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By Root 1424 0

support from any and every quarter. This had the disadvantage of trying to forge an alliance from completely incompatible religious aspirations, and that might reflect a lack of sincerity on Charles’s part in giving commitments to any or all of these partners. The involvement of Irish troops introduced a new kind of ethnic hostility into the English war, and threatened to push codes of conduct further towards the extremes of seventeenth-century behaviour. Escalation of all kinds was changing the nature and purpose of the war. By the end of 1643 the military balance was still in the King’s favour, but not decisively so; and both sides had entered military alliances which promised new strength the following year. If anything, though, it was becoming less rather than more clear what kind of political settlement could possibly satisfy the parties now involved.

11

Marston Moor

The Victory of the Covenant?

By the time of John Pym’s death from disease in early December 1643 much of the architecture of Parliament’s eventual victory was in place, and he must take a large share of the credit for that. A military alliance with the Covenanters, in the service of yet another covenant, this time between the two kingdoms, was underpinned by novel forms of taxation which would provide the basis for public revenues for over a century (assessment, excise and customs). These were reinforced by penal taxation and seizure from those who opposed the aims of the Covenant. Parliamentary committees, proliferating like mushrooms, allowed Parliament to act as an executive body, albeit a rather poorly co-ordinated one.

Pym’s contribution to sustaining the political will to implement these measures was considerable, but not necessarily popular, even among those who had been riveted by his compelling speeches in May and November 1640.1 Although his influence grew out of those influential speeches, what he had in the end championed was quite different from a defence of parliamentary liberties and the Church of England. A week or so before Pym’s death, Parliament took a further highly significant step. In early November, Parliament had authorized the use of a new Great Seal, the highest symbol of sovereignty, and on 30 November it was entrusted to six parliamentary commissioners. It represented an escalation of the argument that the King enjoyed his powers in trusteeship, exercised in partnership with Parliament. When the King was absent or in danger of wrecking the kingdom, so the argument had gone, then Parliament could assume trust in his place. Now, it was said, those using the Great Seal were enemies of the state, which was not currently entrusted to the King. The new seal made the implications of this plain: it did not include the King’s image but that of the House of Commons, and the arms of England and Ireland. As one commentator put it, there was consternation among ‘all the People’ who had ‘reason to believe that, at last, the divisions between the King and Parliament would become irreparable, and that there would be no hopes left of their being reconciled to one another, the breach made in his Majesty’s authority being so great, that it portended nothing less than the ruin of the state and the dissolution of the monarchy’.2 In all these ways, defence of parliamentary liberty was clearly no longer the same as defence of the ancient constitution.

Pym’s death also coincided with a reorganization of parliamentary military command. The formal alliance with the Covenanters called into being the Committee of Both Kingdoms, which took over from the Committee of Safety in February 1644. It was the first body to have responsibilities in both kingdoms. In one sense it filled the gap of a single executive body, acting as a kind of parliamentary Privy Council. But it was also a highly political body, on which opponents of the Earl of Essex were prominent, men anxious for a clearer military victory in order to secure a peace on demanding terms. Holles, for example, was not on the committee, but Cromwell was, and its terms of reference compromised