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By Root 1069 0

Strafford’s trial opened on the rather frail-looking charge of ‘cumulative treason’. It was likely that Strafford would have beaten this particular rap, since those accusing him of this previously unknown crime were themselves motivated in part by fears about the erosion of legal protections for the subject. Tiring of this procedure, Arthur Haselrig introduced a bill of attainder of Strafford on 10 April. Here, by vote, was the possibility of simply declaring Strafford to be guilty, and the bill had passed its third reading in the Commons on 21 April. Avoiding the complexities of a trial, it had the advantage of achieving an obviously necessary political end by efficient means. ‘Stone dead hath no fellow’; as one wry observer put it. In April petitions circulated in the City calling for swift action, despite a personal request from the King to the mayor to put a stop to this activity. The petitions made a connection between the slow progress in Parliament and economic problems, and attributed the decay of trade to political uncertainty. This agitation was taken up by those anxious for the attainder to make progress. The suggestion that animals of prey (like Strafford) did not deserve the same protections as the creatures they hunted was politically convenient but worrying in principle. Even more worryingly, the names of those who had voted against the attainder (the ‘Straffordians’) were published, and those named feared for their lives in the face of angry crowds. In the Lords there was hostility to these pressures from the Commons and the trial continued.

Not trusting to the course of law, however, some of Strafford’s friends, with Charles’s knowledge, hatched a plot to spring him. On 3 May, fearing that Strafford was not going to survive the attainder, Charles sent loyal troops to take control of the Tower, but they were foiled by the lieutenant of the Tower and vigilant citizens. The public failure of the plot, ‘the first army plot’, did Strafford no favours.57

Nehemiah Wallington was among the huge crowd that gathered at Westminster the same day, prompted by a declaration that Charles would not allow the attainder to succeed. Several thousand gathered in the morning and by the afternoon the crowd had swelled to perhaps 10,000. The demand, paradoxically perhaps, was for justice and execution. When the Earl of Arundel arrived his way was deliberately blocked, and he was forced to say that he was working to achieve the execution of Strafford. These words, reassuring in one way, were met with the threat that ‘they would have justice, or take it’. As for Arundel, they said, ‘we will take his word for once’. At midday the Lords adjourned and many peers left by water. Some of those who took coaches were subject to personal abuse – the Earl of Bristol, for example. Pembroke, a supporter of the attainder, was able to pacify the crowd. John Lilburne, the celebrity radical, was also among the crowd. A London apprentice, originally from the north-east of England, he came from a minor gentry background and had a grammar school education. In the house of Thomas Hewson, a Puritan clothier, he had immersed himself in the Bible and emerged with an intense personal piety. During the 1630s he had been imprisoned for helping to distribute Burton’s publications. Present at most of the crucial disturbances of the period 1640–42, Lilburne became a successful soldier and then a prominent controversialist in print and in the courts. He was questioned the day after these events for some treasonable words, and at this distance in time it sounds like it was a fair cop.58

Despite the efforts of the Lord Mayor crowds assembled again on 4 May in the feverish atmosphere created by the revelation of the army plot. Some of the crowd were indeed armed, as had been threatened the previous day and the social profile was, if contemporaries are to be believed, less respectable. In the Commons the main business was the drafting of what became known as the Protestation, intended as a litmus test of political reliability. Those swearing to it would bind