Addled Parliament

The failure of the Blessed Parliament of 1604–1611 to, in its seven-year sitting, either rescue James from his mounting debt or allow the king to unite his two kingdoms had left him bitter with the body.

The four-year hiatus between parliaments saw the royal debt and deficit grow further, in spite of the best efforts of Treasurer Lord Salisbury.

The failure of the last and most lucrative financial expedient of the period, a foreign dowry from the marriage of his heir-apparent, finally convinced James to recall Parliament in early 1614.

Rumours of conspiracies to manage Parliament (the "undertaking") or to pack it with easily controlled members, though not based in fact, spread quickly.

The spreading of that rumour and the ultimate failure of Parliament have been generally attributed to the scheming of the crypto-Catholic Earl of Northampton, but that allegation has met with some recent skepticism.

Though many prominent politicians publicly praised the idea of unification and MPs promptly accepted a commission to investigate the union, James's proposed adoption of the title "king of Great Britain" was rejected outright.

Lord High Treasurer, Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury proposed the Great Contract: a financial plan wherein Parliament would grant the Crown £600,000 immediately (to pay off its debts) and an annual stipend of £200,000 thereafter; in return, the king was to abolish ten feudal dues, among them, purveyance.

By 6 November 1610, James demanded the other £500,000 and conditioned that, if impositions were to be abolished, Parliament would have to supply him with another equally lucrative income source.

[5] James's first parliament had ended on a bitter note; "your greatest error", he chastised Salisbury, "hath been that ye ever expected to draw honey out of gall.

[14][15] However, James's principal fiscal expedient was to be the marriage of his heir-apparent, Henry, Prince of Wales, for which he expected a sizeable dowry,[11] not to mention a foreign ally.

[8] However, by early 1614, France's internal religious strife had intensified to such a point that civil war seemed imminent, so negotiations stalled on the French side; James grew impatient.

[19] A group of advisors, led by the Earls of Suffolk and Pembroke, encouraged the king to call a parliament to raise funds, convincing James "that"—as he later put it—"my subjects did not hate me, which I know I had not deserved.

Two of the king's closest advisors were unavailable: Salisbury was dead and the 74-year-old Northampton was ill.[8] Even Suffolk and Pembroke were clueless of any way to prevent Parliament from bringing up thorny issues such as impositions again.

[25] James rejected the undertaking derisively, and no such conspiracy was ever arranged,[25] but rumours of its actual occurrence spread quickly in the lead up to Parliament.

[8] After some Byzantine wrangling in which another better-qualified candidate was dropped, Ranulph Crewe, judge and MP for the government-controlled borough of Saltash, was chosen at the last minute to be the Speaker of the House of Commons.

[34] Crewe's inexperience at dealing with rowdy MPs was no doubt among the factors that allowed Parliament to descend into disorder, as it rapidly did.

[35] James's most senior representative in the House of Commons, Ralph Winwood, Secretary of State, was announced similarly late.

[8][36] Though sometimes caricatured as juvenile, and thus prone to passionate outbursts, the new House of Commons as a whole was not especially young or inexperienced;[f] it was the inexperience of his most important officials and advisors that was to damage the king.

[43] English diplomat Sir Thomas Roe was the first to allege that the rumours were promulgated by the Earl of Northampton's crypto-Catholic faction, who wanted the king to instead look for funds in a marital alliance with Catholic Spain, thus favouring Parliament's failure.

[45] Suspicions only compounded as Parliament proceeded, with the revelation that the king had corresponded with influential subjects in the hopes of securing the election of the sympathetic.

[51] As early as 19 April, letter writer John Chamberlain communicated that "the great clamor against undertakers [was] well quieted",[52] and the Commons were occupied with a familiar controversy: impositions.

[54] As parliamentary historian Conrad Russell judged it, "both sides were so firmly convinced that they were legally in the right that they never fully absorbed that the other party thought differently.

[h][54] Bishop Richard Neile, who was one of the most vocal opponents of the conference,[55] added insult to injury with a sharp speech condemning the petitioners.

[57] By the end of May, as historian Thomas L. Moir put it, "the temper of the Commons had reached a fever pitch"[58] and leadership had broken down in this intractable atmosphere.

[53] The Commons issued their own ultimatum to James: if he abolished impositions, "wherewith the whole kingdom doth groan", they would give him financial support.

[3] Victorian Whig historian Samuel Rawson Gardiner, in his monumental history of the lead-up to the Civil War, took the view that the parliament of 1614 was primarily concerned with "higher questions" (i.e. those of a constitutional nature) "which, once mooted, can never drop out of sight".

[76][77] To this parliament, Gardiner wrote, one can "trace the first dawning of the idea that, in order to preserve the rights of the subject intact, it would be necessary to make some change in the relations between the authority of the Crown and the representatives of the people.

[79] Moir, in his 1958 monograph on the parliament, held that "the development had begun which led ultimately to parliamentary control of the executive" as early as the exclusion of Parry.

[79] Maija Jansson, editor of the 1614 Parliamentary proceedings, wrote in 1988: "[f]ar from being the confused do-nothing assembly of tradition, the English parliament of 1614 addressed thorny constitutional issues and anticipated the concern with procedure and privilege that is evident throughout the sessions of the 1620s.

[81] From Russell's revisionist perspective, the members of Parliament were engaged in a constitutionally conservative battle, aimed at preserving their own rights rather than extending them.