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By Root 1158 0

On 17 April he spoke for two hours on a threefold threat: to the liberties of Parliament, to religion and to the law (‘affairs of state or matters of property’). In most of these respects he was speaking to the mood of the House, but he went further in arguing that these were symptoms of a single malaise: ‘the intermission of parliaments have been a true cause of all these evils in the Commonwealth, which by law should be once every year’. The liberty of Parliament, he was arguing, was the safeguard of religion and law.38 When he sat down a string of county petitions were presented in what seems like a co-ordinated move, perhaps reminiscent of Covenanter tactics.39

Over the following weeks unsuccessful shuffling could not overcome this essential impasse – that Parliament wanted redress before supply, a procedure which Charles said ‘put the cart before the horse’. Some members of both Houses supported the King’s position, but Ralph Hopton seems to have spoken for the majority in the Commons when he drew the analogy with a servant who held his master up to remove a thorn from his foot. Such a delay was not the same as disobedience; Parliament, as a dutiful servant, had an obligation to remove the thorns from the King’s foot.40 Deals were proposed to give up unpopular revenue sources in return for parliamentary supply, and the crown tried to enlist the help of the Lords in persuading the Commons to grant supply and put the grievances on hold. This suggestion, however, made the Commons bristle, acutely conscious of any threat to the constitutional principle that supply could only be initiated in the Commons. Rather than acknowledge the immediate and unquestioned necessity of supplying the King’s needs, MPs continued to call for redress of their grievances. And these grievances ranged widely – the long intermission of parliaments and the administrative measures Charles had taken in that time had created a backlog of moaning, and it seems that many MPs were keen to give it full rein. If the problems of mobilizing for war earlier in the year had disappointed the monarch, the attitude of his parliament was still more frustrating and after only three weeks he dissolved it.

Five or six days prior to the dissolution rumours had gone round London that in the event of a dissolution, Lambeth Palace (the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury) would be burned down, with William Laud inside it. This proved to be not far from the truth. On 8 May 1640, after the dissolution, the words ‘bishop’s devils’ were scrawled on the walls of the Royal Exchange. Placards soon followed there and elsewhere, urging an assembly at St George’s Fields of ‘all gentlemen ’prentices that desire to kill the bishops, who would fane kill us, our wives and children’. Apprentices were also invited to join in the hunting of ‘William the fox’. The assembly was planned for the following Monday morning, 11 May. Although threats and rumours circulated about a number of royal ministers identified as public enemies it was clear that the real target of this hostility was Laud (who was also rumoured to have become a Roman Catholic) and bishops more generally. The Southwark militia were mustered at St George’s Fields all day but people simply waited. About midnight, after the departure of the militia, a crowd gathered. One report had it that 1,200 ‘prentices and others’ (probably an over-estimate) had knocked at the gate and ‘said that they must needs speak with his Grace, of whom they would ask (as they termed it) but one civil question; and it was who was the cause of breaking up the parliament?’ Laud had been forewarned and was not in Lambeth Palace when the crowd got there. They stayed for two and a half hours, until they were convinced that he was not inside, but left saying ‘they would be shortly there again, and would not leave until they had spoken with him either by hook or by crook, sooner or later’.41 In fact, he did not return to his palace until 27 May.42 Their anger was instead expressed in damage to the garden and orchard. On the following Thursday crowds gathered