be seen as solutions to ills of the kingdom – parliamentary government as it was normally understood had collapsed. An important reason for this political failure was the way in which political argument had spilled out beyond the walls – in the mobilization of opinion in petitions, demonstrations and printed polemics. Following the breakdown of parliamentary government this process was virtually unrestrained. From March onwards battle was joined for the hearts, minds and military resources of provincial England.

After Henrietta Maria’s departure Charles had returned to Greenwich where, despite the wishes of Parliament, he met up with his eldest son. While he was there he finally responded to the Militia Ordinance, in strongly negative terms. This rejection led to a further escalation of the constitutional terms of the conflict. An important argument in justification of the ordinance was that there was a state of emergency manifest in the various military threats to Parliament. Tackling this emergency required Parliament to have control of defensive military forces and, in the absence of the King, that could only be achieved by an ordinance. This was, in other words, presented as an executive measure rather than a new law. When the King rejected the measure, according to this line of argument, it confirmed the emergency and the absence of the King. As Simonds D’Ewes, a member with a keen eye for legal matters, wrote: ‘if the king should be desperate and lay violent hands upon himself [we] must not only advise but wrest the weapon, so too if he should seize the helm of a ship in a storm and threaten to drown them all, only one course of action was possible’.15

With affairs in this posture, the King began a leisurely progress to York, taking eighteen days for a journey that was possible much more quickly. En route he was warmly received in Cambridge and enjoyed a day of hunting at Little Gidding, but his reception at York was disappointing. In the meantime he had exchanged declarations with his parliamentary critics. In these exchanges his absence, the nature of the emergency and the extraordinary political and constitutional postures adopted by Parliament were all debated at length and in historical detail. Both parties sought to attribute blame for the breakdown of the political process to the other party in an exchange that has been likened to a marital dispute – a series of mutual recriminations rather than an attempt to resolve the dispute, almost incomprehensible in its detail to non-participants.16 But it was also intended for public consumption: to extend the analogy, it was communication in the form ‘tell your father that he’s the one who is jeopardizing the constitution’.

The ‘paper war’: fundamental constitutional issues argued out before a print audience

These mutual recriminations were aimed at a print audience, and were intended to recruit allies as much as to resolve differences. Proclamations, petitions, ballads, pamphlets and scandalous verse brought the issues of this paper war to the provincial middling sort. Letters accompanied pamphlets sent down to the country, fuelling tavern conversation that was engaged, irreverent and often satirical. The response could be informed and critical, as in Colchester, where Stephen Lewes was disgruntled at the suppression of royal propaganda: ‘why should not we know the King’s mind as well as the parliament’s mind?’17

Behind these public and widely discussed exchanges, a parliamentary constitutional theory was taking shape: