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King of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1625 to 1649 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Charles I (19 November 1600 – 30 January 1649)[lower-alpha 1] was King of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649.
Charles I | |
---|---|
King of England and Ireland | |
Reign | 27 March 1625 – 30 January 1649 |
Coronation | 2 February 1626 |
Predecessor | James I |
Successor | |
King of Scotland | |
Reign | 27 March 1625 – 30 January 1649 |
Coronation | 18 June 1633 |
Predecessor | James VI |
Successor | Charles II |
Born | 19 November 1600 Dunfermline Palace, Dunfermline, Scotland |
Died | 30 January 1649 48) Whitehall, Westminster, England | (aged
Cause of death | Execution by decapitation |
Burial | 9 February 1649 St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, England |
Spouse | |
Issue more... | |
House | Stuart |
Father | James VI and I |
Mother | Anne of Denmark |
Religion | Protestant |
Signature |
Charles was born into the House of Stuart as the second son of King James VI of Scotland, but after his father inherited the English throne in 1603, he moved to England, where he spent much of the rest of his life. He became heir apparent to the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1612 upon the death of his elder brother, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales. An unsuccessful and unpopular attempt to marry him to Infanta Maria Anna of Spain culminated in an eight-month visit to Spain in 1623 that demonstrated the futility of the marriage negotiation. Two years later, shortly after his accession, he married Henrietta Maria of France.
After his succession in 1625, Charles quarrelled with the English Parliament, which sought to curb his royal prerogative. He believed in the divine right of kings, and was determined to govern according to his own conscience. Many of his subjects opposed his policies, in particular the levying of taxes without Parliamentary consent, and perceived his actions as those of a tyrannical absolute monarch. His religious policies, coupled with his marriage to a Roman Catholic, generated antipathy and mistrust from Reformed religious groups such as the English Puritans and Scottish Covenanters, who thought his views too Catholic. He supported high church Anglican ecclesiastics and failed to aid continental Protestant forces successfully during the Thirty Years' War. His attempts to force the Church of Scotland to adopt high Anglican practices led to the Bishops' Wars, strengthened the position of the English and Scottish parliaments, and helped precipitate his own downfall.
From 1642, Charles fought the armies of the English and Scottish parliaments in the English Civil War. After his defeat in 1645 at the hands of the Parliamentarian New Model Army, he fled north from his base at Oxford. Charles surrendered to a Scottish force and after lengthy negotiations between the English and Scottish parliaments he was handed over to the Long Parliament in London. Charles refused to accept his captors' demands for a constitutional monarchy, and temporarily escaped captivity in November 1647. Re-imprisoned on the Isle of Wight, he forged an alliance with Scotland, but by the end of 1648, the New Model Army had consolidated its control over England. Charles was tried, convicted, and executed for high treason in January 1649. The monarchy was abolished and the Commonwealth of England was established as a republic. The monarchy was restored in 1660, with Charles's son Charles II as king.
The second son of King James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark, Charles was born in Dunfermline Palace, Fife, on 19 November 1600.[1] At a Protestant ceremony in the Chapel Royal of Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh on 23 December 1600, he was baptised by David Lindsay, Bishop of Ross, and created Duke of Albany, the traditional title of the second son of the king of Scotland, with the subsidiary titles of Marquess of Ormond, Earl of Ross and Lord Ardmannoch.[2]
James VI was the first cousin twice removed of Queen Elizabeth I of England, and when she died childless in March 1603, he became King of England as James I. Charles was a weak and sickly infant, and while his parents and older siblings left for England in April and early June that year, due to his fragile health,[3] he remained in Scotland with his father's friend Lord Fyvie appointed as his guardian.[4]
By 1604, when Charles was three-and-a-half, he was able to walk the length of the great hall at Dunfermline Palace without assistance, and it was decided that he was strong enough to journey to England to be reunited with his family. In mid-July 1604, he left Dunfermline for England, where he was to spend most of the rest of his life.[5] In England, Charles was placed under the charge of Elizabeth, Lady Carey, the wife of courtier Sir Robert Carey, who put him in boots made of Spanish leather and brass to help strengthen his weak ankles.[6] His speech development was also slow, and he had a stammer for the rest of his life.[7]
In January 1605, Charles was created Duke of York, as is customary in the case of the English sovereign's second son, and made a Knight of the Bath.[8] Thomas Murray, a presbyterian Scot, was appointed as a tutor.[9] Charles learnt the usual subjects of classics, languages, mathematics and religion.[10] In 1611, he was made a Knight of the Garter.[11]
Eventually, Charles apparently conquered his physical infirmity,[11] which might have been caused by rickets.[6] He became an adept horseman and marksman, and took up fencing.[10] Even so, his public profile remained low in contrast to that of his physically stronger and taller[lower-alpha 2] elder brother, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, whom Charles adored and attempted to emulate.[12] But in early November 1612, Henry died at the age of 18 of what is suspected to have been typhoid (or possibly porphyria).[13] Charles, who turned 12 two weeks later, became heir apparent. As the eldest surviving son of the sovereign, he automatically gained several titles, including Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Rothesay. In November 1616, he was created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester.[14]
In 1613, Charles's sister Elizabeth married Frederick V, Elector Palatine, and moved to Heidelberg.[15] In 1617, the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, a Catholic, was elected king of Bohemia. The next year, the Bohemians rebelled, defenestrating the Catholic governors. In August 1619, the Bohemian diet chose Frederick, who led the Protestant Union, as their monarch, while Ferdinand was elected Holy Roman Emperor in the imperial election. Frederick's acceptance of the Bohemian crown in defiance of the emperor marked the beginning of the turmoil that would develop into the Thirty Years' War. The conflict, originally confined to Bohemia, spiralled into a wider European war, which the English Parliament and public quickly grew to see as a polarised continental struggle between Catholics and Protestants.[16] In 1620, King Frederick was defeated at the Battle of White Mountain near Prague and his hereditary lands in the Electoral Palatinate were invaded by a Habsburg force from the Spanish Netherlands.[17] James, however, had been seeking marriage between Prince Charles and Ferdinand's niece, Infanta Maria Anna of Spain, and began to see the Spanish match as a possible diplomatic means of achieving peace in Europe.[18]
Unfortunately for James, negotiation with Spain proved unpopular with both the public and James's court.[19] The English Parliament was actively hostile towards Spain and Catholicism, and thus, when called by James in 1621, the members hoped for an enforcement of recusancy laws, a naval campaign against Spain, and a Protestant marriage for the Prince of Wales.[20] James's Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon, was impeached before the House of Lords for corruption.[21] The impeachment was the first since 1459 without the king's official sanction in the form of a bill of attainder. The incident set an important precedent as the process of impeachment would later be used against Charles and his supporters the Duke of Buckingham, Archbishop William Laud, and the Earl of Strafford. James insisted that the House of Commons be concerned exclusively with domestic affairs, while the members protested that they had the privilege of free speech within the Commons' walls, demanding war with Spain and a Protestant princess of Wales.[22] Like his father, Charles considered discussion of his marriage in the Commons impertinent and an infringement of his father's royal prerogative.[23] In January 1622, James dissolved Parliament, angry at what he perceived as the members' impudence and intransigence.[24]
Charles and Buckingham, James's favourite and a man who had great influence over the prince,[25] travelled incognito to Spain in February 1623 to try to reach agreement on the long-pending Spanish match.[26] The trip was an embarrassing failure.[27] The infanta thought Charles little more than an infidel, and the Spanish at first demanded that he convert to Catholicism as a condition of the match.[28] They insisted on toleration of Catholics in England and the repeal of the English penal laws, which Charles knew Parliament would not agree to, and that the infanta remain in Spain for a year after any wedding to ensure that England complied with all the treaty's terms.[29] A personal quarrel erupted between Buckingham and the Count of Olivares, the Spanish chief minister, and so Charles conducted the ultimately futile negotiations personally.[30] When he returned to London in October, without a bride and to a rapturous and relieved public welcome,[31] he and Buckingham pushed the reluctant James to declare war on Spain.[32]
With the encouragement of his Protestant advisers, James summoned the English Parliament in 1624 to request subsidies for a war. Charles and Buckingham supported the impeachment of the Lord Treasurer, Lionel Cranfield, 1st Earl of Middlesex, who opposed war on grounds of cost and quickly fell in much the same manner Bacon had.[33] James told Buckingham he was a fool, and presciently warned Charles that he would live to regret the revival of impeachment as a parliamentary tool.[34] An underfunded makeshift army under Ernst von Mansfeld set off to recover the Palatinate, but it was so poorly provisioned that it never advanced beyond the Dutch coast.[35]
By 1624, the increasingly ill James was finding it difficult to control Parliament. By the time of his death in March 1625, Charles and Buckingham had already assumed de facto control of the kingdom.[36]
With the failure of the Spanish match, Charles and Buckingham turned their attention to France.[37] On 1 May 1625 Charles was married by proxy to the 15-year-old French princess Henrietta Maria in front of the doors of Notre Dame de Paris.[38] He had seen her in Paris while en route to Spain.[39] They met in person on 13 June 1625 in Canterbury. Charles delayed the opening of his first Parliament until after the marriage was consummated, to forestall any opposition.[40] Many members of the Commons opposed his marriage to a Catholic, fearing that he would lift restrictions on Catholic recusants and undermine the official establishment of the reformed Church of England. Charles told Parliament that he would not relax religious restrictions, but promised to do exactly that in a secret marriage treaty with his brother-in-law Louis XIII of France.[41] Moreover, the treaty loaned to the French seven English naval ships that were used to suppress the Protestant Huguenots at La Rochelle in September 1625.[42] Charles was crowned on 2 February 1626 at Westminster Abbey, but without his wife at his side, because she refused to participate in a Protestant religious ceremony.[43]
Distrust of Charles's religious policies increased with his support of a controversial anti-Calvinist ecclesiastic, Richard Montagu, who was in disrepute among the Puritans.[44] In his pamphlet A New Gag for an Old Goose (1624), a reply to the Catholic pamphlet A New Gag for the New Gospel, Montagu argued against Calvinist predestination, the doctrine that God preordained salvation and damnation. Anti-Calvinists—known as Arminians—believed that people could accept or reject salvation by exercising free will.[45] Arminian divines had been one of the few sources of support for Charles's proposed Spanish marriage.[46] With King James's support, Montagu produced another pamphlet, Appello Caesarem, published in 1625 shortly after James's death and Charles's accession. To protect Montagu from the stricture of Puritan members of Parliament, Charles made him a royal chaplain, heightening many Puritans' suspicions that Charles favoured Arminianism as a clandestine attempt to aid Catholicism's resurgence.[47]
Rather than direct involvement in the European land war, the English Parliament preferred a relatively inexpensive naval attack on Spanish colonies in the New World, hoping for the capture of the Spanish treasure fleets. Parliament voted to grant a subsidy of £140,000, an insufficient sum for Charles's war plans.[48] Moreover, the House of Commons limited its authorisation for royal collection of tonnage and poundage (two varieties of customs duties) to a year, although previous sovereigns since Henry VI had been granted the right for life.[49] In this manner, Parliament could delay approval of the rates until after a full-scale review of customs revenue.[50] The bill made no progress in the House of Lords past its first reading.[51] Although no act of Parliament for the levy of tonnage and poundage was obtained, Charles continued to collect the duties.[52]
A poorly conceived and executed naval expedition against Spain under Buckingham's leadership went badly, and the House of Commons began proceedings for the impeachment of the duke.[53] In May 1626, Charles nominated Buckingham as Chancellor of Cambridge University in a show of support,[54] and had two members who had spoken against Buckingham—Dudley Digges and Sir John Eliot—arrested at the door of the House. The Commons was outraged by the imprisonment of two of their members, and after about a week in custody, both were released.[55] On 12 June 1626, the Commons launched a direct protestation attacking Buckingham, stating, "We protest before your Majesty and the whole world that until this great person be removed from intermeddling with the great affairs of state, we are out of hope of any good success; and do fear that any money we shall or can give will, through his misemployment, be turned rather to the hurt and prejudice of this your kingdom than otherwise, as by lamentable experience we have found those large supplies formerly and lately given."[56] Despite the protests, Charles refused to dismiss his friend, dismissing Parliament instead.[57]
Meanwhile, domestic quarrels between Charles and Henrietta Maria were souring the early years of their marriage. Disputes over her jointure, appointments to her household, and the practice of her religion culminated in the king expelling the vast majority of her French attendants in August 1626.[58] Despite Charles's agreement to provide the French with English ships as a condition of marrying Henrietta Maria, in 1627 he launched an attack on the French coast to defend the Huguenots at La Rochelle.[59] The action, led by Buckingham, was ultimately unsuccessful. Buckingham's failure to protect the Huguenots—and his retreat from Saint-Martin-de-Ré—spurred Louis XIII's siege of La Rochelle and furthered the English Parliament's and people's detestation of the duke.[60]
Charles provoked further unrest by trying to raise money for the war through a "forced loan": a tax levied without parliamentary consent. In November 1627, the test case in the King's Bench, the "Five Knights' Case", found that the king had a prerogative right to imprison without trial those who refused to pay the forced loan.[61] Summoned again in March 1628, Parliament adopted a Petition of Right on 26 May, calling upon Charles to acknowledge that he could not levy taxes without Parliament's consent, impose martial law on civilians, imprison them without due process, or quarter troops in their homes.[62] Charles assented to the petition on 7 June,[63] but by the end of the month he had prorogued Parliament and reasserted his right to collect customs duties without authorisation from Parliament.[64]
On 23 August 1628, Buckingham was assassinated.[65] Charles was deeply distressed. According to Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, he "threw himself upon his bed, lamenting with much passion and with abundance of tears".[66] He remained grieving in his room for two days.[67] In contrast, the public rejoiced at Buckingham's death, accentuating the gulf between the court and the nation and between the Crown and the Commons.[68] Buckingham's death effectively ended the war with Spain and eliminated his leadership as an issue, but it did not end the conflicts between Charles and Parliament.[69] It did, however, coincide with an improvement in Charles's relationship with his wife, and by November 1628 their old quarrels were at an end.[70] Perhaps Charles's emotional ties were transferred from Buckingham to Henrietta Maria.[71] She became pregnant for the first time, and the bond between them grew stronger.[72] Together, they embodied an image of virtue and family life, and their court became a model of formality and morality.[73]
In January 1629, Charles opened the second session of the English Parliament, which had been prorogued in June 1628, with a moderate speech on the tonnage and poundage issue.[77] Members of the House of Commons began to voice opposition to Charles's policies in light of the case of John Rolle, a Member of Parliament whose goods had been confiscated for failing to pay tonnage and poundage.[78] Many MPs viewed the imposition of the tax as a breach of the Petition of Right. When Charles ordered a parliamentary adjournment on 2 March,[79] members held the Speaker, Sir John Finch, down in his chair so that the session could be prolonged long enough for resolutions against Catholicism, Arminianism, and tonnage and poundage to be read out and acclaimed by the chamber.[80] The provocation was too much for Charles, who dissolved Parliament and had nine parliamentary leaders, including Sir John Eliot, imprisoned over the matter,[81] thereby turning the men into martyrs[82] and giving popular cause to their protest.[83]
Personal rule necessitated peace. Without the means in the foreseeable future to raise funds from Parliament for a European war, or Buckingham's help, Charles made peace with France and Spain.[84] The next 11 years, during which Charles ruled England without a Parliament, are known as the Personal Rule or the "eleven years' tyranny".[85] Ruling without Parliament was not exceptional, and was supported by precedent.[lower-alpha 4] But only Parliament could legally raise taxes, and without it Charles's capacity to acquire funds for his treasury was limited to his customary rights and prerogatives.[87]
A large fiscal deficit had arisen during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I.[89] Notwithstanding Buckingham's short-lived campaigns against both Spain and France, Charles had little financial capacity to wage wars overseas. Throughout his reign, he was obliged to rely primarily on volunteer forces for defence and on diplomatic efforts to support his sister Elizabeth and his foreign policy objective for the restoration of the Palatinate.[90] England was still the least taxed country in Europe, with no official excise and no regular direct taxation.[91] To raise revenue without reconvening Parliament, Charles resurrected an all-but-forgotten law called the "Distraint of Knighthood", in abeyance for over a century, which required any man who earned £40 or more from land each year to present himself at the king's coronation to be knighted. Relying on this old statute, Charles fined those who had failed to attend his coronation in 1626.[92][lower-alpha 5]
The chief tax Charles imposed was a feudal levy known as ship money,[94] which proved even more unpopular, and lucrative, than tonnage and poundage before it. Previously, collection of ship money had been authorised only during wars, and only on coastal regions. But Charles argued that there was no legal bar to collecting the tax for defence during peacetime and throughout the whole of the kingdom. Ship money, paid directly to the Treasury of the Navy, provided between £150,000 to £200,000 annually between 1634 and 1638, after which yields declined.[95] Opposition to ship money steadily grew, but England's 12 common law judges ruled the tax within the king's prerogative, though some of them had reservations.[96] The prosecution of John Hampden for non-payment in 1637–38 provided a platform for popular protest, and the judges found against Hampden only by the narrow margin of 7–5.[97]
Charles also derived money by granting monopolies, despite a statute forbidding such action, which, though inefficient, raised an estimated £100,000 a year in the late 1630s.[98][lower-alpha 6] One such monopoly was for soap, pejoratively referred to as "popish soap" because some of its backers were Catholics.[100] Charles also raised funds from the Scottish nobility, at the price of considerable acrimony, by the Act of Revocation (1625), whereby all gifts of royal or church land made to the nobility since 1540 were revoked, with continued ownership being subject to an annual rent.[101] In addition, the boundaries of the royal forests in England were restored to their ancient limits as part of a scheme to maximise income by exploiting the land and fining land users within the reasserted boundaries for encroachment.[102] The programme's focus was disafforestation and sale of forest lands for conversion to pasture and arable farming, or in the case of the Forest of Dean, development for the iron industry. Disafforestation frequently caused riots and disturbances, including those known as the Western Rising.[103]
Against the background of this unrest, Charles faced bankruptcy in mid-1640. The City of London, preoccupied with its own grievances, refused to make any loans to him, as did foreign powers. In this extremity, in July Charles seized silver bullion worth £130,000 held in trust at the mint in the Tower of London, promising its later return at 8% interest to its owners.[104] In August, after the East India Company refused to grant a loan,[105] Lord Cottington seized the company's stock of pepper and spices and sold it for £60,000 (far below its market value), promising to refund the money with interest later.[106]
Throughout Charles's reign, the English Reformation was in the forefront of political debate. Arminian theology emphasised clerical authority and the individual's ability to reject or accept salvation, which opponents viewed as heretical and a potential vehicle for the reintroduction of Catholicism. Puritan reformers considered Charles too sympathetic to Arminianism,[lower-alpha 7] and opposed his desire to move the Church of England in a more traditional and sacramental direction.[108] In addition, his Protestant subjects followed the European war closely[109] and grew increasingly dismayed by Charles's diplomacy with Spain and his failure to support the Protestant cause abroad effectively.[110]
In 1633, Charles appointed William Laud Archbishop of Canterbury.[111] They initiated a series of reforms to promote religious uniformity by restricting non-conformist preachers, insisting the liturgy be celebrated as prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer, organising the internal architecture of English churches to emphasise the sacrament of the altar, and reissuing King James's Declaration of Sports, which permitted secular activities on the sabbath.[112] The Feoffees for Impropriations, an organisation that bought benefices and advowsons so that Puritans could be appointed to them, was dissolved.[113] Laud prosecuted those who opposed his reforms in the Court of High Commission and the Star Chamber, the two most powerful courts in the land.[114] The courts became feared for their censorship of opposing religious views and unpopular among the propertied classes for inflicting degrading punishments on gentlemen.[115] For example, in 1637 William Prynne, Henry Burton and John Bastwick were pilloried, whipped and mutilated by cropping and imprisoned indefinitely for publishing anti-episcopal pamphlets.[116]
When Charles attempted to impose his religious policies in Scotland he faced numerous difficulties. Although born in Scotland, Charles had become estranged from it; his first visit since early childhood was for his Scottish coronation in 1633.[118] To the dismay of the Scots, who had removed many traditional rituals from their liturgical practice, Charles insisted that the coronation be conducted using the Anglican rite.[119] In 1637, he ordered the use of a new prayer book in Scotland that was almost identical to the English Book of Common Prayer, without consulting either the Scottish Parliament or the Kirk.[120] Although it had been written, under Charles's direction, by Scottish bishops, many Scots resisted it, seeing it as a vehicle to introduce Anglicanism to Scotland.[121] On 23 July, riots erupted in Edinburgh upon the first Sunday of the prayer book's usage, and unrest spread throughout the Kirk. The public began to mobilise around a reaffirmation of the National Covenant, whose signatories pledged to uphold the reformed religion of Scotland and reject any innovations not authorised by Kirk and Parliament.[122] When the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland met in November 1638, it condemned the new prayer book, abolished episcopal church government by bishops, and adopted presbyterian government by elders and deacons.[123]
Charles perceived the unrest in Scotland as a rebellion against his authority, precipitating the First Bishops' War in 1639.[124] He did not seek subsidies from the English Parliament to wage war, instead raising an army without parliamentary aid and marching to Berwick-upon-Tweed, on the Scottish border.[125] The army did not engage the Covenanters, as the king feared the defeat of his forces, whom he believed to be significantly outnumbered by the Scots.[126] In the Treaty of Berwick, Charles regained custody of his Scottish fortresses and secured the dissolution of the Covenanters' interim government, albeit at the decisive concession that both the Scottish Parliament and General Assembly of the Scottish Church were called.[127]
The military failure in the First Bishops' War caused a financial and diplomatic crisis for Charles that deepened when his efforts to raise funds from Spain while simultaneously continuing his support for his Palatine relatives led to the public humiliation of the Battle of the Downs, where the Dutch destroyed a Spanish bullion fleet off the coast of Kent in sight of the impotent English navy.[128]
Charles continued peace negotiations with the Scots in a bid to gain time before launching a new military campaign. Because of his financial weakness, he was forced to call Parliament into session in an attempt to raise funds for such a venture.[129] Both the English and Irish parliaments were summoned in the early months of 1640.[130] In March 1640, the Irish Parliament duly voted in a subsidy of £180,000 with the promise to raise an army 9,000 strong by the end of May.[130] But in the English general election in March, court candidates fared badly,[131] and Charles's dealings with the English Parliament in April quickly reached stalemate.[132] The earls of Northumberland and Strafford attempted to broker a compromise whereby the king would agree to forfeit ship money in exchange for £650,000 (although the cost of the coming war was estimated at £1 million).[133] Nevertheless, this alone was insufficient to produce consensus in the Commons.[134] The Parliamentarians' calls for further reforms were ignored by Charles, who still retained the support of the House of Lords. Despite the protests of the Earl of Northumberland,[135] the Short Parliament (as it came to be known) was dissolved in May 1640, less than a month after it assembled.[136]
By this stage the Earl of Strafford, Lord Deputy of Ireland since 1632,[138] had emerged as Charles's right-hand man and, together with Archbishop Laud, pursued a policy that he termed "Thorough", which aimed to make central royal authority more efficient and effective at the expense of local or anti-government interests.[139] Although originally a critic of the king, Strafford defected to royal service in 1628, in part due to the Duke of Buckingham's persuasion,[140] and had since emerged, alongside Laud, as the most influential of Charles's ministers.[141]
Bolstered by the failure of the English Short Parliament, the Scottish Parliament declared itself capable of governing without the king's consent, and in August 1640 the Covenanter army moved into the English county of Northumberland.[142] Following the illness of Lord Northumberland, who was the king's commander-in-chief, Charles and Strafford went north to command the English forces, despite Strafford being ill himself with a combination of gout and dysentery.[143] The Scottish soldiery, many of whom were veterans of the Thirty Years' War,[144] had far greater morale and training than their English counterparts. They met virtually no resistance until reaching Newcastle upon Tyne, where they defeated the English forces at the Battle of Newburn and occupied the city, as well as the neighbouring county of Durham.[145]
As demands for a parliament grew,[146] Charles took the unusual step of summoning a great council of peers. By the time it met, on 24 September at York, Charles had resolved to follow the almost universal advice to call a parliament. After informing the peers that a parliament would convene in November, he asked them to consider how he could acquire funds to maintain his army against the Scots in the meantime. They recommended making peace.[147] A cessation of arms was negotiated in the humiliating Treaty of Ripon, signed in October 1640.[148] This stated that the Scots would continue to occupy Northumberland and Durham and be paid £850 per day indefinitely until a final settlement was negotiated and the English Parliament recalled, which would be required to raise sufficient funds to pay the Scottish forces.[149] Consequently, Charles summoned what later became known as the Long Parliament. Once again, his supporters fared badly at the polls. Of the 493 members of the Commons returned in November, over 350 were opposed to the king.[150]
The Long Parliament proved just as difficult for Charles as had the Short Parliament. It assembled on 3 November 1640 and quickly began proceedings to impeach the king's leading counsellors for high treason.[151] Strafford was taken into custody on 10 November; Laud was impeached on 18 December; Finch, now Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, was impeached the next day, and consequently fled to The Hague with Charles's permission on 21 December.[152] To prevent the king from dissolving it at will, Parliament passed the Triennial Act, which required Parliament to be summoned at least every three years, and permitted the Lord Keeper and 12 peers to summon Parliament if the king failed to do so.[153] The Act was coupled with a subsidy bill, and to secure the latter, Charles grudgingly granted royal assent in February 1641.[154]
Strafford had become the principal target of the Parliamentarians, particularly John Pym, and he went on trial for high treason on 22 March 1641.[156] But the key allegation by Sir Henry Vane that Strafford had threatened to use the Irish army to subdue England was not corroborated, and on 10 April Pym's case collapsed.[157] Pym and his allies immediately launched a bill of attainder, which simply declared Strafford guilty and pronounced the sentence of death.[158]
Charles assured Strafford that "upon the word of a king you shall not suffer in life, honour or fortune",[159] and the attainder could not succeed if Charles withheld assent.[160] Furthermore, many members and most peers opposed the attainder, not wishing, in the words of one, to "commit murder with the sword of justice".[161] But increased tensions and an attempted coup by royalist army officers in support of Strafford and in which Charles was involved began to sway the issue.[162] The Commons passed the bill on 20 April by a large margin (204 in favour, 59 opposed, and 230 abstained), and the Lords acquiesced (by 26 votes to 19, with 79 absent) in May.[163] On 3 May, Parliament's Protestation attacked the "wicked counsels" of Charles's "arbitrary and tyrannical government". While those who signed the petition undertook to defend the king's "person, honour and estate", they also swore to preserve "the true reformed religion", Parliament, and the "rights and liberties of the subjects".[164] Fearing for his family's safety in the face of unrest, Charles reluctantly assented to Strafford's attainder on 9 May after consulting his judges and bishops.[165] Strafford was beheaded three days later.[166]
Also in early May, Charles assented to an unprecedented Act that forbade the dissolution of the English Parliament without its consent.