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By Root 1288 0

claims for the rights of subjects to exercise key restraints over the powers of their monarch. The argument for the executive powers of Parliament as the Great Council of the kingdom solidified – the King’s absence was said to be part of the crisis which necessitated the emergency measure (an argument which duly infuriated the royalists). By the early summer Parliament had staked out political territory which could only be justified by these arguments with a dose of goodwill and a following wind. A key issue in these exchanges was the King’s ‘Negative Voice’. To become law, a bill had to pass both Houses and then receive the royal assent. This effectively gave the monarch a veto – a Negative Voice which allowed him to stop legislation which had been passed by both Houses (hence, for example, the slight delay in securing Strafford’s death). According to the Great Council argument now being made, the use of the Negative Voice could necessitate an ordinance. Where the King was not willing to assent to necessary measures the Houses had to act in his absence.18 This, of course, implied something very profound about the relative powers of King and Parliament, and their relationship to the good of the kingdom. Charles was upholding his right to withhold consent, arguing that without that power he was no longer a king in a meaningful sense. In that, surely, he must have had a lot of support, and there were few who would have drawn the conclusion that England would therefore be better off without a king. Advocates of Parliament’s position, on the other hand, seemed to be suggesting that the King was answerable to his advisers” sense of what was good for the kingdom – if something was unacceptable to them then the King could not insist upon it.19

Throughout the life of this parliament there had been a tendency for political difficulties with Charles to lead to constitutional resolutions affecting all kings. Control of the militia was accelerating this process, and leading to startling claims. Even though the sternest opponents of these measures were now likely to be absent from the Houses, it took considerable political skill on Pym’s part to maintain the momentum, and to carry increasingly radical policies despite the qualms of many more moderate spirits.20 In his public declarations Charles was guided by moderate, constitutional royalists, like Edward Hyde, later the Earl of Clarendon, who aimed to undercut the political and constitutional radicalism of Parliament’s position. An opponent of abuses of the prerogative, he supported episcopacy and the Church of England, but without an insistence on enforcing ceremonial issues that were ‘indifferent’. His trajectory from the ‘opposition’ of 1640 to royalism in 1642 is fairly clear, and similar to that of others. By the summer of 1641 Hyde had been working informally to achieve a full settlement in co-operation with Sir John Colepeper and Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, the latter two parliamentary critics of the Personal Rule who, as defenders of the rule of law and religious decency, drew back as the measures of reform pressed further. Together they co-ordinated court attempts to influence the Commons in late 1641 and were widely suspected of being the authors of Charles’s propaganda. On concrete policy, however, Charles seems to have been heavily reliant on the forthright advice of Henrietta Maria, who had consistently counselled him to settle matters by force, foreign force if necessary. Disappointed by the rather lukewarm reception in York, Charles decided on two inflammatory courses of action – to go to Ireland personally to settle the political conflict there, and to wrest control of the arsenal in Hull from Sir John Hotham. Both suggestions were provocative in a situation where the King was thought to be in the hands of an armed papistical conspiracy, and was known previously to have considered bringing Irish forces into England in order to exert a bit of discipline on his behalf.21

The journey to Ireland did not materialize, but the attempt on Hull did, and it resulted in