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By Root 1064 0

a negotiation about the unpopular impositions. It seems clear that the intention had been to make the grant for the monarch’s life once the negotiations were concluded, and a one-year grant was made to tide the King over. Events overtook these negotiations, with the result that the grant was not renewed. Charles continued to collect the duties. In 1626 it was declared illegal, but a bill was prepared to indemnify the King from prosecution. The issue was not resolved in the next parliament either, and so Charles collected the duties without parliamentary sanction throughout the 1630s.52 Now, the grant of tonnage and poundage was deliberately used as a negotiating counter: successive short-term grants were made in order to lever concessions from the King, on the promise of a long-term settlement. Moreover, when a new tonnage and poundage bill was proposed, in March 1641, it contained a Book of Rates set by Parliament rather than the crown – both measures reflect a determination to secure greater parliamentary control over the grant, and yield, of the customs.53 Neither bore immediate fruit, partly because of parliamentary resentment at the King’s determination to resist pressure to institute thoroughgoing persecution of Catholics.54 By the summer of 1641 there was no financial settlement either.

The one area of substantial progress in redress of provincial grievances was in the removal of Charles’s counsellors, in particular Laud and Strafford. There were few defenders of either in Parliament, among the Covenanters or in Ireland, and the attacks on both resonated powerfully in the streets. Laud was impeached in mid-December, the beginning of a slow march to the scaffold which did not finally end until January 1645. In the meantime he was imprisoned in the Tower of London in March 1641, his arrival greeted by jeering crowds, and throughout his incarceration suffered neglect and indignity at the hands of the godly. Other committees were also pursuing particular people: Bridgewater and other parties to the dispute about the muster master in Shropshire were brought to book and so was the Earl of Huntingdon, brought low by his adversary Sir William Fawnt.55

The first real victim, however, was Strafford, who was impeached on 10 November, a week after the meeting of Parliament. He was accused of trying to subvert Parliament, or to find ways of avoiding having to summon it at all. It was said that he had intended to have some of the leading figures in the Commons arrested and tried on charges of treason on the grounds that they had co-operated with the Scots, or even actively encouraged the Covenanters” invasion. He may have done that, just as they may have. His strong line on the need to crush the Covenanters made him few friends in Scotland. In Ireland he had imposed an oath in Ulster, heartland of Scottish Presbyterian settlement in Ireland, disavowing support for the Covenant. This ‘Black Oath’ outraged influential Protestant opinion in Scotland and Ireland. It was also said, plausibly but almost certainly inaccurately, that immediately after the failure of the Short Parliament he had suggested using an Irish army to bring the English kingdom to heel.56

Whatever the truth, Strafford came to personify an apparently lawless defence of the King’s interests in the face of all political difficulties; a willingness to subvert the constitution in defence of otherwise indefensible policies. But, although Strafford had few admirers, the manner of his trial and execution compounded fears that the political process was becoming dangerously corrupted. It was close to judicial murder, informed in no small part by the threat of public disorder if his neck was saved.

On 30 January 1641, when Strafford was called to Westminster to hear his charge, he travelled by water under armed guard. In the event he suffered nothing worse than shouts and curses from the crowd and the early stages of the trial were uneventful. However, as the likelihood that he might escape with his life increased, so did the temperature on London’s streets. On 23 March