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The new parliament, to be known in history as the Long, which met on November 3rd, was the most fateful assembly that has ever sat in the old chapel of St Stephen. It was not like the “great, warm and ruffling parliament” which had passed the Petition of Right, a declaratory body to give voice to opinions, or like the Short Parliament, a gathering of perplexed and moderate reformers. THE LONG PARLIAMENT 1640 The events of the summer months had wrought a portentous change in many minds. Pym’s April speech was his last as a reformer, and now he and his group were moving fast towards revolution. Nevertheless the assembly contained all varieties of view and all that was most weighty in English life.

In it sat the leading gentry of every shire; it was an aristocratic body and it contained a greater proportion of ancient blood than the House of Lords to-day. Most of the famous figures of the Civil War were there, so that it was like a parade of troops before the day of battle. Formal government and opposition parties were not yet in being, but members of a like mind sat together. Charles did not lack friends in the House, some of them office-holders, some of them already vehement royalists, some still doubting. For Wilton sat Sir Henry Vane, the secretary of state, who as an official had made a great fortune and become the owner of wide lands in the north; his character stares at us from Van Dyck’s canvas, the faux bonhomme, the supple courtier, with sly, shifty eyes and a greedy mouth. John Ashburnham, the king’s confidential secretary, sat for Hastings, and Henry Wilmot for Tamworth, and from Bury St Edmunds came Henry Jermyn, the queen’s master of the horse, who already bore an ill repute. Wells sent the soldierly person of Sir Ralph Hopton, and Dorset the younger Digby, Lord Bristol’s son, soon to be Charles’s most intimate adviser, but at present, owing to family grievances, a little estranged from the court. From Hertfordshire came the noble figure of Arthur Capel, “a man in whom the malice of his enemies could discover very few faults.”^[99] There was a little group, too, whose ultimate policy was still undecided. One was John Colepeper from Kent, who had soldiered abroad and knew much about the arts of both agriculture and war. Another was Edmund Waller from St Ives, the poet of Sacharissa, a quaint singing-bird among falcons. There were the lawyers, Edward Hyde from Saltash and John Selden from 1640 Oxford university, both on the popular side, yet with reservations which made them suspect by the hot-heads. And for Newport in the Isle of Wight sat the young Lord Falkland, a small man with an ugly voice and a somewhat vacant countenance, who was nevertheless reported by his friends to be a miracle of wit and wisdom, and who more than any other of his time was born to a heritage of unfulfilled renown.

There were as yet no clear party divisions, and Pym still cast his spell over the whole House, except a few rakes like Wilmot and Jermyn and young exquisites like Sir Philip Warwick. But he had his own special following, on the fringes of which were the elder Fairfax, the holder of a Scottish peerage, who represented the great shire of York; Sir William Waller from Andover, and Sir John Hotham from Beverley, a dull irritable man with a grievance. Deeper in the group were the lawyers, the dry Oliver St John, Strode made implacable by his sufferings, Strafford’s brother-in-law Denzil Holles, and old Rudyerd, the friend of Ben Jonson, who had already sat in six parliaments. There were also the avowed revolutionaries, disreputable cynics like Henry Marten from Berkshire, and slender-witted but stubborn theorists like Sir Arthur Haselrig, and hot foes of episcopacy like Nathaniel Fiennes from Banbury and the young Henry Vane from Hull, just appointed treasurer of the navy. Vane’s religion had carried him to America and his politics had brought him home, and now he filled among the groups of the left something of the position of Falkland with the centre and the right. He was a man of mystery, of undoubted parts, not generally liked, but by a few worshipped. Clarendon tells us that he “had an unusual aspect which ... made men think that there was somewhat in him of extraordinary.”^[100] What that was we may judge from the Lely portrait. The long Hapsburg chin, the prominent lustrous eyes, the loose talking lips reveal the intense spiritual egoist.

Pym was the undisputed leader of the House and the JOHN HAMPDEN 1640 autocrat of his own group, Pym shaggy as ever and now grown very fat, so that the court ladies called him the Ox. He had definitely become a party manager, and at meetings in the country, at Lord Saye’s castle of Broughton in Oxfordshire, and at Sir Richard Knightley’s house of Fawsley, or in town in his lodgings behind Westminster hall, he held frequent conclaves of his supporters. His chief lieutenant was John Hampden, one of the richest men in England, to whom the ship money case had given a nation-wide fame. Hampden was a poor speaker, but, like Falkland, he cast a spell over his contemporaries. Clarendon calls him a “very wise man, and of great parts, and possessed with the most absolute spirit of popularity, that is the most absolute faculties to govern the people, of any man I ever knew.”^[101] His power lay in two things, his single-mindedness, for he knew precisely what he wanted, and his subtlety and tact, for like many of the single-hearted he was an adroit diplomatist. He was eminently persuasive, for he was never dogmatic, and so gently insinuated his views into other men’s minds that they believed them to be their own unaided creation. He was that rare combination, an idealist with an acute judgment of ways and means, perhaps at the moment the wisest head in England; but Pym had the greater daimonic force, and he remained the leader till the civilians were ousted by the soldiers.

Known to few as yet, but in the inner circle of Pym’s followers, stood the member for Cambridge. Oliver was still new to the business, but he was eager to learn, and he had in the House a powerful family backing. John Hampden, Oliver St John and Edmund Waller were his first cousins, Valentine Wauton, the knight of the shire for Huntingdon, was his brother-in-law, and Sir Richard Knightley had married Hampden’s daughter. At the beginning of the Long Parliament he had seventeen kinsmen or connections in the House, and later he had twenty-one.^[102] He was at once placed upon many committees, 1640 and in the first days of the session he intervened in debate—not on a matter of high policy, for that he had scarcely yet mastered, but on a question of an individual wrong, John Lilburne’s imprisonment in the Fleet. Let Sir Philip Warwick introduce the new member.

The first time I ever took notice of him was in the beginning of the Parliament, held in 1640, when I vainly thought myself a courtly young gentleman, for we courtiers valued ourselves much on our good clothes. I came into the House one morning, well clad, and perceived a gentleman speaking whom I knew not, very ordinarily apparelled; for it was a plain cloth suit that seemed to have been made by an ill country tailor; his linen was plain, and not very clean, and I remember a speck or two of blood upon his little band which was not much larger than his collar; his hat was without a hatband; his stature was of a good size; his sword stuck close to his side; his countenance swollen and reddish; his voice sharp and untunable, and his eloquence full of fervour. For the subject matter would not bear much of reason, it being in behalf of a servant of Mr Prynne’s, who had dispensed libels against the Queen for her dancing, and such like innocent and courtly sports; and he aggravated the imprisonment of this man by the Council table into that height that one would have believed the very government itself had been in danger by it. I sincerely profess it much lessened my reverence unto that great council, for he was very much hearkened unto.^[103]