PYM, John (1584-1643), of Brymore, Som. and Westminster.

The House of Commons had never a more dedicated servant or a more staunch advocate than John Pym. The skills he brought to bear in both the Short and Long Parliaments had been acquired and honed in five earlier assemblies in which from his debut he had played a major part. Many of the characteristics that marked him out as a parliamentary performer were there for all to see in his first appearances. In the 1621 Parliament he had delivered an unusually large number of speeches for a newcomer; championed impeachment as a weapon against perceived enemies of the public good; was capable of dramatic and tactical flourishes with documents on the floor of the House; and was inclined to pragmatism on matters of privilege. In 1624 he promoted the powers of committees to hear counsel and summon witnesses. He maintained an interest in financial administration, and became a prominent draftsman of remonstrances on behalf of the Commons. The drivers of his political career in the 1620s were by 1624 hostility towards Catholicism and Arminianism, the latter a threat to Calvinist orthodoxy against which Pym made the first parliamentary speech, and a growing belief, evident by 1626, in a plot to subvert government at its heart. Early in 1622, Pym brushed up against the privy council and was detained for a short period, but when Parliament was dissolved amid scenes of uproar and protest on 2 March 1629, he may not even have been in the House.51HP Commons 1604-29, ‘John Pym’.

The Pym of the 1630s was in some respects a rootless figure, moving between the country houses of his powerful patrons and political associates. Warwick Castle and Fawsley in Northamptonshire, the homes respectively of Robert Greville†, 2nd Baron Brooke and Richard Knightley*, leaders of political opposition to the king’s government, saw much of him; the home of Sir Thomas Barrington*, though in the end denied to him, was a place in which he contemplated wintering.52A. Hughes, ‘Thomas Dugard and his Circle in the 1630s’, HJ xix. 781; Barrington Fam. Letters (Cam. Soc. 4th ser. xxviii), 148. Another house where his family was welcome was that of Sir Arthur Hesilrige* in Leicestershire.53Catalogue of Original Manuscripts and Historical Correspondence (1934), 39. He was not yet persona non grata in government circles, but the commissions out of chancery that came his way were minimal, and consequent upon his continuing hold on the receivership of crown revenues. In the first five years of the decade, the affairs of the Providence Island Company occupied a great deal of his time. His flair for administration recommended him as treasurer of the company, a position he held between 1630 and 1636. He was always more than a mere functionary, and his commitment to the company’s activities led him to defy privy council orders for gentlemen to return to the country after law court terms were over.54Newton, Colonising Activities, 175. Pym argued for the policy of eastward expansion from Providence Island into the south American mainland. Pym and Oliver St John* were asked to draft a patent for a new mainland colony, and Pym was included among the patentees when a new grant was made in April 1635.55Newton, Colonising Activities, 141-2, 168; Coventry Docquets, 266. The following year, when the company became interested in colonising the island of Association, near Hispaniola, it was Pym who joined Lord Brooke and Viscount Saye and Sele as trustees for the company’s rights in the venture.56Newton, Colonising Activities, 215.

Although Pym gave up the treasurership of the company in May 1636, his commitment to the enterprise remained unshakeable. He was elected a deputy of it in 1638 and 1639, and by this time was one of the five core members who directed the company’s affairs, the only one not a peer. His investment matched his commitment, and when in 1642 the company’s accounts were made up after Providence had fallen to the Spanish, Pym was found to be the heaviest investor second only to Brooke.57Kupperman, Providence Island, 311, 316. His tenacity in the project was doubtless mainly driven by enthusiasm for its potential for new godly commonwealths, by which the anti-puritan government of Charles I could be evaded or defied; and as a bridgehead from which to advance the Protestant cause against Spanish colonial activity in the Caribbean. But Pym was also interested in its financial aspects. By May 1635, however, he had grown weary of the post of treasurer, ‘whereby he had been diverted from his own business and put upon extraordinary expense’, signalling that he needed an income.58Newton, Colonising Activities, 170. That he considered the company to have investment potential is suggested by his readiness to invest more of his own resources in it, and by his ‘repeatedly’ asking for a larger share.59Kupperman, Providence Island, 303-4, 309.

Pym took a similar expansionist view of his investment in Bermuda (Somers Islands), taking over other investors’ shares.60Wilkinson, Adventurers of Bermuda, 211. From 1635 the Saybrook venture in New England was another parallel scheme.61Brett, Pym, 120; C. Thompson, The Saybrook Company and the Significance of its Colonising Venture (2005). He considered himself a businessman, or at least someone qualified to dispense financial advice.62Add. 11692, f. 1. He seems to have joined the Company trading to France, probably a purely speculative venture.63Add. 46190, f. 10; Coventry Docquets, 474, 478. His purchase of wardships during the 1630s, in partnership with Sir Dudley Digges†, William Cholmley* and Ralph Brownrigg, master of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, was likely to have been another speculation.64Coventry Docquets, 474, 478. His involvement with the Coventry collieries certainly was. He was party to what was at least the third lease the corporation of Coventry had made since 1620 of the Hawkesbury mines, and among his predecessors were the Coventrian William Jesson* and then a group of courtiers including Endymion Porter*.65Coventry RO, BA/H/C/17/1, ff. 248, 338. Pym only became involved when Porter and his colleagues, despondent at lack of returns, gave up the lease.66Coventry RO, BA/H/Q/A 79/159, 162. Pym’s nostrum was to harness the technical expertise of a German engineer, who was expected to solve the problem of underground flooding, and who assured Pym he would make money; and he was helped in the venture by the polymath Samuel Hartlib and his colleagues in the Providence Island Company, William Jessop* and Richard Knightley*, the latter a co-investor.67Hartlib Pprs. Online, 23/11/3A, 31/3/1A, 3A, 5A, 15A; 31/23/1A. Pym was a serious, practical entrepreneur in the enterprise, riding over from Fawsley to inspect the works and assuring Hartlib in November 1639 that he had another colliery in view for investment if the Hawkesbury mines proved profitable.68Hartlib Pprs. Online, 31/3/11A-12B, 15A. The collieries, however, like the Bermuda venture and the Providence Island Company, not to mention the French Company, whose agent in 1639 reported his own ‘miserable state’, were not a success.69Add. 46190, f. 10.

Hartlib’s attempts to help solve problems of colliery engineering in the midlands were something of a quid pro quo for Pym’s earlier support of not only Hartlib but also John Dury and other intellectuals with wider European roots and contacts. Hartlib thought that Pym was impressed by the writings of Francis Bacon, and he passed on to Hartlib with evident enthusiasm news of a Middle Temple lawyer, William Jewell, who was working on a particularly ambitious biblical concordance. Pym assured Hartlib that Jewell was willing to share his findings with others.70Hartlib Pprs. Online, 29/2/7B, 57A; 7/2/1B; H.R. Trevor-Roper, Religion, Reformation and Social Change (1967), 238. His interest in the Moravian educationalist, John Amos Comenius, was still active in 1642, despite what was by then an overwhelming burden of state affairs.71G.H. Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius (Liverpool, 1947), 342, 365. He was confidently said to have maintained a Dutch Calvinist student, Daniel Erastus, through his studies at Cambridge.72Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius, 371. These intellectual and educational interests of Pym need to be regarded primarily as evidence of his central place in the aristocratic and gentry network defined by its oppositionist puritanism, and outward-facing European vision of Protestantism. Most of the evidence comes from Hartlib, whose often casual references to Pym tend to portray him as just one link in the chain which connected vanguard Protestant intellectual activity with the Providence Island Company network.73Hartlib Pprs. Online, 23/2/12A, 23/11/2A. It is going too far to suggest that Pym was actively interested in widening educational provision. Certainly he made donations to places he had been educated, and in this he was typical of men of his time and class; but the John Pym who founded a free school in Brill – a parish in Buckinghamshire, not the Dutch seaport redolent of the struggle for Protestantism – was, contrary to assumptions, a different man altogether, a Buckinghamshire gentleman who later supported Parliament in the civil war.74HMC 2nd Rep. 143, 6th Rep, 549; Trevor-Roper, Religion, Reformation and Social Change, 238; Further Report [of the Charity Commissioners], 1834. (225) 27, p. 12; SP28/131, pt. 3, f. 75v.

The uncertainties of commercial and overseas projects and his undoubted wider intellectual interests did not dislodge from Pym’s mind his profound belief in the popish conspiracy at home and abroad, and the larger conflict between Protestant and Catholic powers in Europe. ‘I long much to hear the issue of the many great designs and enterprises now afoot, especially of the great armadas upon our own coast’ he wrote to Hartlib in September 1639, of the sea battle between the Spanish and the ships of the Dutch Republic.75Hartlib Pprs. Online, 31/3/9A. The Pym of the late 1630s was an unsettled individual, and a disappointed businessman, but one who retained a strong sense of an as yet unfulfilled personal destiny in a global struggle: ‘How God will dispose of me I know not’, he confided to another correspondent.76SP16/395, f. 135. Given the difficulties he faced it seems remarkable that in July 1638 he gave up his receivership of crown lands, which at least brought him a certain income, and which he could sub-let. Oliver St John’s* eulogy on Pym in the House of Commons in December 1643 attributed Pym’s massive indebtedness to his having liquidated his estate in the early 1630s prior to a possible emigration to escape the policies of the Caroline government.77Add. 31116, p. 198. It seems likely that Saybrook would have been his destination had things come to that, and that the renunciation of his office under the crown may have been an aspect of a planned final break with English public life. In the event, the decision taken by the king in December 1639 to summon a new Parliament transformed his prospects.

Pym and the Short Parliament

Pym’s activities in the 1630s were conducted almost entirely within the framework of an interlocking network of associates, patrons and clients at whose apex were Lords Pym, Saye and Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick. But it was to another peer, Francis Russell†, 4th earl of Bedford, that Pym had looked for electoral patronage in the previous four Parliaments, and upon whom Pym now relied for a seat in the new assembly. Bedford obliged, and Pym was returned again without challenge for Tavistock, where he took the second seat after Bedford’s heir, William Russell*. There is no evidence that he visited Tavistock in either this or the next Parliament. He was a highly experienced parliament-man, had a clear analysis of the ills of the nation and was in a strong position to influence the course of this Parliament, not having been compromised by the disorders on the final day of the last one. He took a commanding role in the Parliament from its opening on 16 April. His opening speeches that day focused on the need to distinguish between what should be dealt with by committees, and what by the whole House, arguing that matters beyond doubt should not be delegated to select bodies of Members. He himself was named to the privileges committee, listed first after the knights and baronets.78CJ ii. 4a; Procs. Short Parl. 143; Aston’s Diary, 5; Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy (Worcs. Hist. Soc. xxv), 51. His pronouncements on election procedure were evidently intended as authoritative, as when he put down Peter Balle* on whether serving mayors could be returned as parliamentary burgesses.79Procs. Short Parl. 144, 145. Pym was named to a total of 15 committees in this three-week Parliament.

On the 17th, after the Speaker had reported speeches by the king and Lord Keeper John Finch†, Pym moved that these reports be treated as made by the king’s special command, not as precedent: the Speaker’s primary function, he argued, was as the ears of the House.80Aston’s Diary, 7. He then ‘brake the ice’, in Edward Hyde’s* phrase, with a two-hour speech, attributing many ills of the state to the absence of Parliaments.81Clarendon, Hist. i. 174. It was an address that ranged over the main headings of grievances, which Pym in effect listed, leaving ‘not anything untouched’, in the words of a contemporary commentator: encroachments on parliamentary liberties; religion; secular affairs of state and liberty to enjoy property. He was able credibly to review the events of the last Parliament, comparing the forced dissolution to an abuse of a dying man.82Procs. Short Parl. 148-57; Add. 28000, f. 2. On religion, he itemised evidence of the rising tide of popery: increasing numbers of priests; the prevalence of popish ceremonies; the activities of the court of high commission; and the insinuation of popish counsels in government.83Procs. Short Parl. 150-2. Under the heading of ‘civil government’, he dilated on unparliamentary taxes and the king’s various revenue-raising projects such as knighthood fines; on monopolies, and on the readiness of the law courts to countenance these oppressions. He concluded by showing how these abuses were as prejudicial to the king as to subjects, by denying the king his subsidies, by diminishing the country’s standing abroad, by driving a wedge between king and people and – here doubtless speaking with his own recent plans in mind – driving people overseas to the colonies, to the detriment of the public good.84Procs. Short Parl. 152-6. He concluded with a call for a remonstrance and petition from both Houses.85Procs. Short Parl. 156-7.

In this speech, Pym generally avoided attacks on individuals, even though all who heard him took his address to be an assault on ‘corruptions of judges, star chamber, council table, the king’.86Procs. Short Parl. 216-9, 234-5, 245, 254-60; Aston’s Diary, 8-10. The French ambassador took note only of its religious content, on innovations, high commission, numbers of priests in London, especially at royal palaces, and correspondence between Rome and the English.87PRO31/3/72, f. 144. To expatiate at such great length and so directly against the pillars of the government, so early in the Parliament, when its temper was yet to be determined, involved a massive gamble on Pym’s part. Some feared his plain speaking would misfire, but when he resumed his seat after two hours, ‘all cried out, A good motion.’88Procs. Short Parl. 234. A modern authority has deemed his speech ‘perhaps the most successful of his life’.89Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 106. The evolution of the speech from oration to text in print and manuscript makes it difficult to recover the precise words he spoke that day: the metaphors from physics and astronomy may have been an aspect of a polishing for publication, probably by Pym himself.90Procs. Short Parl. 300-2. Even if so, it was doubtless a well-crafted address.

The speech constructed a momentum that carried over into subsequent proceedings, with Members such as Edward Kyrton nominating Pym to be the draftsman of the remedies for the grievances he had delineated.91Aston’s Diary, 11. In the following days, Members who were not natural allies of Pym, such as Sir John Strangways, spoke to affirm his comments on the function of Parliament in protecting liberties.92Procs. Short Parl. 159. Pym commanded the committee on the violation of parliamentary privilege by the crown in 1629 (18 Apr.), declaring from the outset what he took the purpose of the committee to be, pressing points on the role of the Speaker to resolution, asking his colleagues to decide on whether they wanted to send for records, and confidently asserting what rules of the House governed their discussion.93CJ ii. 6b; Aston’s Diary, 13, 14, 15, 17. Though he was not in the conventional sense a scholar, procedural and antiquarian arguments were deployed by Pym on a number of occasions to promote the defence of liberties. He queried the way the lord chief justice of king’s bench, Sir John Bramston, had brought in parliamentary records, waved away the suggestion of the lord treasurer, William Juxon, that the Commons should scrutinize the privy council register, and instead moved that sheriffs should be asked to produce letters sent them by the council (21 Apr.).94Aston’s Diary, 22, 24. This was an early indication of what was to be a major dimension of Pym’s tactical sense: the preference for appeals to a wider constituency as against internalizing the debate in Westminster. When the Lords requested a conference on 22 April, he prescribed the duration and procedures for the event, and prescribed the numbers to be involved.95Aston’s Diary, 30. On the 27th, he moved that former orders should be consulted on admitting assistants from the Lords, and strove to prevent the withering of a motion on privilege, based on analysis of the lord keeper’s records.96Aston’s Diary, 66, 68. Consulting records was again the nostrum proposed in Pym’s intervention on 2 May, where differences between the Houses called for a resolution.97Procs. Short Parl. 188.

Pym did not shy away from judgments on disputed elections which came before the privileges committee. Of the three electoral cases on which his opinion is recorded, in debates on two of them he spoke critically of participants who were known sympathisers of the government, Sir Nicholas Slanning* and Sir John Suckling*.98Aston’s Diary, 48,120, 150. The use of committee procedure as a tool for political leverage was evident in Pym’s support for the motion of Alexander Rigby I* that when a petition was appropriate for several committees, only one should deal with it (21 Apr.).99Aston’s Diary, 22. ‘Every petition presents innovation in religion’ declared Pym on 22 April, which led him into a speech denouncing Convocation, which had already been slighted by the Lords.100Aston’s Diary, 31. He argued that the assembly of clergy had no powers to bind the laity without the assent of the two Houses of Parliament, because they derived no authority from either the pope or the archbishop of Canterbury. It was now the role of the Commons to restrain Convocation’s power. His attack was legalistic, and he was supported by, indeed probably armed in argument by, Oliver St John*, like Pym in the circle of the 4th earl of Bedford and one of Pym’s principal associates in the Commons.101Procs. Short Parl. 168; Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy, 52. Pym cited medieval statute on the limitations of Convocation, and his speech led to an appeal from the Commons to examine its documentary basis. On 24 April, in what had from his first appearance in 1621 been one of Pym’s trademarks as a performer in the Commons, he brought in the king’s commission to Convocation, which he said had been supplied him by Robert Holborne*. While admitting that Convocation itself could hardly be described as a religious ‘innovation’, since it had been the subject of complaint since the early years of James I, he argued that its work had tended to foster innovation and ‘great confusion in church and kingdom’.102Aston’s Diary, 50, 52; Procs. Short Parl. 175, 201, 236. When the petition by the Commons against innovations was being planned, he counselled against loading it with detail, arguing instead for buttressing the case with prime examples. He returned to the attack on Convocation the following day, pressing the matter as requiring an urgent resolution by the House.103Aston’s Diary, 54, 61, 62.

Pym brooked no attempt by his opponents to blunt or divert his message. When William Dell*, the secretary of Archbishop William Laud, argued that the Commons had no reason to complain of innovations in the church, he went on to allege that a Member (meaning but not naming Pym) had said that Protestant churches overseas would sever ties with England because the nation was going over to Catholicism. In versions of his 17 April speech, Pym had apparently implied just that.104Procs. Short Parl. 151. But Pym rounded on him, forced a reluctant Dell to name him as the Member in question, and then completed his humiliation by intervening graciously, to moderate his reprimand (22 Apr). Pym was abetted in this by another of his allies in the Saye-Brooke circle, John Hampden.105CJ ii. 9a; Procs. Short Parl. 168-9, 246; CSP Dom. 1640, p. 39. This episode did not damage Pym’s centrality to proceedings in any way; indeed it was reported within a few days of the Parliament’s commencement that ‘Mr Pym gets the reputation to be as wise as Solomon’.106Procs. Short Parl. 237. Ralph Brownrigg, the husband of his niece and master of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, was invited to preach at Parliament’s fast day, with one of Pym’s allies, Sir Thomas Barrington*, providing lay assistance.107Procs. Short Parl. 237; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 110. Beyond the question of innovations, Pym’s views on religion were conservative. He wanted to subject the church authorities to the rule of law, which presumably included canon law, but supported the Book of Common Prayer, rejecting the possibility of religious diversity as destroying ‘unity and uniformity’.108Aston’s Diary, 91; Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy, 53. He strongly disapproved of religious images, particularly those in cathedrals, for which he could allow no justification.109Aston’s Diary, 93. A sermon preached five years earlier by William Beale, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge, provided Pym with material for an object lesson on the country’s religious ills. Putting into practice his preference for focusing on particular cases, and with a portion of Beale’s sermon in his hand as he spoke, he dissected it in minute detail (1 May). Pym claimed he had elevated altars and priests over pastors and ministers and had denigrated Parliaments for attempting to bind the king. Pym again took a risk with this, as Beale was a royal chaplain, but he suggested the House should beard the cleric in his den by sending a summons to his lodgings. His justification for the tactic was that the king should not be troubled about the matter.110Procs. Short Parl. 185, 242; Aston’s Diary, 112, 113. He judged the mood of the House well: a motion instead to refer the matter to committee fell, in the first division of the Parliament, by 109 votes.111CJ ii. 18a. This was another of Pym’s speeches to be noted in reports of proceedings.112Harl. 6411, f. 57.

On 22 April, both Houses sought a conference on Convocation.113CJ ii. 9b; Aston’s Diary, 30. Pym was forward in advising on procedures. The following day, the committee of the whole House resolved to consult the Lords on the whole range of grievances. On that occasion, and resisting pressure from the king and his ministers, Pym declared himself in favour of passing legislation to remedy grievances before acceding to the king’s request for subsidies to meet the emergency in the north. He rejected comparisons between the current circumstances and those in the last of James’s Parliaments, since his son had not taken the Houses into his counsels about his plans. He was asking here for the king to explain his strategy, pushing as far as he dare against Charles’s wish for no discussion of the Scots.114Procs. Short Parl. 173; P. Donald, An Uncounselled King (Cambridge, 1990), 234-5. He moved to petition the king that there be no dissolution until subsidies were granted, meaning until grievances were addressed (24 Apr.), but when St John argued for annual Parliaments, Pym spoke to kill the idea, probably judging that this would fail to win the support of the House, even though it had been mentioned as an ideal in his 17 April oration.115Aston’s Diary, 58, 59; Procs. Short Parl. 155. Pym was prominent in the inter-House conference, reporting back to the Commons on 25 April.116CJ ii. 10a, 12a,b. He was evidently keen to work with the Lords, citing precedents for co-operation between the Houses and doubtless aware that he could rely on his Providence Company allies there.117Aston’s Diary, 57.

On the 27th, despite Pym’s sense that the fate of the Parliament depended on collaborative working, his position on the inseparability of supply from redress became interwoven with a dispute with the Lords. He seconded a motion by Sir Walter Erle that the Lords had encroached on the Commons’ privilege.118Procs. Short Parl. 178-9. The following day, the House had to choose a representative to go to the Lords, to present their case. St John was first asked, but declined on the grounds of his lack of experience. On Hampden’s motion, Pym took up the brief himself, written for him on a side of folio, and on notice of half an hour spoke to the Lords in the structured way expected of such addresses. ‘All this to be done speechwise in so honourable an assembly, he did it well to admiration’, and both secretaries of state joined in their thanks.119Procs Short Parl. 83-4, 239; Aston’s Diary, 79, 80, 81-2, 82-4, 182-4. This was the second of Pym’s speeches of the Parliament to be widely noticed and copied, though this time not subsequently printed. What was so difficult about the assignment, and makes the congratulations even of the king’s ministers so remarkable, was that it was a rebuke to the Lords. Pym evidently embellished the skeleton address he was provided with, but the message remained clear. The Lords had violated the privileges of the lower House by voting that supply should have precedence. The peers had to concede that the subsidy was entirely a matter for the Commons, and so were in breach of the Commons’ privilege by their pronouncement. Furthermore, in a second breach, they had referred to proceedings in the Commons without official notification from that House.120CJ ii. 15b; LJ iv. 73a; Procs. Short Parl. 312-3. On the 29th, the Commons placed three heads of its petition on grievances in the hands of individual Members, Pym being chosen to lead on religion. In debate on this, he added the threat from popery to his list of grievances, reporting how he had heard that mass was said at Oxford, the vice-chancellor unable to challenge it because it was sanctioned ‘from above’, another bold allusion to the court or to Laud.121CJ ii. 16a; Procs. Short Parl. 182. At a conference on 1 May, the Lords protested that they had not intended to encroach on the Commons’ privileges, that their information on proceedings in the lower House had come from the king, and that the Houses needed to unite in the face of ‘public calamities that menace the ruin and overthrow of this famous and renowned monarchy’.122LJ iv. 75b-77a. Pym evidently led for the Commons in response, making a ‘very pathetical’, probably eirenic, contribution.123A Perfect Diurnall no. 322 (24 Sept.-1 Oct. 1649), sig. Aii (E.533.13).

The lord keeper had made it clear in his opening speech on 13 April that the king expected subsidies before grievances would be considered, and Charles had sent messages which had not deviated from that position. On 2 May, in the committee of the whole House, Pym recognised that the king demanded an answer, but urged ‘a resolute one’. The end of Ship Money would not be sufficient: the people were as oppressed by coat and conduct money. He wanted a Declaration that no charges or impositions would be levied without consent in Parliament. It was the king’s undoubted right to make war without counsel, but the Commons would not be bound to support any such war unless the king took the House into his confidence. His advice was that the Commons should stick to presenting the main grievances first; and tell the king that supply would be forthcoming as long as it did not imply a breach of parliamentary privilege. This formula would serve as a reminder to the king that the Commons had been kept in the dark about relations with Scotland. Attempts by the ministers to lead the Commons to a vote on the supply question failed.124Procs. Short Parl. 190, 192, 207.

Conflict was building to a crisis, which duly arrived on 4 May. The king raised the stakes by announcing the abolition of Ship Money in return for 12 subsidies over three years. Some grievances would be redressed immediately, others at Michaelmas, an announcement that seemed to suggest he was about to prorogue the Parliament, if not dissolve it. Pym, probably the first to speak after the lord treasurer had delivered this message, called for a committee of the whole House, and again resisted compliance. What he called ‘pretence of necessity’ could not justify acceptance of the king’s offer, because it would create a greater danger even than Ship Money had been. While he had been willing, indeed keen, since 30 April to allow counsel from the king to be heard, and conceded that Ship Money could be an ingredient in a settlement, he urged that the king should receive, by way of the reply that he had demanded, a full petition of grievances, to be sent up to the Lords for their approval. He seems to have wanted to push the question of Ship Money to a vote on its legality, probably valuing the opinion of king’s counsel as tacit recognition of Parliament’s authority as a court of law, and must have been confident on the support of the peers. Pym’s opponents in the Commons wanted an unambiguous response to the king’s request, to uncouple supply from grievances, while Pym’s suggestion of a framing of heads of grievances implied the delay which resulted. When the majority of the Lords refused to go along with the petition of grievances, Pym’s reliable allies in that House were revealed as numbering 25 out of 135.125CJ ii. 19a,b; LJ iv. 79a,b; Aston’s Diary, 128, 136, 139, 140, 143, 144; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 116.

The following day, his limited reserve of patience exhausted, the king dissolved the Parliament. Had he not done so, Pym probably would have disclosed to the House, with typical dramatic gesture, the Declaration of the Scots Covenanters to the English. During the Parliament, Pym had had very little to say about Scotland, beyond concurring with the consensus that the bishops’ wars were a threat to security. Had he been able to read this declaration, it is likely that he would have tried to advance the Commons towards open support of the Scots, noting their declaration that ‘Duty obligeth us to love England as ourselves. Your grievances are ours; the preservation or ruin of religion and liberties is common to both nations’.126CSP Dom. 1640, p. 144; Information from the Scottish Nation (1640). That the opposition group in both Houses, of which Pym was a prominent member in the Commons, the so-called ‘junto’, had been in regular contact with the Scots long before 1640, and during the course of the Parliament, is just as likely.127Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 122. A little over a week after the dissolution, it was reported that Pym and his key collaborators in both Houses, Warwick, Saye, Brooke, Erle and Hampden, had been arrested. A trunk full of papers was taken away by the officers of the privy council.128CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 152-3; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 261. The only matter which would seem to have justified this heavy-handed search was a suspicion of treasonous correspondence with the Scots. Nothing significant was found, and the Providence Island group continued to meet, doubtless partly on colonial business but also on affairs of state.129Adamson, Noble Revolt, 54. These meetings continued through the summer, monitored by the government. A junto meeting involving Bedford, the 3rd earl of Essex (Robert Devereux), Saye, Brooke, Pym, John Hampden and William Russell* was noted at the end of August.130SP16/464, f. 98.

At the same time, a petition of 12 peers was written at Bedford House, signed by associates of Pym but confidently said to have been drafted by him and by St John.131‘Pprs. relating to the delinquency of Lord Savile’ ed. J. J. Cartwright, Camden Miscellany viii. 2; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 149. The petition called for another Parliament, and ranged over the ills outlined in Pym’s speech of 17 April, with only one notable addition among the grievances listed: ‘the great mischiefs ... if the intentions which have been credibly reported, of bringing in Irish and foreign forces, shall take effect’.132S.R. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents (Oxford 1906), 135. This was an allusion to a rumour that Thomas Wentworth†, earl of Strafford, had advised the king that an Irish army could be used to quell opposition to the government in England. Pym had come by some notes written in May by Sir Henry Vane I* and taken from his study by his son, Sir Henry Vane II*. The younger Vane’s later account of these transactions was that Pym had entered his study while he was transcribing his father’s notes.133CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 112-13; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 287. They described Strafford’s counsel to the king to bring an Irish army into ‘this kingdom’. Much would later hang on this ambiguity about which kingdom the earl had in mind. It must have been this act of collusion between Vane junior and Pym, perhaps involving Vane senior too, that had informed the content of the 12 peers’ petition. Recent commentators seem agreed that Pym’s instructions to William Jessop* on 3 September about the copying and publishing of a document probably refer to publication of the petition, a strategy which bears all the hallmarks of Pym’s thinking.134Lancs. RO, DD HU 46/21; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 149; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 73.

It goes without saying that Pym and the other junto members in both Houses were keen to see another Parliament summoned, and that their best guarantors of a summons were the Scots. Their army had invaded England, plausibly with the active connivance of at least some junto members, and the English critics of the king were certainly more in sympathy with Covenanting Protestantism than with Laudian Arminianism. Pym was assured of a seat at Tavistock, and when the king conceded that a Parliament was indeed inevitable, he was returned again with Bedford’s heir. For the next three years, the palace of Westminster was virtually Pym’s home. Some statistics provide a crude measure of his busyness. By October 1643, in cases where the House of Lords had requested a conference, Pym had reported back to the Commons 146 times. Over the same period, when the Commons had requested a conference with the Lords, Pym had managed the resulting conference on 191 occasions. Setting aside interactions with the Lords, and counting nominations to committees that were accountable solely to the Commons, he chalked up (had anyone been counting) 226 until his health failed in October 1643. Conversely, there were some parliamentary tasks that Pym never performed: notably, he was never a teller in a single division.135CJ ii, iii, passim. And despite his ubiquity as a committeeman, only 18 of the committees to which he was named were tasked with producing legislative drafts (intended as acts or ordinances) subject to readings in the House and transmission to the Lords.136CJ ii. 60a, 80a, 84b, 115a, 129a, 197a, 265b, 268a, 280b, 305b, 316b, 414b, 533b, 563a, 601b; iii. 2a, 164a, 178a.

Early months of the Long Parliament

There is evidence that Pym prepared assiduously for the opening of this Parliament, and was intent on pressing home the advantages he thought gained from the last one. Hyde later alleged that a few days beforehand, Pym insisted to him that

they must now be of another temper than they were the last Parliament ... they must not only sweep the house clean below, but must pull down all the cobwebs which hung in the top and corners, that they might not breed dust and make a foul house hereafter.137Clarendon, Hist. i. 222.

He visited Sir Henry Vane II early in October and was lent the original of the paper Vane had taken in May from the study of his father, Sir Henry Vane I. Later that month he assured the French ambassador that there was to be an assault on Spanish interests in England (surely with Catholic priests in mind).138Procs LP, iii. 500; PRO31/3/72, f. 295. Both exchanges suggest that the major lines of Pym’s strategy in these early days, aimed against Strafford and against the popish interest, were in preparation.

When the Parliament opened, Pym resumed the role of a parliamentary elder – ‘the great Parliament man’ – that he had carved out for himself in the abortive assembly earlier in the year.139Diurnall Occurrences (1641), 7 (E.523.1). At 56 years of age and now with experience of six Parliaments behind him, he was unlikely to face a challenge to his seniority. Among his close relatives in the Commons were Francis Rous, John Upton I, Anthony Nicoll and from February 1642 his son, Charles Pym. Sir Thomas Barrington, Sir William Masham and John Hampden all called him their ‘brother’, quite possibly because of kinship links, through Pym’s late wife, between Sir Thomas Barrington’s mother and the Hooke family.140Eg. 2643, ff. 5,14; Eg. 2645, ff. 29, 205, 293; Hotham Pprs. 54; Vis. Notts. 1569, 1614 (Harl. Soc. iv.), 118. Sir John Clotworthy’s* sister was married to Upton’s brother, giving Pym a kinship tie with Clotworthy, and access to intelligence on politics and opposition to the earl of Strafford in Ireland.141W.H. Upton, Upton Family Recs. (1893), 13, 110. If he was related by marriage to Barrington and Masham, then he stood in the same relationship to Sir Gilbert Gerard, Oliver St John and Richard Knightley. Sir Arthur Hesilrige was familiar with him as a regular house guest. By kinship through the Rous family he was more distantly related to John Northcote* and Hugh Pollarde*. Among the trustees of his estate was Sir Benjamin Rudyerd*; parties to the marriage settlement of his son were John Bampfylde* and William Strode I*.142Som. RO, DD/BW/2/224, 230; DD/BR/ely 1/3. His associates in the Lords had been long bound to him by ties of business, colonial enterprise and opposition politics, both religious and secular. His seniority and advantageous connections ensured he was again named to the privileges committee, and it was because of his arguments that the House resolved to add Irish affairs to the list of the standing committees of the whole House: religion, grievances, courts of justice, trade.143CJ ii. 21a; D’Ewes (N), 3. Pym’s line was that the Irish had the right to petition the English Commons. His position is less significant as suggesting genuine sympathy with problems in Ireland than as marking a first stage in the all-encompassing campaign which Pym was to spearhead against Strafford. The matter was the subject of the first division of the Parliament. Pym probably intended a select committee rather than this outcome, to judge from the names of the tellers, but it ensured that Strafford’s case was well to the fore of business.144CJ ii. 21b; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 97.

His first major intervention on the floor of the House came on 7 November, when his was one of a number of ‘set speeches’ reciting grievances.145Diurnall Occurrences (1641), 1 (E.523.1). His was comparable with his contribution on 17 April. It was another tour de force survey of the country’s ills.146Procs. LP, i. 35-6, 38, 43, 46. The plots of papists, especially from Spain, were outlined, and according to some accounts, Pym conjured an image of a sinister quadruped, whose four feet were outrages ecclesiastical, political, judicial and military, taking steps destructive of the commonwealth. There were new dimensions to his critique, largely familiar though its overall shape would have been to his audience.147Procs. LP, i. 39-40. The king’s advisers were charged with deliberately driving a wedge between England and the Protestant Scots, who were natural allies: ‘the partition wall is only unity’.148Bodl. Clarendon 19, f. 84v. They were accused of planning to keep the king short of legitimately-raised taxes; of inserting Catholics into key position in the army and of bringing in an army from another, popish, nation. In some versions of the speech Ireland and Spain were explicitly linked in plotting. There was an allusion to a ‘foot’ that went ‘underground’ to set up popish colleges.149Bodl. Clarendon 19, f. 84v; Procs LP, i. 39-40. Plenty, therefore, to reinforce earlier arguments, but new details to refresh the message. The speech was noted by all the diarists, though with quite wide variations, and Pym seems not to have identified any of the evil counsellors by name.

The planning two days later (9 Nov.) of the fast day provided his first visit to the Lords and an opportunity to deploy procedure to attack papists with some vigour. Pym was in charge of arrangements for the fast, and moved that care be taken to weed out Protestants from papists at communion, thus implying Catholic infiltration at Westminster. He was first-named to the committee to oversee this, and second to another on disarming popish recusants. Some diarists report that his motion extended to removing Catholics from the House and from London.150CJ ii. 23b, 24a, 24b; D’Ewes (N), 17, 18; Procs. LP, i. 65, 67, 71. Again no names were mentioned, but on the 10th, there was a change of register in his rhetoric. He demanded to know who had appointed John Cosin to be dean of Peterborough, and urged that the authors of the war in the north be identified and made to pay for the army there and any depredations it caused.151D’Ewes (N), 21, 23; Procs. LP, i. 87. This move from the general to the particular was completed on the 11th, when his first speeches of the day were to excoriate a priest who turned out to be resident in the household of the queen mother.152D’Ewes (N), 25; Procs. LP, i. 102, 105. A motion against Strafford’s secretary, Sir George Radcliffe, was then brought in by Pym’s associate, Sir John Clotworthy, probably to test the water for what was to follow; but it was Pym who urged that Strafford be asked whether he had advised bringing in an Irish army. A conference with the Lords seems to have been postponed by Pym’s leaving the chamber, only to be reinstated on his return; and after a number of interventions by him on innovations and reports of armed activity in the provinces, seemingly calculated like the locking of the chamber doors to heighten an atmosphere of tension and anxiety, the long day culminated in Pym’s delivering at the bar of the House of Lords a charge, brief in extent, against Strafford in the name of the Commons.153CJ ii. 26b; LJ iv. 88b; D’Ewes (N), 25, 26; Procs. LP, i. 99, 111, 104, 106; Clarendon, Hist. i. 219n; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 104-8. The case put by Lucius Cary*, Viscount Falkland, for a Commons committee not an impeachment, was brushed aside. Whether or not Strafford had just alighted from his coach after his journey from Yorkshire, or whether he had in fact had two days to unpack his cases in London and was at home unwell, there seems no reason to doubt that Pym, moving hither and yon at Westminster and sedulously building a momentum, was central in determining the moment to accuse Strafford. The urgency may have been a response to rumours that the earl was about to accuse Saye and the other opposition leaders of encouraging the Scots to invade England, a counter-charge of high treason.154Clarendon, Hist. i. 225-8; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 221; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 100.

With Strafford under restraint, Pym spoke in the Commons the following day to prepare the ground for proceedings against the earl. It may have been his kinsman Clotworthy who had brought in the motion against Radcliffe (11 Nov.), but it was Pym who moved he should be sent for as a delinquent (12 Nov.).155D’Ewes (N), 31. A day later, it was noted how the solicitor-general, Sir Edward Herbert I*, brought in articles against Radcliffe ‘with great clearness’, an ominous sign of how willing the government was to bend to opposition demands.156Procs. LP, i. 128, 130, 132134; Add. 31954, f. 181. Nearly a week then elapsed before he spearheaded the official proceedings against Radcliffe’s master. Over a period of four days from 18 November, Pym managed the relationship with the Lords on Strafford’s case, with a successful delivery of seven articles of ‘treasons of the highest nature’ in the Lords on the 25th.157CJ ii. 30b, 34b, 35a, 35b, 36a, 36b; HMC Cowper, ii. 262. He took a message to the Lords (18 Nov. but recorded 20 Nov.), asking them to examine witnesses on oath, strictly separately, but with Commons men present: ‘Treason … for the most part walks in the dark’, he added.158CJ ii. 30b; LJ iv. 94a; PRO31/3/72, f. 326. As before, Pym spoke on various occasions to build a groundswell in favour of the impeachment. His was the first motion on the 19th about the examination of witnesses, and he spoke authoritatively about attainder records. On the 23rd, it was he who moved to put into execution the existing laws against recusants, and who proposed the conference which took place on the 24th. On the 25th, the day he took the articles to the Lords, he successfully argued in favour of a conference as preferable to the bar of the Lords as the format for the presentation, probably because of the opportunities it afforded for discussion and persuasion; the option of a speech at the bar he denigrated as a ‘dumb show’.159Procs. LP, i. 189, 191, 250, 251, 269, 273-4, 295; LJ iv. 97a-b. Very unusually until this point, the text of Pym’s address to the Commons before he went to the upper House was recorded in direct speech in the Journal, in the hand not of the clerk but of his assistant, John Rushworth*. On his return, he was thanked for his work.160Procs. LP, i. 290; CJ ii. 36a. His speech in the Lords was published as a separate, with his address to the Lords (31 Dec.) on Sir George Radcliffe, the first of his utterances to be disseminated in print.161Two Speeches made by John Pymm (E.196.27, E.196.28).

Pym’s success in the Lords disposed him towards further opportunities to exercise his persuasive powers there. He spoke in the House (27 Nov.) to support the idea of a free conference, valuing the freedom of speech implied in that format. Over the next week he worked to build the case for witnesses to be examined by the Lords in the presence of Members of the Commons, seemingly doing what he could to answer procedural queries raised in both Houses, and by 1 December was ready to provide the peers with a list of witnesses the lower House wished to summon.162CJ ii. 38a, 39b, 42b; Procs. LP, i. 340, 342, 355, 358, 360, 375, 402. He ensured that he himself was of the committee of ten, composed of equal numbers from each House, to hear the examinations (4 Dec.).163Procs. LP, i. 459. It was Pym’s work that ensnared Radcliffe (9 Dec.), sending him to prison in the face of some procedural objections; his speech to the Lords on Radcliffe’s offences (31 Dec.) was classic Pym, depicting in binary terms the relationship between Strafford and his secretary as ‘author ... superior planet ... haughtiness and fierceness’ in alignment with ‘instrument ... inferior planet ... baseness and servility’. Strafford was not a lawyer but Radcliffe was, Radcliffe’s own ‘more moderate’ nature suborned by a corrupt one.164CJ ii. 59b, 61a; Procs. LP, i. 526; D’Ewes (N), 190, 192, 193, 203; Stowe 424, ff. 173v, 174. The tone Pym was adopting towards Strafford by this point was in marked contrast to the sorrowful one of a month earlier, when he had expressed regret at the fall of one he had known long ‘by acts of friendship’.165Northcote Note Bk. 1.

As a sideshow to the impeachment of Strafford, Pym had also begun moves against Sir Francis Windebanke*. These had begun early in the Parliament (12 Nov.), when he had accused the secretary of state of freeing papists from prison, rejecting as a defence that the releases had been by verbal order of the king.166Procs. LP, i. 118. On 3 December, during the reading of a petition by one of the notable sufferers during the personal rule of the king, William Prynne*, and confident of his progress with the Strafford impeachment, Pym moved that Windebanke be brought before the House, unless he was actively occupied in the king’s business.167Procs. LP, i. 440, 444. Ostensibly, Windebanke was simply the first on the list of examinees in the Strafford case, but the audacity of summoning another leading minister of the king was not lost on observers.168HMC Cowper, ii. 267. Pym’s method of targeting an opponent by progressing from general to particular was evident in the subject of religious policy. From the time of his rather disingenuous demand early in the Parliament to know who had appointed Arminian churchmen and his complaint that ‘a man would think we lived rather in Turkey than in Christendom’ (7 Nov.), he was actively pursuing a policy of reversing over a decade of policy in the English church. He called for the existing laws against Catholics to be enforced, and for papists to be made to wear special distinguishing clothing (23 Nov.); for a new bill to prosecute recusants (28 Nov.). He promoted a motion to offer relief to puritan ministers to whom the pulpit was forbidden (30 Nov.), while demanding retribution against the ‘contrivers’ of such a policy. Rather than make redress in individual cases, he wanted all examples to be comprehended in a single remedy. A committee on star chamber and high commission had been named on 3 December and included Pym, who brought petitions to it from victims of Laudianism (11 Dec.). He urged restraint on the illegality of the Canons, preferring that the Lords should order burning of the documents and punishing the authors (14 Dec), but was first named to the committee on the topic (16 Dec).169Procs. LP, i. 36, 252, 357, 373, 377, 382, 591; CJ ii. 44b, 52a. By this point he was in range of his next target, and on 16 December made a speech ‘at large’, arguing that Laud as well as Strafford should be impeached. The timing of the denunciation of Laud was determined by the charge against him delivered by the Scots to the Lords on 14 December. In some versions of his speech, Pym included Lord Keeper John Finch† in his denunciations, perfectly credibly since he had recently called for charges to be brought against him too. It seems inconceivable that such a speech would have been delivered had he not been confident of progress in the Strafford case and of his support from the junto in the Lords.170Procs. LP, i. 513, 624, 625; Donald, Uncounselled King, 280. On the 18th, on Pym’s motion, Denzil Holles took a message to the Lords impeaching the archbishop, and despite the procedural objections of Sir Simonds D’Ewes*, Pym’s nominee, Hampden, took up a message the following day on the case of Mathew Wren, bishop of Ely.171Procs. LP, i. 659, 669. Some differences were noted between Pym and St John, however, on the Finch case. Pym expressed himself willing to hear the lord keeper’s defence before articles were sent to the Lords, but St John, who had personal reasons to be hostile to Finch, wanted an immediate vote without any mitigating procedure (19 Dec.).172Add. 31954, f. 181v. When Finch did get a hearing (21 Dec.), Pym called early in the subsequent debate for a resolution to accuse Finch of treason, but on this occasion an evident lack of co-ordination between the Houses, not to mention a long and what some thought a risible speech by George Peard*, allowed the lord keeper to escape abroad.173Procs. LP, ii. 6, 8; Add. 31954, f. 181v.

Procedural arrangements had generally been useful to Pym in his interventions. Commissioners of the Scots were heard at a joint committee on the 17th, which the Lords noted would not be allowed as a precedent. As Pym reported the conference to the Commons on the 18th, he was able to maximise the damage inflicted by the proceedings on the reputations of both Strafford and Laud, and to dilate on their crimes, a spring-board for the impeachment of the cleric.174Procs. LP, i. 660-2; LJ iv. 111a, 111b-112a. Pym was as outspoken as any on the depredations and cost of armies in the north, but was keen to attribute blame to the king’s advisers.175Procs. LP, i. 80, 87. He was also actively exploiting the fiscal implications of the continuing confrontation there. Initially he was hostile to subsidy as the solution to the king’s problems. On 12 November he moved consideration of the question of supply to the army, but in the resulting debate the following day argued against any grant of subsidy in favour of local levies. The sum of £100,000 was agreed on 13 November, but what remained to be decided was the means of supply. When government ministers urged a speedy resolution, Pym was content to contribute points on detail (13, 19 Nov.), because the matter was of much less urgency to him than the Strafford impeachment.176Procs. LP, i. 131, 133, 140, 188; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 75; CJ ii. 28b. His chief interest was in maximising the degree of control the Commons could exert on any financial provision to the government. At a committee of the whole House on 16 November, he argued that City aldermen should be receivers of contributions from taxpayers in the counties, as a mechanism by which they might be repaid for advances to the government.177Procs. LP, i. 160. City financiers should be able to raise money on the security of the Commons, and Pym was confident that the money-men would agree to this (21 Nov.); he had evidently been in discussions with them, as he urged they be troubled only with matters amenable to ‘smooth and easy passage’.178Procs. LP, i. 231; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 74. The effect of this mode of fiscal management would be a shift of power from the exchequer to the City and to Parliament itself.

As late as 5 December he was evidently still hostile to the idea of subsidy, preferring successfully to move that the House should rise rather than vote on the question.179Procs. LP, i. 473. On 10 December, many Members but ‘especially Mr Pym’ argued against any procedure that re-opened the question of how much to grant, and how.180D’Ewes (N), 135. On that day, however, Parliament finally voted two subsidies. The grant of £100,000 was withdrawn, a direct rejection of Pym’s urgings that such a volte-face was ‘contrary to all former precedents’.181CJ ii. 49a; D’Ewes (N), 135; M. Jurkowski, C.L. Smith, D. Crook, Lay Taxes in Eng. and Wales 1188-1688 (Kew, 1998), 190-1. The following day, Pym reported that he had been asked to attend a meeting of commissioners for a treaty between England and Scotland, where the plight of the resource-starved Scots army was made clear. He subsequently argued for realism in calculating the extent of the government’s financial needs, and from ‘present necessity’ concurred with the grant of two further subsidies on the 23rd.182Procs. LP, i. 568, 596; Northcote Note Bk. 106-8. However, when the bill received royal approval (24 Feb. 1641), it was evident that Pym’s earlier proposal that the money be paid to the hands of parliamentary commissioners had been adopted. He might have cited as a precedent the subsidies granted in the 1624 Parliament, when a small number of such commissioners were appointed, but the 1641 act created a commission of 48 from the two Houses, with Pym named second after Holles from the Commons.183SR iv. 1261; v. 78. By this means the mechanism for raising subsidies was subjected to much greater control by the dominant opposition group in Parliament of which Pym was a prominent member.

Pym was generally careful to be seen as constructive in matters relating to the king’s finances, and was certainly not an adherent of the view that the king needed to be kept short of money. The regularizing of collections of tonnage and poundage, so that it be subjected again to parliamentary grant, had been a major topic in the Parliament dissolved in 1629, and now Pym, acting as a spokesman for the group surrounding the earl of Bedford, was reported to have promised that a settlement of tonnage and poundage would make the English king the ‘richest ... in Christendom’.184Diurnall Occurrences (1641), 7 (E.523.1); Clarendon, Hist. i. 281. The purpose of this particular tax was always understood, in parliamentary discourse at least, to be in support of the navy. Pym was one of a number of Members who moved to further the bill of tonnage and poundage (27 Nov.), but when he did so was immediately and effectively opposed by St John and Sir Walter Erle. As both men were usually close associates of his, the possibility of a collusive postponement seems plausible, motivated by a confidence that the mood of the House favoured redress of grievances before any grant.185Procs. LP, i. 337; Diurnall Occurrences (1641), 7 (E.523.1); S. Lambert, ‘Opening of the Long Parl.’, HJ xxvii. 270; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 144-5. Immediately before this exchange, Pym had successfully closed down discussion on Ship Money, on the grounds that it had already been judged illegal.186Northcote Note Bk. 11; Procs. LP, i. 336; Diurnall Occurrences (1641), 7 (E.523.1). On the day the extra two subsidies were voted (23 Dec.), he successfully moved that funding the navy should be debated on 29 December. When the debate took place, a patently inadequate account by officials of the government’s income and expenditure led him to propose that in the interests of the navy, outlay from customs receipts be withheld until Parliament had settled the king’s revenue in its entirety.187Procs. LP, ii. 36, 53; Northcote Note Bk. 114.

Despite the sense of urgency felt by the whole House, the preamble of the subsidy bill was immediately in dispute (at length, over three hours) when the bill received a first reading on 1 January 1641, with Sir Simonds D’Ewes* taking issue with a wording that differed from the usual form. Pym’s contribution was to assert that at one time in the past the Lords and Commons sat together, which D’Ewes predictably considered unhistorical and detrimental to the ancient rights of the lower House. D’Ewes conceived the formula would alienate the Lords, but doubtless because of assurances received from his allies in the upper House, Pym demurred. Further antiquarian wrangling took place the following day, and it was Pym who brought it to a timely close, with his own original preference for the rubric still intact.188D’Ewes (N), 207-9. It may have been on 6 February 1641 that as a member of the committee on the subsidy he introduced the notion of parliamentary commissioners to manage the tax.189CJ ii. 80a. He himself was no antiquary, except where antiquarian points suited his political purpose, but through long experience of Parliaments was able to command respect on procedural matters. This was evident in debates on electoral cases, where his interventions were based on confident assertions of precedent.190Procs. LP, i. 22, 310, 316, 511, 515 Only in the case of Sir Robert Crane (8 Dec. 1640) did he over-reach himself, provoking a furious response from Sir John Strangways at his suggestion that Crane might have threatened electors at Sudbury.191Procs. LP, i. 511.

By the close of 1640, Pym had consolidated his position as a major figure in the Commons, having played a prominent role in reiterating and developing the grievances he had successfully articulated the previous April. He had continued to push for remedies for what was for him the preoccupying conspiracies of papists, and he had played a crucial part in successfully impeaching Strafford in the Lords, achieved by nimble footwork and impeccable timing. He had demonstrated adroit tactics in bringing charges against Radcliffe, Windebanke, Finch and above all, Laud. He had spoken constructively and seemingly with conciliatory intent on the subject of the king’s finances. He had been included in important committees, including one not recorded in the Journal, for licensing books (16 Dec.).192Add. 36913, f. 53. By this time he was probably settled into a sustained and prodigious daily application to work, from which he seemed to need only three hours’ sleep each night.193S. Marshall, Threnodia. The Churches Lamentation (1643), 36 (E.80.1). Yet his prominence and sway over the House at this point should not be exaggerated. He was certainly among the most popular men for inclusion in committees, though his total of 19 nominations to 30 December was marginally surpassed by John Maynard (23) and Harbottle Grimston (21). He had suffered reverses. His idea of badging Catholics, which reminded the French ambassador of the treatment of Jews in Italian states, had been firmly quashed.194Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 177. His line had been repudiated on a number of occasions, including by his own supporters. He had been forced swiftly to abandon his insistence that a special levy to relieve the forces in the north was non-negotiable, and had seen his quarry Finch slip away laughably easily. He was not in any sense leader of the House, and although he had already reported to the Commons on six committees with the Lords, he was yet to manage a conference which the Commons had requested. There were even rumours in the City by December that Pym had ‘grown cold in the business of the commonwealth’, and, as if to keep his options open, he had not abandoned his business interests in Bermuda.195Add. 31954, f. 181v; Catalogue Original Mss and Hist. Correspondence, 26.

Earlier in the day that Pym reported on his meeting with commissioners on the problems in the north (11 Dec. 1640), he had presented petitions from a number of victims of the court of high commission. They were referred to the committee already dealing with even more prominent martyrs of Laudianism, William Prynne* and Henry Burton, and he himself was a few days later the first nominee to the committee on yet another, John Bastwick. On the 11th, these cases must have been overshadowed by the presentation by Londoners of the root and branch petition. Responses in the House were varied, but Pym was much in support of it, and called for another reading. His recommendation that the names of signatories should be obscured was another illustration of his curious capacity to blend an instinct towards secrecy with appeals to the public, but the sufferings endured by those he sponsored are enough to explain his caution.196Northcote Note Bk. 52; Procs. LP, i. 565; CJ ii. 52b. He was first-named to the committee on the new Canons and who had devised them (16 Dec.), after successfully resisting those who thought this business should be interrupted to accommodate the Lords, who sought a conference on the Scots.197Northcote Note Bk. 72: Procs. LP, i. 622; CJ ii. 52a. Despite his hard line on papists, he objected to the proposals by Sir John Hotham* to impose not only the usual oaths of loyalty but also the religious test of taking holy communion on soldiers in the north, as a way of flushing out Catholic recusants (23 Dec).198Northcote Note Bk. 105. He was active in bringing proceedings against not only Laud but also the bishops of Bath and Wells, Norwich, Llandaff and St David’s.199CJ ii. 50a, 91a. He was a member of the body officially designated a sub-committee of the standing committee on religion, which became the committee on scandalous ministers (19 Dec. 1640).200CJ ii. 54b.

All this suggests a politician with the usual puritan sensibilities, but it has been argued that by February 1641 Pym was an advocate of abolishing the office of bishop, so that episcopal estates could be sequestered as part of a financial settlement for the crown.201Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 194. The root and branch petition had only listed religious grievances, stopping short of proposing remedies, and on 23 January 1641 Sir Robert Harley brought in a remonstrance of ministers, which fuelled further debate on church policy. The stakes were raised higher on the 25th, when a number of petitions demanding abolition of bishops were introduced. Pym did what he could to create parliamentary time for debate on the remonstrance (1 Feb.), by diverting the matter of Members who had subscribed the new Canons, proposing a fresh debate (in order to create time for the even more pressing matter of Anglo-Scots relations) and by moving for a select committee. Progress was wrecked by George Digby*, Lord Digby, who drew attention to ministers who disavowed the remonstrance.202Procs. LP, ii. 260, 272, 334-5. A week later, the root and branch petition was again under scrutiny, when Rudyerd, Holles and Harbottle Grimston were critical of bishops, but held back from demanding abolition. Pym’s contribution, noted by only a single diarist, was to move ‘some consideration ... of the king’s expense’. In the context of what others had said in the debate, if this was a call for episcopal estates to be confiscated it was running ahead of the general thinking in the House, and was not picked up by subsequent speakers, who all then focused on the procedural aspects of the petition.203Procs. LP, ii. 390-1; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 3. The number in the House in favour of reform rather than abolition was thought to be increasing.204Add. 64922, f. 4. This growing group did not include Oliver Cromwell, whose anti-episcopal views led to his facing calls to be reprimanded at the bar of the House (9 Feb. 1641), with Pym and Holles seeking to defend him from that humiliation.205Procs. LP, ii. 398-9.

Views in the Commons on episcopacy were inevitably conditioned to a significant extent by the attitude of the Covenanters, whose London commissioners on 24 February published a defensive and angry rebuttal of criticism from their own side that their own hostility to bishops had cooled. They were driven to reaffirm their commitment to abolition and to condign punishment on Strafford and Laud. This produced in the Commons what D’Ewes called ‘one of the greatest distempers in the House that ever I saw’, with Pym’s allies such as Hampden and William Strode I eager to brush it aside, and his opponents such as Strangways wanting it read, in order to exploit divisions between Scots and English critics of royal policy.206From the Commissioners of Scotland, 24 February 1640 (1641); Procs. LP, ii. 576. On 10 March, Pym was certainly in favour of removing bishops’ votes in the Lords, and provided constitutional reasons for his view, which included comparisons with the disenfranchised position of parish clergy relative to the Commons. He went on to compare the episcopal bench in the Lords with the biblical Jonah, who had boarded ship with his master’s consent, but was thrown overboard for disobedience. For defying their master, the king, ‘these bishops’ should be jettisoned from the ship of state. The reported phrase ‘these bishops’ tended to make particular the offence and the offenders, and his speech said nothing about the principle of episcopacy.207Procs. LP, ii. 697, 701, 703; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 105. Other testimony, albeit from 20 years later or more, suggests firmly that Pym and Hampden, not to mention Brooke, Saye and Warwick, were never abolitionists in principle, but were against what Edward Bagshawe* called ‘episcopapacy’.208Baxter Corresp. i. 409; Procs. LP, ii. 393; A Just Vindication (1660), 3-4 (E.1019.6); Clarendon, Hist. i. 309. It seems plausible that a moderate line on bishops might have emerged as a position in bargaining to secure a financial settlement and a new government, with Strafford and Laud as very public sacrifices that would command consent across the political spectrum.

Pym and the Strafford trial

However many frustrations he had experienced in these early months of the Parliament, and despite the necessary caveats surrounding notions of his primacy, Pym’s centrality to events in the Commons is beyond question. A man reported as ‘grown cold’ in December was a month later, according to a rumour picked up by the French ambassador, being touted as about to become chancellor of the exchequer. Montereul stressed the uncertainty of his intelligence, but the inclusion of the earls of Essex and Bedford in the rumour only gives credibility to the report, and even more significantly it was believed by others, who also reported meetings between Bedford, Saye, Pym and the queen.209PRO31/3/72, ff. 405-6; HMC Cowper, ii. 272; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 366, 367. This was a government-in-waiting, with Pym as a leading member of it. His reputation was resting to a large extent on his management of the case against Strafford. Pym has been credited with the invention of the ‘modern’ form of impeachment, by which the Commons were prosecutors and the Lords judges.210Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 280; HP Commons, 1604-29, i. 36-9. At the conference on 18 Nov. 1640 he had pressed for examinations to be taken on oath, in secret, with Commons-men present: to judge from copies made of his speech, evidently regarded in some quarters as a decisive intervention.211Merevale Hall, Dugdale MSS, HT 9/4.

It may well be the case that the junto members in the Lords were divided about the aims and purposes of the case against Strafford. Bedford may have been content with a debarring of Strafford from public life, while Warwick and Essex may have wanted him dead.212Adamson, Noble Revolt, 218. It is difficult to discern what Pym’s personal preferences may have been. Evidently, he worked tirelessly as a manager of proceedings against the earl, showing no willingness to excuse potential witnesses or allow any aspect of process to run into the sands, and some of the testimony involved serious diplomatic manoeuvres with profound political implications. By January 1641 Pym and fellow junto members had made sure that the Scots were reliable witnesses for the prosecution. He successfully moved for the committee which was to draft charges should now also consider reparations for victims of Strafford and Laud, and for the cessation of hostilities in the north to be prolonged, so the Scots could bring in as evidence their own allegations. At a conference with the Lords (4 Jan. 1641), Pym seemed to be acting as the guarantor of the Scots’ good faith.213Procs. LP, ii. 101, 104, 105. He brought to the attention of the House the sufferings under Strafford of some noblemen and gentry figures, to bolster the case for reparations and to feed further evidence to the committee of Commons-men appointed originally on 11 November to draw up the prosecution case. He himself was among them, but the greatest burden of legal work was later to fall upon Bulstrode Whitelocke*, a reliable ally of Pym’s.214CJ ii. 64a; Procs. LP, i. 94, ii. 123, 126-7, 173, 174; Whitelocke, Diary, 124. On the 13th, he had to ask for help reading the articles against the escapee Finch, so long were they, and two days later urged that the charges against Strafford needed to be ready for presentation to the Lords. In preparation for this, he successfully asked the Lords for access to examinations taken from witnesses, so the Commons could detail the charges, but under conditions of confidentiality.215Procs. LP, ii. 185, 199; CJ ii. 68b, 69a; Harl. 6424, f. 5v.

On 28 January, Pym reported to the Commons on the work that had gone into preparations for articles to be taken to the Lords. Members were given to understand how arduous and time-consuming the effort so far had been, and the clerk took over an hour to read the draft charge. Pym reported that only one article was still in need of evidential support, which waited on the arrival of witnesses from Ireland. The 28 articles were rehearsed in the Commons again on the 30th, and then he, assisted by Hampden and John Maynard, went to the Lords. Pym’s ‘pithy’ and certainly eloquent speech at the conference was marked by his usual rhetorical flourishes, and was judged by the Commons a success, but Pym waved aside a proposed vote of thanks by declaring his intention immediately to resume preparation for the prosecution of Laud.216CJ ii. 76a,b; Procs. LP, ii. 322, 323, 324-6; HMC 4th Rep. 45. In the words of a contemporary commentator, ‘the heat in the lower House’ was increasing, and Pym was at the heart of moves against the king’s chief ministers, as well as in proposals for new appointments. Though some thought a sudden dissolution of the Parliament was in prospect, Pym’s conciliatory tone on episcopal reform may have been sufficient to ensure that a majority in the Commons followed his line on the impeachments.217Add. 64922, f. 4. He worked with Hampden, William Strode I, St John and Sir John Culpeper to organize a conference with the Lords (16 Feb.), at which he urged speed in bringing the Strafford proceedings to a head, on the grounds that there was extra evidence against the still-dangerous earl, and that a resolution would ‘joy the hearts of the people’.218CJ ii. 86b, 88b; Procs. LP, ii. 466; D’Ewes (N), 366n; Harl. 6424, f. 21v. He was equally active in the business of the archbishop, taking responsibility for presenting to the Commons the articles against him on 24 February. His speech was a series of comparisons designed to show not only complicity between Laud and Strafford, but also their identical natures, ‘ambitious, proud and insolent’. The intended impression of identical offences being treated identically was reinforced when Hampden and Maynard were selected to support Pym when he took the 14 articles against Laud to the Lords (26 Feb.).219CJ ii. 91b, 92a, 94a; Procs. LP, ii. 510, 530, 532, 533, 534, 535-8, 566-7, 569-70.

On that occasion, Pym began what was to be another widely reported speech by dwelling on the offence of ‘spiritual wickednesses in high places’, one of the sinister enemies of the Christian identified by St Paul. He proceeded to an item by item commentary on each of the 14 articles, building up a formidable catalogue of wrong-doing, linking the cases of Laud and Strafford and explicitly accusing Laud of correspondence with Rome and of attempting to erect a Roman hierarchy in the English church. Laud had ‘sold justice’ in his courts and had devised the new Canons ‘contrary to the prerogative of the king and the liberty of the people’. Pym described the scarcity of preaching ministers and the loss of ‘the trade, the manufactory, the industry’ in consequence of emigration by those who sought spiritual nourishment overseas, points which not only capitalized on recent petitioning to Parliament, but also chimed with his personal experience. The growing distance between the English and foreign Reformed churches, together with the war with Scotland, were laid at Laud’s door. So as to minimise dissent at Westminster, Pym was careful in this oration to make no expression of solidarity, let alone kinship, with the Scots, even though by this time the phrase ‘Scottish brethren’ had made its first appearance in the Journal, allegedly at the behest of Holles.220CJ ii. 78a; Add. 31954, f. 183; Donald, Uncounselled King, 286. Pym’s speech made extensive use of arguments from political necessity, building on the commonly understood metaphor of the law as uniting king and people in a political body. It was published as a ‘separate’, together with the articles he took to the Lords.221The Speech or Declaration of John Pymm (1641, E.196.33, E.196.34); D. A. Orr, Treason and the State (Cambridge, 2002), 45, 47.

Pym did his best to ensure that the momentum against Strafford continued to build, but the pace of the preparatory work had been erratic. Before he addressed the Lords on 26 February, he successfully moved for a Commons committee to consider Strafford’s initial responses to the charges against him, and the task was referred to the committee, augmented by an influx of lawyers, that had been working on the charges.222Procs. LP, ii. 561, 565. When his Irish witnesses arrived at Westminster, he moved to reconvene the committee involved in the examination process (1 Mar.), and this seems to have marked a quickening of pace. However, it was Whitelocke, not Pym, who moved for a conference with the Lords to initiate the start of Strafford’s trial (6 Mar.), and when this conference took place, touching the practical arrangements for the hearings, Pym’s only recorded contribution was an indecisive one on the legal scope to be allowed the earl’s counsel.223CJ ii. 98a; Procs. LP, ii. 653, 712. Making the arrangements for the trial evidently involved a range of managers, but Pym’s energies were devoted entirely to that end, especially during March 1641, when his name appears in the Commons Journal only three times, so preoccupied was he in business outside the chamber.224CJ ii. 94b, 98a, 107b. He fed the House additional alleged cases of Strafford’s wrongdoing, and successfully urged that these, with a disavowal by peers who had attended the king’s great council at York that they had commanded the earl to raise money in the north, should be grist to the mill of the committee managing the prosecution (15, 17, 19 Mar.).225Procs. LP, ii. 755, 781, 808, 809, 815. Public anticipation of the trial was mounting, and copies of Pym’s charge against Strafford of the previous November were by this time scarce.226Add. 46500, f. 3.

The opening speeches in the trial at Westminster Hall on 23 March, before the king and the prince of Wales, came as the culmination of months of work on Pym’s part, and he delivered the first address, which naturally received the greatest coverage by diarists and other reporters. Pym’s speech was workmanlike rather than laced with ‘hyperboles, ... flashes and superlative expressions’, but memorably to those who heard it made use of the biblical image from Proverbs of ‘the adulterous woman ... that wipes her mouth as though all were well’.227A Briefe and Perfect Relation (1641), 3 (E.417.19); Procs. LP, iii. 61. However eloquent he managed to be, no-one mistook the insistence of Pym’s tone – ‘I desire justice against him’, recorded one diarist – and after his initial speech he added new charges to the catalogue.228Two Diaries of Long Parl. 27; Briefe and Perfect Relation, 4. The speech was structured as a brief but authoritative rebuttal of each of the heads of Strafford’s defence against the articles of 25 November, and after a speech by Thomas Howard, 21st or 14th earl of Arundel, for the Lords, Pym introduced the first of his witnesses. Strafford excepted successfully against Sir Piers Crosby, but Pym recovered the advantage when the earl in less than careful phrasing asserted that his impeachment had been ‘contrived by faction and correspondence’. Most diarists record that it was Pym who was brought to his feet by this remark, and who thus compelled the earl on his knees to beg forgiveness for the unintended slur on the Commons; but Denzil Holles attributed the intervention to John Maynard and to Pym a more conciliatory role.229Procs. LP, iii. 61-3, 66-7, 69, 75. Pym also intervened to draw attention to England’s contribution, raised in an unparliamentary way, to subsidize Strafford’s regime in Ireland, and his emphasis on the privilege of Parliament, on which no decree by privy council could lawfully encroach.230Verney, Notes, 31, 33.

The management of the Strafford trial was intensive and sustained. The Commons steering committee under Whitelocke, which included Pym, met ‘almost daily’, under a voluntary oath of secrecy, and communications between the Houses were frequent.231Whitelocke, Diary, 124. In April 1641, most of Pym’s activity recorded in the Journal involved conferences, mostly on Strafford, but also on relations with the Scots, disbanding the army in Ireland and on a planned fast day.232CJ ii. 115a, 117a,b, 120b, 122a,b, 125a,b, 126a, 127b. The subject matter indicates the political context in which the trial was taking place, and this period marks the start of Pym’s role as a principal intermediary that was to occupy yet more of his time as the Parliament progressed. It usually fell to him to organize the cast of characters who appeared at the trial as witnesses, and to devise strategies for coping with their absences, for example through ill-health. Their initial testimonies were presented instead, and Pym resisted any attempt at exploitation by Strafford of what must have been far from watertight documents.233Procs. LP, iii. 212, 317, 319, 362. On 10 April, the procedure-bound trial, the slow pace of which had stalled progress across the range of parliamentary business, was galvanized. The article which was intended to show that Strafford had planned an offensive war in England was challenged amid scenes of uproar and near-panic, and induced a confrontation between the Houses.234Procs. LP, iii. 488-9; Briefe and Perfect Relation, 57. In the Commons later that day, Pym introduced the content of the paper of Sir Henry Vane I, given him in the early autumn by Sir Henry Vane II. The initiative for bringing this to the Commons lay with the committee for managing the trial, and was intended as an exercise in damage limitation. John Glynne* cleared the way for it with a portentous call for the chamber doors to be locked, and then the younger Vane (a known enemy of Strafford) and Pym each explained his part in the affair. As an authentic memorandum of a privy council meeting, the paper incriminated not only Strafford and Laud but also Francis Lord Cottington†, and Pym’s selective reading of it directed the focus on those three.235CJ ii. 118a; Procs. LP, iii. 497, 499, 500; Clarendon, Hist. i. 249, 301-5.

The intention of this display was to influence the thinking of the Commons, not the Lords, and some thought a secondary aim was to signal to Cottington that he would be next in line for impeachment, so that he would quickly surrender office in favour of Saye. In the light of the uncertain progress of the trial, not to mention divisions among the king’s opponents over other matters such as church reform, this seems unlikely.236Clarendon, Hist. i. 305-6; NLW, Wynn of Gwydir ms 1683. The revelations on the 10th were surely collusive between Pym and Vane II, and were born of a need to pre-empt the opposition expected from some in the House who were bound to query the basis of this evidence against the earl. But they indicated defensive weakness not confident planning. Divisions among the opposition leadership had been evident since February, when under external pressure arising from questions over relations with the Covenanters, differences had opened up over episcopacy. The opening up of parallel proceedings against Laud can plausibly be viewed as another strategy to satisfy competing factions in the opposition.237Adamson, Noble Revolt, 197, 203, 204. The first reading of an attainder bill against Strafford, the last business in the Commons on the 10th, was surely a desperate expedient to buy time so that inter-House antagonisms to be assuaged.238CJ ii. 118b; Procs. LP, iii. 498, 499.

Notwithstanding the attainder bill, Pym remained committed to the trial. On 12 April he reported that the trial committee was planning a conference with the Lords and resisted demands that the attainder bill be progressed: on the grounds that the trial and conferences about it were a demonstration of unity between the Houses. Patient work on his part produced heads that would not only be acceptable in the upper House but also saw off the immediate demand for attainder in the Commons.239Procs. LP, iii. 512, 514, 515. Pym took on the delivery of the final speech for the prosecution the following day. He spoke in the afternoon after a marathon speech by John Glynne. He argued that Strafford’s ‘counsels would have dissolved all the ligaments between prince and people’. On this occasion his own usual mastery of his audience slipped. Although Robert Baillie praised his half-hour oration as ‘one of the most eloquent wise free speeches that ever we heard or I think shall ever hear’, towards the end of it, Pym stumbled: his papers were confused and ‘to humble the man, God let his memory fail him a little before the end’.240Procs. LP, iii. 526-7; Baillie Lttrs and Jnls. i. 347-8; Briefe and Perfect Relation, 67. The incident was doubtless indicative of the tensions Pym was trying to contain within the opposition camp, but an effort was made, presumably unofficially on behalf of the prosecution, to obliterate Pym’s mistakes by allowing publication of an unauthorised version of his speech, replaced on 30 April by a revision on the authority of the Commons.241Mr Pymmes Speech to the Lords in Parliament (1641); The Declaration of John Pym Esquire upon the Whole Matter (1641). But in the House, the differences between managers of these proceedings remained visible to all, with St John and Maynard ‘absolutely’ opposed to the committee’s continuing to attend Westminster Hall if the attainder bill was in progress. Pym urged ‘very strongly’ the opposite, and held out for several days for carrying on meeting the Lords at the trial venue, thereby making it clear that in his view unity between the Houses was paramount.242Procs. LP, iii. 566, 582-3. There was no softening of his line on Strafford’s offending, but he now argued that Strafford had usurped authority that was properly that of Parliament: ‘he hath taken a legislative power ... and assumed it to himself, and put it in execution, and this is subversion’. The value of continuing the trial lay in its public aspects: ‘I would have all the world to conceive it as clear as we do’. But by the 17th, he was reconciled to the inevitability of the attainder bill as the likely means to destroy Strafford, and began to contribute suggestions for its shape.243Procs. LP, iii. 588, 608; Verney, Notes, 48. After the vote on the bill (21 Apr.), it was Pym who took it to the Lords, impressing upon them its urgency, and was one of the Commons team that justified the legal aspects of it to the peers.244CJ ii. 125a, 126a.

It was probably a recognition by Pym of the way events were running that impelled him towards support of the bill. Had he actively opposed it, the weight of parliamentary precedent would have tended to preclude his further involvement in the committee, though not as emphatically or as comprehensively as has recently been implied.245HP Commons 1604-29, i. 319-21; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 256. Recent political developments were pushing him towards decisive positions. On 2 April he had moved for a committee to summarise and categorise principal grievances, convinced that a conclusion of the trial and a dissolution of the Parliament had become linked outcomes. A document that passed both Houses and won the king’s assent would ‘be as a law, the time not suffering to prepare bills for the remedying of those evils. This will be an ordinance though not an act of Parliament’.246Procs. LP, iii. 320. Pym’s willingness to seize on expedients at the expense of parliamentary precedent had been, and was to continue, one of his political characteristics. By the time of this intervention he was surely apprised of the discontents among officers in the English army that became known as the army plots.247C. Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603-1642 (1990), 288-9. By the time he was openly supporting the attainder bill he was encouraging the Commons towards redefining and extending the concepts of treason and attempts at subversion, with the army plot revelations in mind. A confrontation between Pym, Glynne and Lucius Cary*, Lord Falkland on the one hand and George Lord Digby, who condemned attainder as ‘bloody’, on the other (21 Apr.) began to crystallize the opposition to the death penalty for Strafford. Further talk of high office for the likes of Pym was indicative of the last negotiations around Bedford’s conciliatory plan, though the near-contemporary notion that Windebanke was wooed by Pym to return to England to testify at the Strafford trial was well wide of the mark; and Bedford himself was terminally ill.248Procs. LP, iv. 41; HMC Cowper, ii. 279; Add. 31954, f. 182; Clarendon, Hist. i. 334.

Any control Pym had over the Strafford prosecution committee dissolved on 23 April, when the paper which had been so contentious on 10 April vanished from Pym’s study. Years later, it emerged that Digby had filched it in the interests of the king, but the consternation caused by its disappearance can be measured by the ‘protestation’ the committeemen (including Digby) took publicly to exculpate themselves, after a round of mutual recrimination made all the more bitter because of their earlier oath of secrecy. As soon as this protestation had been taken, the House was turned to attack Digby’s speech on the 21st, which he had provocatively consigned to print.249CJ ii. 127a; Procs. LP, iv. 77; CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 559; Add. 31954, f. 184v; Whitelocke, Diary, 126-7. It was Pym who angrily moved to summon an individual thought to be wilfully retaining material relevant to the trial, and promoted heads for a conference aimed at progressing the disbanding of the Irish army, the disarming of recusants and the removing papists from court, all enduring strands in Pym’s own thinking.250Procs. LP, iv. 87; CJ ii. 127b. The Commons order (30 Apr.) for printing Pym’s speeches at the trial was presumably an attempt to counter Digby’s appeal to the public.251CJ ii. 131a; Procs. LP, iv. 152-3. The king’s own unintentionally inflammatory contribution to the growing crisis was to address Parliament in order to repudiate the idea that any force was to be brought south, and to announce his intention to banish Strafford from all office. Pym’s response to this came two days later (3 May), when he declared the king’s intervention a breach of parliamentary privilege, since he had spoken on a matter currently in progress, and to reiterate his belief in the plot: ‘I am persuaded that there was some great design in hand by the papists to subvert and overthrow this kingdom’. The king had not intended it, but he had been counselled that he was absolved ‘from all rules of government’. By the passing of the attainder bill the king was now ‘free’, and care should next be taken to provide for the Scots while the north and Ireland should be relieved of the military presence.252Procs. LP, iv. 180; Verney, Notes, 66-7.

It was probably Pym’s idea, but not his draftsmanship, that brought into being the Protestation, only hours after this speech: in one sense an extension of the voluntary association that Pym had used for the trial managers, adumbrated in his speech of 2 April, and certainly a fresh variant of his call in the Parliament of 1621 for an Elizabethan-style oath of association. The Protestation stopped short of imposing a corporeal oath, which would have encountered inter-House difficulties as well as resistant tender consciences.253CJ ii. 132b, 133a; S.R. Gardiner, ‘John Pym’, Old DNB. It was a highly reactive response to widespread rumour and panic, and emerged as a rallying point for the opposition on a tumultuous day in London, with Pym evidently fully in the grip of a fear of armed insurrection on the streets, intensified by his knowledge that the king himself had been implicated in a plot to seize the Tower of London and liberate Strafford.254Clarendon, Hist. i. 329-30; Gardiner, Hist. Eng. ix. 348-9.. In the next few days, Pym acted decisively to crush any plotting. He wanted to make a catalogue of papists’ names (4 May); successfully moved after it had been drafted and taken by the majority of Commons-men that the Protestation should be sent down to the counties for subscription; was one of a secret committee on the army plot (5 May); and on the 6th was behind the decision to close the ports: not only to prevent the escape of fleeing plotters, but also with an eye to impeding any overseas journey by the queen.255CJ ii. 135a, 136b, 138a,b; Procs. LP, iv. 196, 214, 232, 233, 319; Gardiner, Hist. Eng. ix. 358. On the 7th, his announcement in the Commons of the details of another plot, by which the queen would have summoned French troops to land in Portsmouth and the south of England went well beyond reportage, and his speech included detailed plans for individual Commons-men whom he trusted to take charge of the militia in particular regions. The clerk of the House evidently copied into the Journal a paper supplied him by Pym as a record.256CJ ii. 138a; Verney, Notes, 73. Having announced these measures on the authority of the Commons alone, Pym then addressed the Lords on the attainder bill, conveying his belief that they understood the need for urgency as well as he (8 May). He kept up the pressure by encouraging an order for publishing more speeches, and even on the day of Strafford’s execution (12 May) unveiled more evidence from an intercepted letter ‘of a violent nature’, which seemingly encouraged a rising to ‘slay that beast with many heads’, which he took to mean a design against Parliament by papists.257CJ ii. 142b; Procs. LP, iv. 274, 279, 319, 339, 340, 345.

In view of his increasingly alarmist and sanguinary interventions in the House in the period around the attainder bill’s passage, it would certainly seem that by the time the earl went to the block, Pym was in favour of the execution. But the opposition junto had been split and damaged, and Pym’s standing diminished, by the uncertainties of the trial and the parallel bill. Pym was less visible in the House during the second half of May than he had been previously, but by this time the ‘close committee’, formed in response to news of the army plot, was reporting to the Commons from a privileged position of secrecy, on intelligence matters that had come its way. On 19 May, in another speech on further news about the pre-empted insurrection, in a House made jittery by a cracking floorboard or some falling stones, he complained that some there considered the plots unimportant. A few days later, he was according to D’Ewes seeking to take credit for evidence brought in by the committee chaired by Laurence Whitaker*.258Sloane 1467, f. 39v, 40; Procs. LP, iv. 463, 466, 467, 507. By the end of May, the leading Yorkshire Member and anti-Straffordian, Sir John Hotham*, was complaining about the close committee’s practices, declared himself no longer willing to live ‘in an implicit faith’ and demanded to know more about the committee’s discoveries. Pym and his colleagues seem to have headed off this minor rebellion by assuring Hotham and his sympathizers that due process took time, and that full disclosure would damage public safety.259Procs. LP, iv. 644. The close committee continued to operate, as the prime vehicle of the opposition junto.

Attempts at imposing a settlement, Apr.-Sept. 1641

In mid-May, Pym seems to have resumed an active interest in the tonnage and poundage bill, a strand in the abortive settlement stalled by the death of Bedford and the crisis over the army plot and the fate of Strafford. He moved that the related committee on the Vintners (which he had chaired in February) should re-convene (19 May), and progressed the business a few days later by announcing that he had been given to understand that if a Commons committee levied a manageable fine on the customs farmers, they would in return for future indemnity raise £400,000 on the security of subsidies already granted. On the 25th, he outlined this plan more fully as a new deal for customs farmers, subject from this point onwards to parliamentary control. He was certain that money could be raised quickly, and was optimistic that further sums could by this means be forthcoming.260Procs. LP, iv. 466, 553, 560-1, 564, 630; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 56. By the end of May he had soap monopolists in view as another target and source of significant state income, and a few weeks later was seriously proposing that not only should municipal corporations be persuaded to lend as the City had, but also that Spanish coinage in the kingdom should be temporarily adopted as currency.261Procs. LP, iv. 647, v. 204. Pym’s willingness to continue working with the customers, whatever their former misdemeanours under the personal rule of Charles I, was not endorsed by all his closest allies. Holles, for example, denounced the ‘art and fraud and cozenage’ of the customs farmers (22 May), while in the Lords Pym opposed those like the earl of Bristol (John Digby†) who simply wanted a quick solution. On 17 June, when the tonnage and poundage bill came to a vote in the Commons, Pym and the bill’s supporters carried the day, and their opponents included Holles. This was no full and final settlement imposed on the king, however, simply a temporary measure that continued to bind the monarch tightly to the Parliament.262Procs. LP, v. 206, 209; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 46, 47; CJ ii. 161a, 178b; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 332-3, 336, 346-7.

Religion was another problem which it appeared did not admit of a graspable solution, let alone an immediate one. While the Strafford case was dominating men’s thoughts, Pym had continued to marshal evidence against Laud (19 Apr.) and on 17 May announced that the committee against the archbishop would resume with its plentiful haul of material.263Procs. LP, iv. 11, 417, 585. He was named to committees on bills to exclude the clergy from secular office (1 Apr.) and on punishing members of the late Convocation (27 Apr.), the second of which he defended against the Lords (3 June).264CJ ii. 115a, 129a, 165b But on the fate of bishops, it was the Lords who kicked the topic into life again on 27 May, by calling for a conference, in which Pym was a manager. They themselves chose to allow bishops to remain in the upper House, but in the Commons a bill for total abolition passed a second reading. On that occasion Pym was identified as firmly in the anti-episcopal camp, underscoring a speech by Holles to denounce the bishops as having ‘well near ruined all religion’ by resisting all attempts at reformation. He wanted provision for ministers by the state, and a bill specifically to impeach bishops and remove them from the Lords. These denunciations seem a long way from his position of three months earlier, but it is perfectly possible that Pym’s ire was directed ad homines at the incumbents of the sees, and that he continued to believe in some kind of primitive episcopacy.265CJ ii. 159a; Procs. LP, iv. 608, 615; Gardiner, Hist. Eng. ix. 381-2. On 10 June he was party to a private meeting involving Sir Robert Harley*, Hampden and the leading godly divine, Stephen Marshall, which may have taken place at Leez, the country house of the earl of Warwick. The intention was to plan a response to the Lords’ intransigence, which was ill-received in the City, where the abolition of episcopacy was a popular policy. As a result of this, the debate on the root-and-branch bill was abruptly brought forward, to the surprise even of its supporters such as D’Ewes.266Procs. LP, v. 90-1; Diurnall Occurrences, 122 (E.523.1); V. Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (1961), 219; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 330. No contribution to the debate on the 11th by Pym was noted by a diarist, and it is striking that as spring gave way to summer in 1641 little of Pym’s energy was directed in practical terms towards the wider reform programme. He was working single-mindedly on matters of state security, on a financial settlement intended to strike a bargain with the king, and somewhat fitfully on religious questions, but the detail of reforming legislation was left to others, and he had assumed the role of a manager among a group.

The aims of the junto peers, notably Saye, Viscount Mandeville (Edward Montagu†), William Russell*, now 5th earl of Bedford, and very probably Warwick, were to prevent the flight of the army plotters, and now to do everything they could to dissuade the king from going to Scotland. His intention had become known around the time of Strafford’s execution, and became a practical possibility once the treaty between the kingdoms was clinched. Efforts were still being made towards a settlement: once again, from June through to late July, the rumour was rife of new appointments, again including Pym’s as chancellor.267HMC Cowper, ii. 286; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 405, 406; CSP Dom. 1640-1, 63. On 23 June, Pym spoke authoritatively to argue that if the king insisted on going north, the Commons should ask him to delay until the armies were disbanded and a political settlement achieved. The tone and content of his speech suggested that he spoke for an opposition that believed they were dealing with a kind of abdication, which they themselves were falsely thought to have engineered; and Pym strove to clear his colleagues of suspicion that they had manufactured ‘pretended straits or necessities’. Pym ranged over topics such as granting a general pardon, arrangements for the royal family, putting the whole of England on military standby with parliamentary nominees to head each county militia: a surer safeguard than the army in the north, infected as it was by ‘many evil spirits’.268Procs. LP, v. 293-4, 296, 297-8, 299. His address included the presentation to the House of two treasonable letters, one by the queen’s Catholic confessor, Father Robert Phillips. The outcome of Pym’s speech on the 23rd was that its heads were passed to the ‘Committee of Seven’, or close committee, for presentation to the Lords.269CJ ii. 183b, 184a; Diurnall Occurrences, 159-62 (E.523.1). After a further reading in the Commons the following day, Pym took the heads to the upper House, and the content of his presentation immediately became known as the Ten Propositions.270Procs. LP, v. 315-6, 329, LJ iv. 285b-7b; CJ ii. 190b.

It seems clear that Pym spoke on 23 June at greater length and more discursively than the record of the Commons diarists and the Journal clerks suggests. Among the bills he singled out as deserving the royal assent before the king left London was that on tonnage and poundage, which he commended as the primary means of funding the navy. There were elements in his speech that were provocative. He said that kings who acted under evil counsel were not nursing fathers but ‘hirelings to all ill’; reminded his hearers that the queen had given the Commons to understand (through him) that she would concur with them ‘for the common good’; called for an oath of loyalty to the state to be devised in Parliament, and nowhere else, for all in the militias to take; insisted the Capuchins at Denmark House should be deported, not least because they had slandered the parliamentary leadership as ‘puritans’; denounced Father Phillips as having described the Protestation of 3 May as ‘worse than the Scots Covenant’, and so on.271Harl. 6424, ff. 75-76v. The speech was successful as an expression of sentiments and policies less contentious than the exclusion of bishops, and the tenth head (as recorded in the Lords’ Journal), which called for a standing joint committee of Lords and Commons, foreshadowed future developments. The idea of control by parliamentary nominees over the militia was to reappear in the militia ordinance of 1642. Later on the 24th, Pym reminded the Commons that the cease-fire between the Scots and English armies would soon need to be renewed again, and his call for a collection in aid of the officers and servants of the House, to recognize their long hours and heavy workload, could only have enhanced his reputation there.272Procs. LP, v. 319, 320.

Pym capitalized on the authority given him by an initial near-unanimous acceptance by the Houses of the Ten Propositions. His energies were now deployed in attempts to persuade the king not to go to Scotland, and to persuade the Commons and Lords to implement the practical proposals the Propositions contained. There is a suggestion from later testimony that Pym was active at this time in attempts to suborn John Williams, bishop of Lincoln, to contribute to a statement of ‘irregularities’ under the king’s rule, which may have been part of the process of compiling material for the Grand Remonstrance.273J. Hacket, Scrinia Reserata (1693), 163. Publicly, however, the Ten Propositions were the focus of parliamentary attention. Over the next month there were regular conferences on them, in which Pym led the way.274CJ ii.190b, 193a, 200b, 208a, 216a; Procs. LP, v. 400, 517, 562, 578, It was his motion (29 June) that led to a request to the king to postpone his journey until 10 August, to which Charles reluctantly agreed.275Procs. LP, v. 413; Gardiner, Hist. Eng. ix. 416. His authority was in evidence on 19 July when his kinsman Clotworthy proposed that priests should be castrated. The suggestion was given more time than it deserved and provoked laughter, but it was Pym who intervened to shut down the discussion.276Add. 31954, ff. 185, 185v; Procs. LP, vi. 7. The context of Clotworthy’s motion was the renewed anxiety over the numbers of foreign Catholics in London and specifically associated with the entourage of the queen and the queen mother, which Pym was always ready to publicise to the House. Debates on the Ten Propositions gave further opportunities to dovetail these fears with the other elements of the grand conspiracy.277Procs. LP, v. 558, 560, 562, 565, 578, 580, Against a countdown to the king’s departure, July and August saw Pym busier than ever before in managing relations between the Houses, building on the groundwork of the Ten Propositions. In those two months, he was the manager of 15 conferences requested by the Commons, and reported on another 16 requested by the Lords. Twice as many of these were in August as in July.278CJ ii. 196a-277b. He was never to exceed the total number he managed in August 1641. Apart from the king’s journey and the propositions, the most time-consuming of subjects of these meetings were the disbanding of the armies (29 July; 4, 5, 19, 24, 25, 30 Aug.), the sending of commissioners to Scotland (16, 17, 19 Aug.) and the disarming of recusants (17, 21, 30 Aug.).279CJ ii. 229b, 235b, 236a, 238b, 264b, 270b, 271a, 277b (disbanding); 258b, 259a,b, 261a, 262a,b, 264a,b (Scotland); 261a, 267b, 268a, 277b (recusants). Others included putting the kingdom’s militia on alert and securing Hull (14, 16 Aug.) and, after the king had gone to Scotland, on his messages (24, 30 Aug.). The recovery of the palatinate (7, 8, 12 July) was a subject that most Members would happily support, in pursuit of a rejuvenated Protestant foreign policy. 280CJ ii. 201b, 202b, 207a (palatinate); 257a, 259 (defence), 269b, 276a (king’s wishes).

Pym was happy enough to see the queen mother return to France, the state funding for the entourage to be supervised conscientiously by the English Parliament.281CJ ii. 199a; Procs. LP, v. 501; PJ i. 77. Journeys abroad by the queen herself were a different matter. Since May at the latest, Pym had been behind efforts to restrict the queen’s movements, and the Ten Propositions had codified a long campaign by the opposition to limit her access to Catholic priests and monitor the upbringing of the royal children. On 14 July, a committee chaired by Pym devised six articles to be taken by him later in the day to the Lords. Pym announced in the afternoon, even before the articles were presented at the conference scheduled for 4 o’clock, that the heads of the articles were to be published.282CJ ii. 210a, 211b; Procs. LP, v. 636; The Reasons of the House of Commons (1641, E.164.3). The relatively terse speech on staying the queen’s travel was as usual with Pym’s addresses to the upper House emphatic on the unprecedented gravity of the matter. He summarised the objections to the queen’s journey, which had ostensibly been proposed as a cure for her health, but was thought to be a design to raise continental military help for the embattled king. The grounds for opposing the voyage were that papists had been emigrating to rally abroad as plotters, taking wealth from the kingdom with them, and that the cost to the state of funding her visit to the level she deserved would be burdensome, particularly since the king would also be absent. Reports by the diarists of Pym’s short speech tally with the printed version, except that one noted a comment that the king had been granting licences to prominent Catholics to leave the country, thus implicating the government in the plot, as well as the court.283Procs. LP, v. 636, 640, 644, 645. On the 21st, when news came that the queen was ready to accede to Parliament’s request to remain in the country, Pym moved to pass a bill on the queen’s jointure, an obvious quid pro quo, but there had been much diplomacy behind the scenes, involving the new French ambassador, the marquis de La Ferté-Imbault, who was sympathetic to the junto.284Procs. LP, vi. 39; Gardiner, Hist. Eng. ix. 406.

As the king’s departure for Scotland drew nearer, Pym was no less animated by his fears of plotting, assuring the House on 26 July that ‘a base conspiracy works nothing till reduced into act’.285Procs. LP, vi. 96. Two days later, he spoke at the Commons committee for the constitutional arrangements in the absence of the king. He moved that their first priority should be the fate of the Parliament, whether it would continue or be suspended. D’Ewes was on hand to bandy terminology and constitutional precedents, concluding that a recess was required, but Pym, while acknowledging precedent, insisted that the Houses should petition for parliamentary commissioners to rule in the king’s absence, an extension of one of the Ten Propositions.286CJ ii. 227a; Procs. LP, vi. 119. At a conference with the Lords (5 Aug.), Saye supported Pym’s position on the desirability of a commission over a custos regni, and subsequently Pym’s summary of an irreducible core of parliamentary business was copied into the Commons Journal. Nothing came of this while the king remained in London, even though a bill for ‘keepers of the kingdom’ was entrusted to a committee headed by Glynne and Pym on the day he left town.287CJ ii. 238a, 242a, 249a; Procs. LP, vi. 216-7. An alternative mechanism by which the king might continue within Parliament’s sphere of influence, and by which the power of junto members would be enhanced, had in any case been devised by 7 August. This was a bid to appeal to the Scots over the king’s head, and was unveiled to the Commons on 8 August, a Sunday, when Pym reported a conference on the necessity of such an unusual time of meeting. Commissioners would be sent to Scotland while the king was there, and by this means, Pym asserted, ‘all them that are troublers of both nations: that is the papists and bishops’ should be ‘cast out’.288CJ ii. 243a, 246a ; Procs. LP, vi. 299. Pym was evidently still implacably opposed to the king’s journey on the eve of its commencement, with other junto members fearing the opportunity it allowed Charles to negotiate himself into authority over a Scots army.289Procs. LP, vi. 315. The Scots themselves were prepared for the king’s departure on the 10th, and Pym was that day asked to draft a declaration, an expression of unity, on their message, which was presumably the ordinance which the Commons agreed on the 27th and ordered to be printed.290CJ ii. 247a, 249b; CJ ii. 274a.

The treaty with the Scots provided a stimulus and incentive for resuming work on the question of the bishops. The day after the king had set off northwards, there were two conferences with the Lords on their impeachment, Pym arguing that the charge should be whether or not the bishops had devised the recent Canons, something that they could hardly deny.291CJ ii. 251b, 252b; Procs. LP, vi. 354. On the 12th, however, any proceedings on this subject seem to have been pushed aside in favour of a remonstrance to the king on the state of the kingdom, drafted by Pym and others, while a section of the same document, specifically on religion, was to be entrusted to Nathaniel Fiennes I and Sir Henry Vane II. This had been first moved on the 3rd, and was to emerge late in the year as the Grand Remonstrance.292CJ ii. 234a, 253a. The question of discussions with the Scots was also stimulated by the king’s departure. Pym was concerned that the ‘brotherly assistance’ to the Scots should be transmitted in such a way that made it clear it was not a grant to the king, and on the 16th he raised the question of the authority for Parliament’s sending commissioners to Scotland. There were doubts about the validity of affixing the great seal to any commission in the king’s absence. It is clear that Pym knew this perfectly well, and that he and his junto colleagues would have to work to produce an alternative, which duly and quickly emerged after another round of conferences, some of which were what Pym called ‘double free’, in the form of a parliamentary ordinance lacking the royal assent, the first of its kind.293CJ ii. 256b, 258b, 259a,b, 262a,b, 264a, 265b, 266b; Procs. LP, vi. 433, 437, 439, 487, 503, 504. His nephew Anthony Nicoll* was employed in the inter-House negotiations.294Procs. LP, vi. 487. The ordinance embodied Pym’s expressed insistence that disbandment of both armies should be speedy and verifiable.295CJ ii. 264a, 265a; Procs. LP, vi. 576, 488, 492, 505.

At the same time as this ordinance was being worked up, Pym spoke on the importance of home security, in the light of continuing revelations of plotting and suspicions of foreign agents; he successfully moved (24 Aug.) for an ordinance to be brought in for the disarming of recusants.296CJ ii. 259a,b, 261a, 266a, 267b, Procs. LP, vi. 386, 419, 487, 502, 514, 541. On the 14th came his call for ‘fit men to be appointed in every county to have command of every county’, a recapitulation of one of the Ten Propositions, with a parallel procedure to be followed in the business of recusants (21 Aug.).297CJ ii. 267b, 268a; Procs. LP, vi. 419. The ordinance against recusants passed the Lords on 30 August, and was ordered to be published the following day.298CJ ii. 277b, 278a, An Ordinance for the Speedie Disarming (1641, E.171.14). The committee to which he was first named on 14 August, to consult with the Lords on the security measures in each county, was given authority to investigate the condition of the navy.299CJ ii. 257a.

The recess and the Irish, Sept.-Dec. 1641

Despite the procedural innovations evident in the ordinances for the commissioners to Scotland and against recusants, the Houses continued to believe that their capacity for independent action of either a legislative or an executive kind without the king was limited in time and scope. On 27 August, Pym was one of the Commons-men at a conference to discuss a parliamentary recess, which had been mooted since June. At the prompting of the earl of Essex, who just as the peers were trooping back into the Lords expressed the hope that should an emergency arise, the recess could be postponed, Pym and Sir John Culpeper agreed that the date could be negotiable.300CJ ii. 181b, 220a, 274a; Procs. LP, vi. 582. In the remaining days between 27 August and the suspension of business on 9 September, on behalf of the lower House, Pym urged the Lords to pass the ordinance for thanksgiving for the treaty with the Scots, and reported from committees on transmitting the cases of victims of Strafford to the Irish Parliament (1 Sept.) and on the recruitment of troops in Ireland for the use of France and Spain. Pym had expressed suspicions of the French four months earlier, and conscription was now taking place with the consent of the king, despite, as Pym reminded the House, a petition to the king aimed at preventing it.301CJ ii. 277a, 279b, 282a, 285b, 286a; Procs. LP, vi. 680, 683, 691; Harl. 6424, f. 66. In fact there were rumours that Pym had been bribed by the French ambassador to favour his country over Spain as partners with England in these transactions, but Hyde’s information seems barely credible in the light of Pym’s pronouncements.302Clarendon, Hist. Rebellion, i. 369-70, iii. 323. It is more likely that he was in favour of disbanding all forces owing allegiance to the king. On 8 September he was asked to draft a letter to the earl of Holland (Henry Rich†) encouraging him to proceed with the disbandment stipulated as a condition of the Scots treaty (8 Sept.).303CJ ii. 282b; Procs. LP, vi. 685.

On 30 August, in order to counter scandalous publications against the Scots, Pym presented an order to the Commons which parish clergy would be required to read in churches. On the eve (6 Sept.) of the day stipulated for the public reading, Pym reported from the committee on religious innovation. They had drafted an order against innovations which countermanded Laudian directions on the position of the altar, on ceremonies, on images and on observing the sabbath. But Pym reported an augmentation of the order which would have added a caveat that none should publicly hold in contempt the Book of Common Prayer to the point of disrupting divine service. He reported disagreements in the committee over the wording of this, which triggered a parallel debate in the House. Pym’s own view was not captured by any of the diarists, and the order was printed with no such caveat in place. The following day, instead of consenting to the Commons order as expected, the Lords issued an order of their own for publication, which enjoined the observance of the sabbath as it was laid down in law, with a number of peers (mostly associates of the junto) entering their dissents.304CJ ii. 287a; LJ iv. 395a; Procs. LP, vi. 654-5. What had evidently begun as disunity in the Commons committee had turned into a fiasco in which each House had issued a contradictory order on religious observance. Pym can have taken little satisfaction in this breakdown of the junto’s grip on events, and he soon came to recognize that the order on innovations was divisive in the parishes.305CJ ii. 283a; Procs. LP, vi. 612, 654-5; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 402. He was similarly unable to take the ‘reasonably full’ House with him on the subject of pay for the army plotters, Hugh Pollarde* and William Ashbournham*. D’Ewes found it hard to understand why Pym, who had examined the plotters and had always been a Jeremiah on conspiracies, should now (8 Sept.) want to favour them by allowing them their pay arrears. Devon and family links may explain Pym’s leniency, but connections between Pollarde and the earls of Bedford and Essex may have weighed just as heavily in Pollarde’s favour. Again, Pym’s views were defeated.306Procs. LP, vi. 690; ‘Hugh Pollarde’ supra.

Despite Pym’s hectic pace of activity during August, therefore, the summer drew to a close with the junto in danger of forfeiting decisive influence over events. The committal of parliamentary business to a Recess Committee, with Pym as its chairman, between 9 September and 20 October must have come as manna to the beleaguered junto. It was now in command, at least at Westminster, mainly because the king had surrendered control. Pym was unquestionably the dominant figure in the committee, which despite his unflagging commitment to it, in fact suffered from progressively declining attendances.307CJ ii. 288b; ‘Recess Committee’, supra. Even before the recess began, a Lords order (6 Sept.) had given temporary command of naval expenditure to the earl of Warwick, who appointed two of his closest allies in the Commons, Pym and Sir Henry Mildmay, as joint controllers.308LJ iv. 388b; CJ ii. 280b. The first of Pym’s acts was to sign the Declaration on religion, which appeared in black-letter print, and he personally judged disputes arising from it in the parishes, for example admonishing both minister and parishioners of the church in New Fish Street, London, to resolve their differences.309Diurnall Occurrences, 371 (E.523.1). The contradictory injunctions of the Lords were simply countermanded, the Recess Committee taking care of a publication to that effect.310CJ ii. 287b; A Declaration of the Commons (1641, E.171.13). Various proceedings of the committee were published, such as the letters to Pym read on 18 September that reported the welcome, well provided-for departure of the queen mother, and on events in the north and Scotland.311The True Copy of a Letter (1641, E.172.17). One of these publications, which must surely have been made with the consent of the committee, but not of the Commons, shows how Pym was assuming the authority that had normally been claimed by the Speaker. He was described as ‘Mr Committee’, to parallel ‘Mr Speaker’, to acknowledge his position as ‘chief committee’, and petitioners were graced with lapidary judgments, in which he pronounced on the law as it applied to their case, as for example in that of petitioning army officers (5 Oct).312The Heads of Severall Petitions (1641, E. 172.14). A number of other publications were issued explicitly on the authority of the committee, enjoining executive actions of various sorts.313Printing for Parliament, 1641-1700 ed. S. Lambert (List & Index Soc. Special Ser. xx), 3. Observers both subtle and vulgar noted the quasi-regal implications of style and image, and from this time the sobriquet King Pym made its appearance in commentary.314CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 132; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 404; J. Morrill, ‘The Unweariableness of Mr Pym: Influence and Eloquence in the Long Parliament’ in S.D. Amussen, M.A. Kishlansky eds. Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1995), 21.

Pym’s assiduous attention to detail at the Recess Committee was noted on more than one occasion by D’Ewes, a less unfailing member.315D’Ewes (C), 4, 8. He went well beyond mere meticulous attention to paperwork, for example when persuading troopers of Sir Fulk Huncks, a sergeant-major in the wars against the Scots, to put their hands to the petition they brought against him for abuses towards them (12 Oct.).316D’Ewes (C), 5. He undoubtedly managed the flow of information from Scotland on the plot known as the ‘Incident’, admitting to the Recess Committee only on 19 October, the last day before the Parliament returned, that he had been receiving intelligence about it for the previous ten days. The crowds outside the palace of Westminster continued to be restive, and on Pym’s encouragement, the militias of London, Middlesex and Surrey were put at the ready.317D’Ewes (C), 9-11: HMC 4th Rep. 102. The following day (20 Oct.), Pym gave a full account to the House of the Recess’s Committee’s stewardship. His account, as it appears in the Journal, written in the first person, appears to have been supplied by him to the clerk for the record. D’Ewes’s version of Pym’s speech suggests that Pym was reading from a script, without much discursive commentary. His list of the committee’s doings included a report of the commissioners in Scotland, the disbanding, action against religious innovation, on revenue, on charges against delinquents. A proposed new colonial venture in the West Indies, of great concern to Pym’s fellow Providence Island Company members who had recently seen their investments disappear when the Spanish captured the island, was not mentioned, nor was relief for the fishing industry, both of which had figured on the committee’s agenda when it was established.318CJ ii. 288b, 289a; D’Ewes (C), 11-14. Not everyone in the House was willing to accept Pym’s account: on the 22nd, Thomas Coke, Orlando Bridgman and Sir John Strangways mounted a challenge to Pym’s intention to inflict exemplary punishment on a churchwarden who had defied the declaration on images, and Pym was apparently obliged to back down.319HMC Cowper, ii. 293-4; D’Ewes (C), 19-20.

In a classic coup de théâtre, Pym reserved the news of the Incident until last in his speech, and it served as a springboard for a conference on home security, which he himself was to manage, and for committees on interrogating traitors and military readiness. He spoke of ‘lurking’ Jesuits, and urged unity with the Lords. His proposal that the close committee which had examined the original army plotters should be revived to investigate these new threats was challenged by some in the House, but Sir Edward Nicholas’s† prediction to the king that at the start of the new session the junto would try to recapture public opinion by volubly re-opening the attack on public enemies proved remarkably accurate.320CJ ii. 290a,b, 291a; D’Ewes (C), 15n., 16, 17; Evelyn Diary and Corresp. ed. Bray, 765. A committee under Pym’s chairmanship quickly drew letters and instructions for the parliamentary commissioners in Scotland, and the following day he and Sir Gilbert Gerard managed a conference with the Lords, once again appealing for inter-cameral unity and for a fresh letter to the king. In typical fashion, Pym described the Incident to the peers as ‘the greatest treason that ever was’. Later that day, Pym returned to accounting for the business transacted by the Recess Committee, with a record in the Journal that looks like a copy of a document he supplied the clerk.321CJ ii. 291b, 292a; D’Ewes (C), 18, 21, 22, 23. Over the next week he was occupied in writing to the committee in Scotland, reporting their replies, and managing further conferences with the Lords, to maximise the political impact of the Incident on domestic English politics.322CJ ii. 292b, 294a,b D’Ewes (C), 27, 28-9, 33. So dominant was he in this activity that on the 22nd, while he disappeared to his lodgings to retrieve a document, the House sat ‘a good whiles silent’ in his absence.323D’Ewes (C), 27. Unrest in the London streets still gave cause for concern, and there was anxiety over the outbreak of plague, which some had thought would derail the return of Parliament.324Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 407. Disorder, resentment at the Recess Committee’s perceived usurpations and the plague itself were all evident in the anonymous package containing an abusive letter and a plague-sore which was delivered to Pym at the Commons on 25 October. The Commons launched an investigation, and the outrage could only have played into the junto’s hands as proof of a widespread conspiracy; a recent suggestion that it was stage-managed by Pym’s allies is supported by no evidence.325D’Ewes (C), 37; CJ ii. 295b; D. Cressy, England on Edge (Oxford, 2006), 66.

Secretary Nicholas had predicted that the junto would turn its fire against Catholics and/or public ministers, but it was against the bishops that the opposition now began a campaign. The day after Pym had received the death threat, he was the first named to a committee for preparing for a conference on excluding the episcopate from the Lords, kick-started on an initiative begun in the Commons. A House of Lords minus the bishops would of course tilt voting there in the favour of the junto. Pym and St John managed the preparations, and Pym reported the text which he was to take to the Lords on the 27th. Again, it appeared in the Journal in a form which suggests he deposited a copy of his text with the clerk.326CJ ii. 295b, 296b. The ‘heads’ he delivered to the Commons were in fact a fully worked-up speech on removing the bishops, with legal precedents cited to remedy the offences of the bishops against ‘the prerogative of the king ... the privilege of the Parliament ... the propriety [i.e. property] and liberty of the subject and the peace of the kingdom, which are jewels deposited under the trust and safeguard of Parliaments’.327CJ ii. 296b. The hard political work on this had to be undertaken in the Commons, where Pym argued successfully, though only after a debate of two hours’ duration, that the precise offence of the bishops should be left unspecified, and that the Lords should be asked to exclude the bishops from voting on their own impeachments. The debate drew speeches from D’Ewes, Vane II and Oliver Cromwell. The address Pym gave to the Lords, augmented by the legal arguments formulated by Oliver St John, was by comparison brief and plain, though it was a version of this speech that was published.328D’Ewes (C), 40-1; LJ iv. 407b; Diurnall Occurrences, 388-90 (E.523.1). On the 29th, according to a printed report, it was Pym who moved that five new bishops should be challenged as to the authority for their nomination, but D’Ewes attributed the initiative to Sir Walter Erle, one of his junto associates. The motion stimulated a prolonged debate, revitalized at one point by Cromwell, on the wider question of bishops, everyone recognizing the distance between the total abolitionists and those sympathetic to primitive episcopacy. Once again, Pym’s personal view on this topic, especially if it was indeed not his own motion, remains uncertain, and he was certainly not named to the committee on it that ended the day’s proceedings.329Diurnall Occurrences, 399 (E.523.1); D’Ewes (C), 51-4. His reticence may have owed something to the fact that one of the five episcopal nominees was his kinsman, Ralph Brownrigg, but in any case his interest in bishops as an object of reform seems to have been confined to their parliamentary functions as a component in the legislature, and his evident enthusiasm for a ‘declaration’ that was to emerge eventually as the Grand Remonstrance was at this point because of its value as a mechanism for a post-recess summary of remaining grievances.330D’Ewes (C), 47, 52.

Pym continued to initiate parliamentary activity relating to the detection and explanation of plotting, by bringing to the attention of the House those suspects bailed by the serjeant-at-arms, and by opening the debate on how to deal with two judges to be impeached, noting (rather unconvincingly) that a long time had elapsed since Parliament had dealt with traitors (28 Oct.). On 30 October, the Speaker’s afternoon rest period was terminated, after a session of the close committee, by Pym’s arrival in the chamber. The latter reported on the examinations of a number of suspects, but delivered further revelations on plots surrounding the queen mother, in Hampshire by recusants, the prince of Wales’s protracted sojourns with his mother’s Catholic entourage, and links between educational influences on the prince and plots in Scotland and England. ‘He feared the conspiracy went round.’331D’Ewes (C), 48, 52, 58-9. The House accepted his proposal that the Lords should be asked to join in a petition to confine the prince to his governor, the marquess of Hertford (William Seymour†), and he managed the subsequent conference which saw the Lords concur.332CJ ii. 300a; D’Ewes (C), 60; CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 147-8. The illegal levies of vestrymen, the exaction of fees by law court officials and the oppressions of the Vintners were all subjects of motions by Pym (29 Oct.); he was added to the committee on the poll tax, named earlier in the day, to investigate these, and no doubt intended their inclusion in the Grand Remonstrance.333Diurnall Occurrences, 400 (E.523.1); CJ ii. 298b.

These priorities were temporarily overshadowed on 1 November when the news of the rebellion in Ireland reached Westminster. Pym’s kinsman Clotworthy was voted the task of sifting intelligence about it, because it was a servant of his who had broken the news. Pym moved that Clotworthy’s man should be examined carefully by both Houses, and it was he and his friends Clotworthy, Whitelocke and Holles who managed the first of two conferences that day with the Lords.334CJ ii. 300b, 301a; D’Ewes (C), 63. Throughout November and December, Pym was prominent in devising the parliamentary response to the revolt. From the conference on 1 November emerged the bicameral committee for Irish affairs, which took immediate chief responsibility for devising and implementing the military response to the rebellion. It was quite effective in focusing quickly on the fiscal and logistical problems that would confront any punitive expedition that was planned from London, and over the coming months the details ‘were invariably reported to the Commons by John Pym’.335CJ ii. 302a, 313b, 331b, 333b, 335a, 338a, 340a; R. Armstrong, ‘Ireland at Westminster: the Long Parliament’s Irish Committees, 1641-1647’, in C.R. Kyle and J.T. Peacey eds. Parliament at Work (Woodbridge, 2002), 80. Just three days after hearing of the rebellion, Pym was able easily to persuade the House to allow the earl of Newport (Mountjoy Blount), Warwick’s half-brother and master of the ordnance, to assemble armaments to support the 2nd earl of Leicester (Robert Sidney†) in raising an army for Ireland.336D’Ewes (C), 86. He was able to exploit his mastery of the House to reverse committee decisions that went against him, as on 5 November, when at a ‘thin’ committee there had been an attempt to repudiate a resolution of the Commons to accept the Scots’ offer of military help in Ireland.337D’Ewes (C), 90-1. During those two months Pym reported on 15 conferences which the Lords had requested, and managed another 23 initiated by the Commons. The majority of these could be described as relating to public safety, but Ireland was the most discussed single topic, accounting for 16 of the conferences in that period that were attributable to Pym’s managerial skills.338CJ ii. 312a,b, 335b, 336a, 337a, 338a, 341b, 348a, 349a, 350b, 353a, 361a,b, 362a (conferences on Ire.).

From the outset, Pym treated the events in Ireland as another dimension to a single conspiracy threatening to engulf the three kingdoms. The earliest demonstration of this came on 1 November, which proved an illustration of Pym’s genius for political opportunism. Before the heads were concluded for the first conference after news broke of the rebellion, Pym had insinuated into them proposals to remove the 2nd earl of Portland (Jerome Weston†) from command of the Isle of Wight and to confine Catholics to counties of residence.339D’Ewes (C), 64. To demonstrate the interconnectedness of events, he urged that the favoured servant of Clotworthy should be examined on oath by the Lords at the same time as the suspected Father Phillips. It was Pym who read the questions to Clotworthy’s man and then reported to the House on the narrative he gave.340D’Ewes (C), 67, 71, 73, 75. An element in the junto’s response evident in Pym’s strategy was the need to harness Scots military help in Ireland as quickly as possible, Pym presenting reports to indicate that the Irish rebels were fearful of retribution by Scots forces.341D’Ewes (C), 137; R. Armstrong, Protestant War (Manchester, 2005), 47-8. When St John moved to ask the Scots for 1,000 men (5 Nov.), Pym argued powerfully that while no-one could be more willing than he to commit his person and estate to the cause, all would be futile unless the king, still in Scotland, would rid himself of the evil counsellors that continued to surround him. He went on audaciously to suggest that if the king failed to comply, the Parliament should consider itself absolved from needing to intervene in Ireland. This provoked opposition from Hyde and from Edmund Waller*, who allowed his anger to lead him into comparing Pym with Strafford. Pym duly exacted the apology to the House and to him.342D’Ewes (C), 95; CJ ii. 306a.

He lined up the committee for Irish affairs behind him on this message to the king of conditional support, but when it came to the debate on the 6th, there was substantial opposition to the last clause in the instructions to the parliamentary commissioners in Scotland, which would have embodied the controversial condition. On the 8th, the final version was modified so that it conveyed to the king the Members’ intention to secure Ireland in a way that would secure the Parliament.343D’Ewes (C), 98-102, 104-5. When on the afternoon of the following day, Pym managed the conference on the final instructions to the commissioners, he spoke for a quarter of an hour on evil counsellors. Sir William Lewis by torchlight read the completed document, and then Pym took it to the Lords where he made a supporting speech articulating current junto thinking. Both the text and Pym’s address went well beyond repeating the request that the king rid himself of evil counsellors to predict that all efforts to reform or redress would be futile unless malign counsels were dismissed; and boldly intimated that unless the executive were in the hands of well-affected individuals, Parliament would find ways of securing Ireland by its own means, calling upon the king to appoint only ministers of whom Parliament approved.344D’Ewes (C), 111, 112; LJ iv. 430b-432b. A bowdlerized version of Pym’s speech was published, omitting the more provocative promises of parliamentary initiative.345The Substance of Mr Pymms Speech (1641, E.199.24).

By the 9th, Pym had met Leicester’s doubts on the validity of his commission by persuading the House to declare the planned Irish expedition secure through an ordinance ‘well made’, and to answer his own call for immediate funding, successfully moved that any City merchants who advanced money for the cause of Ireland would be repaid from contributions at the Guildhall on the authority of the Commons.346D’Ewes (C), 109, 110; CJ ii. 309a. Pym spoke eloquently of the amity between Commons and City (11 Nov.), more than hinting at the reciprocity of cash advances and political rewards.347Kent History and Library Centre, U269/F3/1. Among the other expedients agreed between the Irish affairs committee and the House under the leadership of Pym and his fellow junto-men were the composition of the council of war (9 Nov.), the transportation of foreign coin to Ireland, the recalling of landless English Catholics in Ireland (10 Nov.) and the structure of the expeditionary force (17 Nov.).348D’Ewes (C), 110, 111, 115, 116, 159-60. But Pym’s role went far beyond acting as a simple intermediary between House and committee. On 8 December in the Commons he spent the morning displaying and reading a number of letters from Ireland. Among these was one showing how an Irish peer, Lord Dillon, who had recently attended Charles in Scotland, had been acting as intermediary between the Irish rebels and the king, with no reference to the English Parliament. His negotiating package had included concessions to the majority Catholic populace in Ireland, and after debate, Pym must easily have extracted from the Commons a resolution that it would never consent to toleration of Catholicism, a declaration extended at the instigation of Holles to include the whole of the king’s dominions.349CJ ii. 335a; D’Ewes (C) 250-4; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 396-7. Pym’s later interrogation of Dillon (reported 27 Dec.) would reveal a further project on Irish governance of which the king was thought to be aware, to push aside lords justices in favour of rule by the 12th earl of Ormond [I], which was bound to be seen at Westminster as a modification of Strafford’s regime.350CJ ii. 357a,b; D’Ewes (C), 351-2. Later in the day’s proceedings on 8 December, Pym was at the centre of the drafting of instructions from both Houses to parliamentary envoys on the terms of Scots military aid, itself the start of a further flurry of inter-cameral conferencing.351CJ ii. 335b, 336a, 337a, 338a, 341b.

Even Pym could not encompass every activity that the Commons had in train in the weeks after news of the Irish rebellion broke. On 8 November, the declaration which became known as the Grand Remonstrance, a summary of all the ills of the kingdom, to be delivered to the king, was read, and debated the following day. This idea had been first mooted by Pym in November 1640, and indeed can be seen as a codification of what had been a constant theme in his thinking since April that year at the latest: the notion that a grand popish conspiracy provided a web that linked all the manifestations of political, religious, social and economic ills in the state. The remonstrance had surfaced from time to time since, but only in November 1641 was it revived in such a way that it was given sufficient parliamentary time to be brought to a conclusion. It was doubtless the imminent return of the king to London, accomplished on 24 November, that provided the focus for completion, and equally clearly it was Pym’s preoccupation with Irish affairs that ensured that he personally should not be credited with the drafting of the remonstrance in its entirety, even if his thinking is plainly visible in it.352CJ ii. 308b, 309a, 320a,b; A. Fletcher, Outbreak of English Civil War (1981), 81-2. As printed (15 Dec.), it included a call for efforts to ‘unite the two kingdoms of England and Scotland to be mutually aiding and assisting of one another for the common good of the island’, an allusion to the contribution the Scots might make to quelling Ireland.353A Remonstrance of the State of the Kingdom (1641), 52 (E.181.2). There was no question that Pym was strongly supportive of the remonstrance, demonstrated coruscatingly when in debate he clashed with Hyde, Falkland and Culpeper (22 Nov.), whose disparaging remarks on the remonstrance provoked Pym into a combative defence

The honour of the king is the safety of his people. That he had thrust home all the plots and designs to the court, and it’s time to speak plain English, lest posterity shall say that England was lost and no man durst speak truth.354D’Ewes (C), 184n.

Pym noted the contagion of popery in the highest state offices – ‘Shall we forget that the lord treasurer died a papist? that a secretary was a papist?’ – and came closer than usual to blaming the king, whose officers had surely been of his own choosing. Reports of this speech noted his strong condemnation of ‘altar-worship’ as ‘idolatry’ that was initiated and fostered by bishops in their cathedrals. Learning would be more effectively encouraged ‘in the general’, by which he presumably meant that the work of the church would be better managed in a structure where hierarchy was levelled. On this occasion he denounced ‘sectaries’ and implied that Laud should be viewed simply as one of a variety of individuals and causes that were attempting to divide the church. The speech is also of interest because Pym rejected any suggestion that the remonstrance itself should be subject to scrutiny or revision by the Lords, knowing as he did that his friends in the Lords could not prevent its being rejected there: it was a summary of business transacted by the Commons that came to the House by the representative process. Furthermore, it was intended that the remonstrance should be printed, and this appeal to the people was deplored by Pym’s opponents. ‘This declaration will bind the people’s hearts to us, when they see how we have been used’, Pym is recorded by Ralph Verney* as asserting against his critics.355D’Ewes (C), 184n, 185n; Verney, Notes, 123; HMC Cowper, ii. 295. The debate ended, after the remonstrance was passed, at 2 a.m.356D’Ewes (C), 187. Having deployed the full weight of his authority to see off the naysayers, Pym put himself at the head of a committee to draft a petition from both Houses that would accompany the remonstrance to the king. It would naturally include congratulations to him on his safe return, but by including a call for bishops to be secluded from the upper House it by-passed the legislation stalled in the Lords. Among the challenges on procedural grounds (27 Nov.), he encountered came one from a frequent opponent, Sir John Strangways, but he also found support, including from the Speaker. The original draft of the petition, from which a fair copy was made and delivered to the king on 1 December, bears evidence of alterations in Pym’s hand. A few days before this, Pym had outlined the protocols to be adopted when the king was presented with the documents, but he himself was not part of the delegation to Hampton Court.357CJ ii. 326a, 327b; D’Ewes (C), 203-4, 205, 212-3; PA, Main Pprs. 1 Dec. 1641.

The Five Members, Dec. 1641-Jan. 1642

The reasons for Pym’s determination not to venture from Westminster on 1 December, despite his prominence in drafting the petition, are easy to discern. For at least a month, the basic security of the state had come to seem in doubt, and when effective security was achieved, it needed to be under parliamentary control. A committee had been named to draft an ‘ordinance’ (in the king’s continued absence) on setting the militia on alert (15 Nov.), with conferences on reviewing the governorships of forts so that they were in reliable hands. The 3rd earl of Essex was named in the ordinance as a lord general of militia. The safety of the Isle of Wight was one concern; English coastal waters were another.358CJ ii. 316b, 317a, 318b, 321a; D’Ewes (C), 147. The anxiety induced by these deficiencies can only have been made more acute by intelligence suggesting the security of Members themselves was uncertain. It was with this news that Pym interrupted debate on the remonstrance (15 Nov.), and followed it up, regularly and characteristically, with further revelations of dangerous men who were sheltering in the London residences of prominent Catholics (16 Nov.); or arriving in the metropolis from counties where Catholicism was undoubtedly prevalent (17 Nov.); or under George Goring* at Portsmouth (19 Nov.); or gathering in East Anglia (20 Nov.); or arrived from Ireland (24 Nov); or looking to the persistently ‘very dangerous’ Father Phillips (20, 23, 24, 30 Nov., 18 Dec.).359D’Ewes (C), 144, 149,163, 165, 168-9, 178, 180, 190, 191, 196, 213, 317. Any who imagined that the king’s return would ease the situation would be mistaken. As soon as Charles was back in the capital, he sought to stand down the guard outside the Houses themselves, ostensibly claiming that his own person was a sufficient guarantee of public safety. The Lords requested a conference to report this, and Pym brought back the news to the Commons (26 Nov.). At least one commentator suggested that Pym was initially relaxed about this, and if true, it can only have been because he anticipated a quick acceptance of Essex’s appointment as general of militia.360CJ ii. 325a; D’Ewes (C), 200-1; HMC Buccleuch, i. 286. In view of the continuing unrest on the streets of Westminster, however, it was inevitable that here was developing a contest for control over parliamentary security, and on 30 November Pym brought from a Commons committee a reasoned case to be submitted to Lords and king why their guard should be under the control of a parliamentary nominee, with defensive cover provided by the London authorities to remedy the current emergency.361CJ ii. 326a, 327b; D’Ewes (C), 217, 219.

Pym was – probably inevitably – implicated in the worsening direct relations between king and Parliament after Charles’s return. It was John Wylde, not Pym, who brought in a bill to recruit soldiers for service in Ireland (4 Nov.), but after its passage through the Commons the bill happened to be in debate in the Lords when the king dropped in on the Upper House on 6 December. He objected to the aspects of the bill that would have restricted the king’s powers of impressment, and the Lords accordingly amended it.362CJ ii. 305a,b; D’Ewes (C), 83-4; LJ iv. 463b. Pym’s report on the 7th, of conferences on this matter, was overshadowed by the bill brought in by Sir Arthur Hesilrige on a commander for the English militia, a scheme supported by Pym and given life by a majority of 33 in a division. The matter blew up again a week later (14 Dec.), when the king summoned the Commons to tell them he looked favourably on the bill but stipulated a clause to safeguard what he took to be his prerogative. After the king’s speech, Pym persuaded an unruly House that a conference with the Lords was required, in the light of what he took to be two breaches of privilege, one in the king’s interference in a bill in progress, and another in the attempt to interpolate a clause. Pym succeeded in convincing the Lords, and quickly completed both a ‘declaratory protestation’ and a ‘petitionary remonstrance’, which went through the Commons in six resolutions and were fair-copied into the Commons Journal (16 Dec.). Pym’s aggressive demand that the few noes should explain themselves was one of his proposals not adopted.363CJ ii. 334b, 335a, 343a,b, 345a; LJ iv. 475b; D’Ewes (C), 287-8, 297-9.

The speed with which the Lords approved these declarations is hard to reconcile with the picture painted by Pym on 3 December of a foot-dragging upper chamber. On that occasion, he successfully moved for a committee on legislation held up by the Lords. The appointees were all reliable junto collaborators, with the notable exception of Culpeper. He spoke of the good bills not passed because of the Lords’ obstructivism, and urged that if they persisted, the Commons should

join with those Lords who are more careful of the safety of the kingdom, they [the Lords] being but private persons, and [the Commons] having a liberty of Protestation, shall join with them to represent the same to his majesty.364D’Ewes (C), 228.

The legislation blocked in the Lords that exercised him included the bill on bishops’ exclusion, but while that had at least been addressed in the Grand Remonstrance, the Lords’ attitude towards disarming recusants was surely the frustration that provoked him into his threat on 3 December. Although a bill for disarming recusants had tortuously made its passage through the Lords during the summer, the peers had spectacularly failed to respond to demands from the Commons to identify the recusants among their own number, however well-known at large their names would have been.365LJ iv. 305a, 306a, 308b, 316b, 319b, 328b, 333b, 369b, 373b, 384b, 441b, 443a, 445a. After an expression of exasperation by the Commons on 17 November, the bill promised by the peers had seemed doomed to be transmitted indefinitely between the Houses as Pym’s fears of a universal plot intensified.366LJ iv. 445b, 446a, 447a, 448b, 449a, 450b, 452a, 456a,b. As a serious statement of intent, Pym’s outburst on 3 December cannot be taken seriously: the 23 conferences with the Lords in which he was active in the rest of the month point in the direction of his unflagging and usually patient negotiation, and it is telling that commentators noted that a sympathetic news sheet did not include Pym’s ‘desperate motion’ in its reporting.367HMC Buccleuch, i. 288.

Even as the immediate fear over the parliamentary guard eased, a new anxiety arose (23 Dec.), this time first articulated by the City authorities, on the control of the Tower of London, the country’s most strategically crucial fortress. There were good reasons to doubt the character and credentials of Thomas Lunsford, recently made governor by the king in disregard of the inevitable backlash his appointment would provoke. Pym managed the consultations with the Lords, and depicted the appointment (24 Dec.) as another advance in the all-enveloping popish menace.368CJ ii. 355a, 356b; D’Ewes (C), 339, 345, 346-7. And when all this and the Irish revelations were persuading MPs like D’Ewes that ‘all things hastened apace to confusion and calamity’, news came via the Lords (27 Dec.) that the king had been looking into a rumour that Pym and his coadjutors in both Houses had at a meeting in Kensington contemplated seizing the queen and the royal children during the king’s absence in Scotland. Pym was quick to turn the matter into a conference on slanders against the Members, but it was an ominous insight into current royal thinking and into the fearfulness of the junto.369CJ ii. 358a, 359a; LJ iv. 490b; D’Ewes (C), 353. A month earlier, he himself had been the intended victim of a plot uncovered in the City to murder ‘rascally Puritan Pym’.370LJ iv. 439b. Despite the king’s evident suspicions of the junto, it seemed to be making the running on the question of the expeditionary force to Ireland. The triumvirate of Warwick, Pym and Sir Henry Mildmay had gained a toehold on naval affairs in September, and now Pym headed five conferences or committees in two days (28, 29 Dec.) on naval transport for troops to Ireland.371CJ ii. 360a, 361a,b, 362a.

While this was developing inside the palace of Westminster, the London crowd jostled the bishops outside, on their way into the Lords (29 Dec.), the culmination of several days’ disorder around the Houses. It coincided with the naming by Walter Long* of John Digby†, 1st earl of Bristol as an incendiary in Ireland.372CJ ii. 362a,b; D’Ewes (C), 352, 358, 364. Pym spoke to argue that the Commons should not fear to intervene where it could in the affairs of the Lords, from the

respect due from one House to another ... if anything be done in either contrary to the respect and justice which they ought to bear to one another ... the House may take notice of it and require justice.373D’Ewes (C), 361n.

Pym returned to the Commons after an unusually long conference to move that ‘army’ watches be maintained in Westminster. The previous day, he acknowledged the legitimacy of the London crowd: ‘God forbid that the House of Commons should proceed in any way to dishearten people to obtain their just desires in such a way’, and the watches were intended at least as much against the assembly of armed supporters of the king as they were against boisterous citizens.374D’Ewes (C), 356n, 364; Clarendon, Hist. i. 452. On the 30th, the House was formally apprised of the petition to the king by 12 bishops, asserting their undoubted right to sit and vote in the Lords. After the conference on this had been reported, Pym moved that the doors of the chamber be locked, and then outlined a plot against the Commons in which Lunsford was thought to be leading a hostile force. It needed in his view to be foiled by a counter-display by the City militia regiments, although some Members counselled instead a flight to the Guildhall. Nearly the whole House went up to the Lords with the message impeaching the bishops, but Pym’s suggestion at their return of another conference, on the need for another guard, was accepted, and Pym managed the resulting consultations, on the safety of the kingdom as well as that of the Commons.375CJ ii. 363b, 365b; D’Ewes (C), 365-8.

The Members were highly apprehensive at the prospect of an intervention by the king’s armed retinue headed by Lunsford, and on the 31st resolved that both the committee for Irish affairs and the new Commons committee of 12 on public safety, in which Pym’s name was listed second, after that of Holles, should meet the following day at the Guildhall. The meeting duly took place, and Pym reported from it on 3 January, the next time the House assembled. His report brought worse intelligence on the milling about London of 4-500 ‘desperate and loose persons’. Any remaining semblance of normality in the day’s proceedings was quickly dispelled first by news that the king’s men had sealed up the lodgings of Pym and other vocal opposition parliament-men, then by the appearance of the serjeant-at-arms with a message to the Speaker to detain them.376CJ ii. 366a,b, 367a; D’Ewes (C), 375-7. Pym was forewarned by the sympathetic French ambassador of the personal attempt by the king the following day to arrest the ‘Five Members’ in the Commons and a junto-man, Lord Kimbolton (Edward Montagu†) in the Lords. He himself brought an accurate account from the Lords of the articles of high treason preferred against them there, but printed speeches by Pym and Hampden were long ago shown to have been contemporary forgeries. When reports came of armed men in Whitehall, Pym moved sending to the London authorities to mobilise the militia regiments, but was forced to escape Westminster for the City before any action could be taken.377CJ ii. 368a; LJ iv. 500b, 501a; D’Ewes (C), 379-383; Master Pym his Speech (1642, E.200.4); Gardiner, Hist. Eng. x. 135n. The king’s actions could only be interpreted as an attempt on Pym’s life, so there has been a reluctance to give credence to evidence that at some point on 1 January Pym was approached for one last time with an offer from the king of the chancellorship.378Procs. in Kent 1640 ed. Larking, 68. If the report was accurate, Pym evidently rejected the king’s gesture out of hand, and the post was instead bestowed on his political enemy, Culpeper. But both the job offer and the articles of high treason were attempts to coerce Pym, alternative strategies for bringing to an end the encroachments by the junto in both Houses on the executive authority of the king.

Retaliation and declarations, Jan.-Aug. 1642

It was not until 10 January that the Five Members re-appeared in the Commons: the date also of the king’s departure from London to Hampton Court, never to return until long after Pym’s death.379PJ i. 29. During that month and February, home security and that of Ireland absorbed most of Pym’s attention. This was played out against a background in which threats and reports of threats against his person were a recurring theme, which began on 4 January after the king had made his ill-judged appearance in the Commons. The House generally fell in behind him to try to investigate and punish the perpetrators, but this kind of intelligence can only have intensified Pym’s sense of a deepening conspiracy affecting him personally, as well as against the commonwealth.380CJ ii. 369b, 377a, 427a, 471b, 478b; PJ i. 257, 299, 349, 448. He was the first-named to a committee on a bill to enable Parliament to adjourn from place to place (11 Jan.), but his earliest substantial political task was to secure the agreement of the Lords to assign the Tower in effect to the care of the London militia, headed by Philip Skippon*, so that a governor judged to be more sympathetic to Parliament than Sir John Byron† could be installed. There was some opposition to this in the Commons, despite the current emergency, and it was not until early February, and then by means of a bicameral committee, that a short petition to the king was drafted by Pym, incorporating the command of the Tower in the broader call for the militia to be placed into the hands of those nominated by Parliament. The idea was not new, but this time it was pointedly articulated in a petition with only this one request (2 Feb.).381CJ ii. 370a, 372a,b, 373b, 376b, 381a, 409a,b; PJ i. 40, 41, 42, 76, 77, 117. In response, the king asked for clarification on the extent of the demanded authority, while conceding that he intended to abandon the pursuit of Pym and the others he had sought on 4 January.382Two Petitions (1642, E.134.20).

Pym was pressing home the advantage bestowed on him by a perception of crisis in the country as well as in London. The security situation outside London had deteriorated, with reports about the safety of Hull, Berkshire and Surrey feeding into the anxiety.383CJ ii. 380a, 381a; PJ i. 36, 67. Furthermore, there were petitions from London, Middlesex, Essex and Hertfordshire which on 24 January were passed to Pym, Nathaniel Fiennes I, Hampden, Strode and Samuel Browne to confer on with the Lords. Pym managed both the drafting of heads and the resulting conference, which saw the Commons delegation ask for the Lords’ concurrence on the perceived dangers of a stop to the process of religious reformation, the popish menace and delay in suppressing the rebellion in Ireland, and on the need for the country to be placed on military alert. Pym’s success in presenting the Commons case to the Lords (25 Jan.) was judged meritorious enough for him to be asked to print his speech on that occasion, an address which, listing ‘obstructions’, took the petitions as speaking for England, and was another example of Pym’s capacity for hitting on memorable, even if familiar, figures of speech. Evil counsels around the king were the source of the ‘common and epidemical disease wherein this commonwealth lies now gasping’. Foreign states took advantage of the turmoil in Ireland; papists continued to swarm; unemployment, for instance in the clothing industries, was high and produced unrest; there was danger of Irish rebels arriving in England intent on revolt. Pym devoted significant time in this speech to an analysis of the ‘stop of trade’ which gripped London and the home counties. He vindicated Parliament’s efforts at suppressing monopolies, freeing trade and loosening trading privileges, interpreting the parliamentary intervention at the Tower as not only a security measure but also a gesture which should be encouraging merchants to bring in bullion to the mint and to make available money for the Irish campaign. Pym’s assertion that ‘diseases of the brain are most dangerous, because from thence sense and motion are derived to the whole body’ was simply an extension of the metaphor of body politic as human, and his peroration an appeal to the Lords not to allow posterity to record that the Commons was ‘inforced to save the kingdom alone’.384CJ ii. 393b, 394a, 395a; A Speech delivered at a Conference (1642, E.200.21, E.200.22); A Speech delivered at a Conference (1642), 15-21 (E.200.23). In the event it was a remark buried in the address, to the effect that principal rebel commanders had been allowed by the king’s warrant to circumvent Parliament’s closure of the ports, that provoked Charles into raising an objection to the printed speech, but the resulting Commons committee, which included Pym himself, politely endorsed it.385CJ ii. 420a, 423a.

Pym had expressed regret in this speech at the ‘shame and dishonour’ to the English that the Scots were more advanced than they were in putting down the Irish rebellion. He had himself contributed to the treaty with the Scots by which they agreed to send troops to Ulster, but to a lesser extent, for example, than did the prominent Yorkshire reformist Member, Philip Stapilton. On 20 December 1641, with Holles and Stapilton he managed a conference on the Scottish treaty, and was at hand on 17 January 1642 to be asked with others including Stapilton, Hampden, Fiennes and Vane II to offer thanks to the Scots commissioners for their contribution, ‘of great advantage to both nations’.386CJ ii. 350b, 386a; ‘Sir Philip Stapilton’, infra. It was Pym who was credited in a printed speech, which cannot be considered a fabrication, with delivering the thanks, which stressed ‘brotherly communion’, the need to persuade the king of the real causes of the state’s distempers, the subversive nature of the popish conspiracy, to which the ‘prelates’ contributed, and the paramount role to be played by Parliament in settling the anxieties of the king’s subjects in all his kingdoms.387A Message of Thankes (1642), 2-4 (E.134.14); Morrill, ‘Unweariableness’, 37, 51 n. 135.

Even more attention was bestowed by Pym on Irish affairs early in 1642. The committee for Irish affairs had removed to the Guildhall before 4 January, and it was Pym’s power-base in the uncertain days of early January. Because the efforts to build a war chest for Ireland necessarily sprang from the City, the Irish affairs committee assumed a wider remit than its name might suggest, for example allocating under Pym’s direction £20,000 for Ireland on the same day (20 Jan.) as it ordered arms movements from the Tower.388PJ i. 117. Pym was the committee’s principal spokesman in the Commons early in 1642, and reported its decisions on arms shipments (20 Jan.); remuneration for the lord lieutenant and his officers, and penalties for delay on their part (26 Jan., 1 Feb.); the names of commissioned officers (24 Jan.-10 Feb.); strategies for overcoming the shortage of coin in Ireland (15 Feb.); plans for collaboration with the Scots on ammunition, and on moving arms for Ireland from Hull (19 Feb.).389CJ ii. 391b, 397a, 398b, 418b, PJ i. 117, 118, 178, 239, 336, 383, 419. It was Pym who moved (28 Jan.) for a reward to be bestowed on the servant of Clotworthy, who according to parliamentary lore first brought news of the Irish revolt.390PJ i. 208. The principal agency for developing the parliamentary response to the Irish rebellion remained the bicameral committee for Irish affairs, but this unwieldy body of 28 peers and 56 from the Commons, whose size was a reflection of the seriousness of the threat, was evidently unfit for the purpose of executive action. The City base of the committee for Irish affairs was more than a mere meeting place. Pym worked to encourage the City leaders to bring their resources to bear on the Irish emergency, successfully arguing (3 Feb.), that contributions from London should be prioritized in the fund-raising process, but less successfully (15 Feb.) for a new committee to find ways of speedy borrowing. The scheme known as the Irish Adventure was based on a statute that was ordered after a City petition (19 Feb.), and received royal assent on 19 March. Pym played no known part in the drafting, but within days of the act receiving royal assent (19 Mar.), personally invested the first tranche of what was to be a total of £600.391PJ i. 267, 384, 484-5; CJ ii. 425a,b; CSP Ire. Adv. pp. vi.-viii, 188. Given both the high level of interest he had shown in colonial and business schemes during the 1630s, and the amount of money he was willing to hazard in them, this was very small beer, and it confirms that for Pym Ireland was solely a battleground for political authority and public safety.

A scheme to invest oversight of Irish affairs in a small executive commissioned body had been promoted by Sir Philip Stapilton on 17 December, but it was Erle and Pym who had set up a conference the next day to move the matter forward.392D’Ewes (C), 309; CJ ii. 348a, 349a. In the aftermath of the Five Members episode, efforts were made by the Commons to bring this to fruition: at Merchant Taylors’ Hall (3 Feb.), Pym brought in the instructions to the commissioners, of whom he was to be one. When Wylde brought in the list of commissioners the following day, some balked at the principle of nominating commissioners by parliamentary committee and not by the king’s letters patent, especially since the approving meeting in the City had been poorly attended. The scheme survived the hazard posed by a division of the House, and on the 7th, Pym had the elaborate instructions, which he probably drafted, formally adopted and copied into the Journal.393PJ i. 266, 268-9, 300-1; CJ ii. 414a, 417b-418b. Ominously for the plan for speedy completion, Pym was obliged to report that the Lords refused to contribute the ‘proportionable number’ of commissioners from their own House (11 Feb.), so the scheme was recommitted.394PJ i. 350. Pym continued to progress it through sub-committee (e.g. 14 Feb.) and had the House adopt it again on the 24th, but not without conflict between himself and Erle (16 Feb.). No sooner had the House approved the names, than the king sent word that he remained unhappy about Pym’s speech of 25 January on Ireland, signalling that commissioners for Ireland were unlikely to meet with immediate royal approval.395PJ i. 369-70, 395; CJ ii. 453b Names of commissioners passed the Lords on 14 March.396LJ iv. 644b.

In the light of the attempts on his life implicit in the treason articles against him, an antipathy between Pym and the king that was becoming unbridgeable is hardly surprising. His commitment to the project of securing the finances of the king’s government on a generous and expansive basis, which had been sustained through 1641, began to slip in January 1642. D’Ewes noted how Pym, Holles and a few others ‘with great violence’ insisted on a second reading of the tonnage and poundage bill (26 Jan.), only so it could be rejected.397PJ i. 177. The topic of monopoly or unfair trading advantage by the Vintners, which they had enjoyed since 1637, was an interest of Pym’s that went back at least to the Short Parliament, and may have derived from his membership of the struggling French Company, and his sympathies with the south-western dominated merchants trading with Spain. His proposal (5 Feb.) that the committee on the Vintners should be empowered to compound with them fell on stony ground, but it was an illustration of his increasing interest in revenue schemes initiated by the Houses themselves.398PJ i. 284, 327; CJ ii. 414b, 422b; Procs. Short Parl. 260; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 5; Procs. LP, iv. 466, 630; R. Kilvert, A Reply to a Most Untrue Relation (1641, E.175.10); M. Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1995), 141-4. Even so, he was careful to avoid adopting too vengeful an approach to public policy. He largely kept out of the inquiries into the events of 4 January, and no particular influence of his can be detected in the draft ‘Declaration of Ways and Means’ (as a recent historian has called it), which failed to reach fruition.399Verney, Notes, 145-7; C. Tyler, ‘Drafting the Nineteen Propositions, January-July 1642’, Parlty. Hist. xxxi. 266-8. Neither did he initiate the moves to impeach the attorney-general, Edward Herbert I*, who had brought in the articles of treason against him; although the king’s attempt at deflecting the planned impeachment of Herbert by a general pardon was too much for Pym, who urged a fresh petition in its favour (7 Feb.).400PJ i. 307. Doubtless because of his workload and his general avoidance of committing his time to detailed legislative drafting, he played no part in developing the militia ordinance as supervised by William Pierrepont and approved by the Lords on 5 March. Rather, he contributed more than anyone else to sustaining an atmosphere and outlook in the Commons that enabled that ordinance to go through, and he certainly voted for it.401Add. 37343, f. 245. On the day John Wylde took the impeachment of Herbert to the Lords (14 Feb.), Pym followed him up with newly intercepted letters, first revealed to the Commons, showing how George, Lord Digby was apparently intent on building a response abroad to ‘violence’ against the king, which could to parliament-men only be interpreted as another incendiary threat against themselves.402CJ ii. 431a, 432a; LJ iv. 582a,b; PJ i. 404. Pym’s part in the resulting impeachment articles against Digby (22 Feb.) was to ensure that they received a favourable hearing in the Lords, and he performed a similar role in the final days before the peers passed the militia ordinance. On 1 March, Wylde took to the Lords the corresponding bill clearing Pym and the other Five Members.403CJ ii. 433a, 440a, 441a, 442b, 443a, 460b, 464b, 462b; LJ iv. 616a, 645a, 649a; PJ i. 465, 476.

Pym made sure that the continuing turmoil in Ireland, and the entire ‘British’ dimension of the crisis, never fell out of parliamentary focus, by repeatedly laying before the Commons fresh intelligence which correspondents and informants must by this time have been passing to him as a matter of course. By these means he was able to announce, for example, attacks on the Scots in Ulster (7 Feb.), the sufferings of the governor of County Clare (7 Feb.), the unpatriotic behaviour of the earl of Peterborough (John Mordaunt) (12 Feb.), the military plans of the marquess of Argyle [S], who would be subject to the command of the English lord lieutenant of Ireland (22 Feb.), the siege of Waterford (24 Feb.), correspondence with Jesuits in Scotland and Ireland (24 Feb.), and better news from Drogheda (7 Mar.).404PJ i. 300, 301, 361, 443, 449, 459; ii. 2; CJ ii. 449b, 450a, 453a,b, 477a. In nearly all these and similar cases, he would follow up the news with a specific motion, rarely waiting for others to fill the void. Quite how pre-eminent he was in initiating motions is probably beyond recall, as the Journal clerks were accustomed to recording outcomes not origins of business; but between January and the end of July 1642, 90 motions at the very least were brought in by Pym, and the vast majority were adopted by the Commons.405PJ i-iii. As well as being a principal intelligencer to the Commons, which he seems to have become purely by seniority and esteem (with behind him a central place in a powerful political network), rather than ex officio as a committee chairman, he was also its chief apologist. Within days of his 25 January speech (from 29 Jan.), he was at work on a summary Declaration, intended for publication, and he was assisted from 15 February by Sir Henry Vane II, Wylde, Edmund Prideaux I, Hampden, Fiennes I and Barrington. Additional material was soon added by Pym, including denunciations of trading of public office, which he was called upon to devise on 17 February. Two days later, the document on ‘Grievances and Remedies’ was copied into the Journal, although none of the diarists noted it in their entries for that date.406CJ ii. 402a, 431b, 432b, 438a,b, 440a, 443b-446a; Tyler, ‘Drafting the Nineteen Propositions’, 271. Another speech of Pym’s was printed that day, but the purpose of publication seems to have been to exaggerate progress on the suppression of the Irish rebellion, and it was probably a fabrication.407Mr Pym his Speech in Parliament (1642, E.200.13); Morrill, ‘Unweariableness’, 37, 51 n. 135.

He was helped further (21 Feb.) by the irascible George Peard*, when the document on grievances and remedies went to the Lords.408CJ ii. 447a, 448a. There it remained. A different, and substitutive, draft emerged from a committee at Merchant Taylors’ hall, produced away from Westminster in the halls of livery companies, a mark of its sensitivity, but now reported by Pym. When it came to be debated in the House (4 Mar.) it was challenged by Strangways and then by his fellow future royalist Sir Ralph Hopton, whose assertion that it accused the king of apostacy landed him in the Tower. Pym’s additions, which may have been framed with further advice from Pierrepont, St John, Strode, Holles and Stapilton, included a request that the king should return to London, but when it was presented to Charles at Newmarket (9 Mar.) – by a delegation that pointedly included none of the Five Members – he responded by asking them again for a climb-down on Pym’s January speech.409CJ ii. 467a, 468b, 469b, 470b, 475b; LJ iv. 633a; PJ i. 500-5, 506-7, 509-10; Verney, Notes, 159-60. The previous day in the Commons, Pym had dug his heels in to defend what he had said and published then.410PJ ii. 10. A speech attributed to Pym and supposedly delivered on 17 March echoed some of the imagery of the January speech, albeit in toned-down form, and should probably be judged to have been published with his approval, rather than as a complete fabrication.411Master Pym’s Speech in Parliament (1642, E.200.37); Morrill, ‘Unweariableness’, 37, 51 n. 135. Pym reiterated his position on the 24th, dismissing the call to engage with the king’s repeated line.412PJ ii. 77. The ‘declaration ... about fears and jealousies’ itself took the familiar form of drawing together the evidence of a grand popish conspiracy, but with provocative and memorable examples and images, drawing on reports that the king’s intention was ‘for altering of religion, the breaking the neck of your Parliament’; and that booty captured by Irish rebels ‘they mark with the queen’s mark’, which came closer than ever to a treason accusation against Henrietta Maria. It was Pym’s expostulation against not only the attempted arrest on 4 January, but also against the credence given by the king to the unsubstantiated rumour of a plot by the junto against the royal family. The reasons offered to persuade the king back to London dwelt on the symbolic rather than the practical value of his presence.413A Declaration of the Lords and Commons (1642), 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13-14 (E.138.20).

There was by this time set in train an extended exchange of ‘declarations’, with varying titles, that formed the principal dialogue between king and Parliament, conducted through the medium of print, and with a significant element of continuity and repetition across the corpus of them. Some of the speeches of doubtful attribution date from this period, such as the one dated 8 February, probably composed by Pym but never delivered; and that of 17 March, a version of an earlier address which he probably approved.414Mr Pym his Speech (1642, E.200.26); T.P.S. Woods, Prelude to Civil War (Salisbury, 1980), 27-8, 175, n. 49; Morrill, ‘Unweariableness’. 42, 53 n. 163. Speeches and declarations should be seen as aspects of a single strategy of aggressive publication. Five days after the delegation visited Newmarket, Pym was working on another declaration, on the militia, quickly expanded to include the familiar denunciation of popery. On 19 March, the king arrived at York, and in the Commons Pym was the principal in drafting the heads of a conference with the Lords as well as a riposte to the king’s message of the 9th. As on previous occasions, the record in the Journal appears to have been constructed from drafts supplied by Pym.415CJ ii. 478a, 479a, 486b; PJ ii. 37, 60-1. On 1 April, Lord Robartes (John Robartes) reported in the Lords a conference held with the Commons, at an unspecified earlier time, in which Pym had argued in favour of the stalled ‘grievances and remedies’, listing in detail the perceived objections of the peers and arguments rebutting them. The report was delivered under the subject headings of evil counsellors; a general rather than a selective removal of officers; the removal of papists and Jesuits from the queen’s court; the imposition upon the queen of an oath of loyalty; the marriage of the royal children and the addition or removal of Members of either Commons or Lords to be made only with the Houses’ consent; all of which were comprehended in a declaration rather than a bill because of the need for urgency.416LJ iv. 689a-92a, 692a-93a. Robartes’s report of Pym’s arguments looks like the one he should have made on or just after 21 February, when it was crowded out by other business, and which was now in early April given fresh relevance by a slew of alarming news, including a report by Pym of choices being made in Somerset, ‘of the king’s side and Parliament’.417CJ ii. 503a.

Pym was undoubtedly the most publicly visible face of Parliament throughout these ‘paper skirmishes’, and the king contributed to this impression by repeatedly quoting Pym’s published words in his own declarations, albeit only from a single speech he had made on the Strafford case.418Clarendon, Hist. ii. 32, 52n, 56n. Between the king’s arrival at York and the presentation of the Nineteen Propositions to him there on 1 June, the preparation of declarations by Parliament, or the framing of contributions by Parliament to the increasingly tense dialogue with the king and his advisers took up a significant portion of Pym’s time. So intense was the publication of self-justifying tracts by both sides at this point that it is difficult to distinguish clearly between them in terms of commentary by the diarists. Some of Pym’s input was undoubtedly coloured by deep personal distrust of the king. The failed coup of 4 January was evidence that the king intended violence, and Pym read to the House on 15 March a letter, apparently found in the street, which claimed the king enjoyed reading comprehensive reports on everything Parliament did in secret, that he intended more violence, with French help, and that he claimed the allegiance of the navy, the nobility and gentry.419PJ ii. 40. Between February and the end of June, at the very least 12 libels against Pym, a number of them including threats of lethal violence, were reported in the House, which must surely have contributed in some degree to a personal sense of escalating crisis and vulnerability.420PJ i. 257, 299, 349, 448, ii. 106, 207-8, 241, 382; CJ ii. 471b, 478b, 579b; LJ v. 157a. Judged on their potential threat to his career, rather than his life, the libel with strongest legs was the one first aired in late May, when allegations emerged that he had taken a bribe of £30. Examinations were taken of the informants, and the story was current until 8 July, when it was quashed (the informant retracted months later); but the evidence of Windebanke, an inveterate enemy, can hardly be given much credence, and Pym’s reputation emerged unscathed except among those already his opponents.421HMC Portland, i. 39; PJ ii. 382; CJ ii. 651a, 661b, 806a; LJ v. 181a. An able propagandist working on his behalf by this time was Henry Parker, a client of Lord Saye’s and soon to become secretary to the Committee of Safety, whose lucid commentaries were aimed at dispelling the notion that ‘Master Pym and four or five of his consorts should besot and stupefy two or three hundred gentlemen chosen out of the flower of the kingdom’.422H. Parker, Some Few Observations (1642), 4 (E.151.23).

All of this can only have honed the edge of Pym’s determination. In a debate on the response to one of the declarations from York (4 Apr.), Pym explicitly repudiated any idea that the king had offered indemnity to the Five Members, and one of his own drafts (9 Apr.), struck D’Ewes as ‘full of asperity and fieriness’.423PJ ii. 125, 148. Among the most important of Pym’s drafts was the petition against the king’s quixotic notion of going to Ireland, which as Pym’s published text (22 Apr.) bluntly asserted, not only jeopardised the war effort in train and encouraged the king’s enemies by his personal attention, but also alienated the Adventurers, whose contributions were such a significant element of the intended war-chest. Pym, somewhat impatient of amendments from the floor, took the opportunity gifted him by the king to serve notice that Parliament would not heed whatever commissioners for Ireland the king might appoint unilaterally, and would resist any troops thus deployed, but would look to its own: in fact, the scheme for parliamentary commissioners had at last come to fruition a little over two weeks earlier.424CJ ii. 527b, 531a, 533a, 537a; PJ ii. 169, 171, 182, 183, 200; HMC Portland, i. 35; The Petition of both Houses (1642), 4-7 (Wing E2168); Armstrong, Protestant War, 62. Early in May he was prominent in managing the Commons’ response to the events in Yorkshire, focusing particularly on the refusal of Sir John Hotham* to allow the king into Hull on 23 April.425CJ ii. 542b, 543a,b, 553a, 554b, 556b, 557b, 560b, ; Procs. LP, v. 43a He was responsible for the declaration (15 June, but in preparation from 18 May) which attempted to deflect royal appeals to the Scots by refuting the king’s account to the Scots council of the differences between him and his Parliament, while insisting on the efforts made at Westminster to wean Charles from evil advisers.426Declaration of both Houses of Parliament (1642, 669.f.5.42); PJ ii. 313; CJ ii. 570b, 576a, 578a. On 20 May, a number of votes were taken and then printed, with Pym steering through the process, which asserted publicly that the king, ‘seduced by wicked counsel’, intended ‘to make war against Parliament’.427CJ ii. 580b, 581a,b; The Votes of both Houses (1642, E. 148.16). Ten days later, he was in the same day named to two separate committees to produce separate declarations; one, against the king’s raising of money on the security of the crown jewels, and again asserting the imminence of a war by the king against Parliament, was published the following day.428CJ ii. 594a,b; Die Iovis 2 Junii (1642, 669.f.5.33).

As one who would lay claim to being the safest pair of hands for publicising and explaining the parliamentary case in the Commons, Pym was inevitably prominent in the shaping of the Nineteen Propositions, as sent to the king after the Lords approved them on 1 June. But it has been demonstrated that much of the content of the document bore a strong resemblance to material that had long been in draft, and Pym’s particular contribution was less in drafting than in co-ordinating the debates and amendments in both Houses in the last hours before the Propositions were finalized.429CJ ii. 596a, 597a; PJ ii. 395, 398, 400; Tyler, ‘Drafting the Nineteen Propositions’, 309-12. There was no prospect that the king would or possibly could accept the Propositions, which were an uncompromising demand for parliamentary government. If they in any way embody Pym’s managerial skills, it is in their timely appearance as an agreed bicameral statement. It is clear from the parliamentary record that the drafting of contributions towards the paper war, though he continued to make published and unpublished ones, was far from being the principal call on Pym’s time.430E.g. Add. 11692, f. 17. Measured solely by the number of actions on Pym’s part recorded in the Journal, the managing of the relationship between Commons and Lords was the most onerous. It can be measured also by the number of conferences: in April and May he was the reporter of 13 conferences initiated by the Lords, and exactly the same number where the Commons requested them, a trend that rose to a total of 16 conferences in June alone. Ireland, too, continued to be a much more demanding political problem than negotiating with the king. From 4 April, Pym took up his duties as a Commissioner for Irish Affairs, underlining the need for such a body by reporting to the House some particularly blood-curdling setback in Ulster.431HMC Cowper, ii. 312. He attended the meetings, averaging three a week, unfailingly. He was probably the chairman, and only Sir Walter Erle matched his attendance record.432PJ ii. 469. Technically, this bicameral body wielded authority delegated by the crown, but in fact it enjoyed conciliar powers to match those of the king’s privy council, with the crucial difference that in this case there was no contribution or supervision by the monarch. The principal business transacted was directed towards building the war effort in Ireland and harnessing the commitment of the Scots towards it. Pym reported regularly from the commissioners to the Commons, and as the leading commissioner was responsible for moving many resolutions and actions of the House.

Pym managed not only inter-cameral relations, but also co-ordinated the response from the external financial supporters of the military effort in Ireland: the Irish Adventurers, the Merchant Adventurers, the merchant strangers, the wider City business community and the specialist contributors, such as the Northamptonshire shoemakers, who shod the troops.433PJ ii. 118, 200, 208, 258, 273, 392, 452. The accounts of the diarists indicate that in general Pym’s authority on Irish matters was unchallenged. On occasion, Pym’s motion would displace other well-supported moves on Ireland, as when the efforts by Sir Samuel Rolle* and Oliver St John to cut off support for escaped Irish plotters were interrupted by Pym’s calls for action to raise money from the City (6 May).434PJ ii. 284. Less frequently, there were minor obstacles put in Pym’s way. While Members accepted his call to seek subscriptions to the Irish Adventure from the constituencies (28 Mar.), they balked at his motion for immediate payments by country Members. Other examples included the successful promotion by Sir Philip Stapilton of his own choice for a military command accompanying the Scots in Ulster, at the expense of Pym’s candidate (19 Apr.); or when the Coventrian William Jesson*, perceiving a threat to the trading interests he represented, objected to courting the Merchant Adventurers (10 May); or when his wish to shower official praise on Philip Sidney*, Viscount Lisle, fell on stony ground (14 May) in the House because of inactivity on the part of his father, the 2nd earl of Leicester.435PJ ii. 81, 134, 187, 252, 301, 317. Pym may have had to work hard to convince elements in the Commons even more hostile to the king than he was that the Sidney family was worthy of continued support as commanders in Ireland; Henry Marten, for one, was a sceptic that Pym had to work on in the summer.436HMC 5th Rep. 161. Opposition towards co-opting the Merchant Adventurers into the war effort was natural among those suspicious of them on economic grounds, and Pym’s approach is redolent of his pragmatism, his determination and his commitment to wider and higher political goals over narrower vested interests. When Sir Robert Harley presented the names of reluctant lenders among the Merchant Adventurers, Pym went out of his way to save them from the humiliation of being named in the House. 437Add. 70108, ‘misc. 41’, petitions against the Merchant Adventurers; PJ iii. 14.

More significant a stumbling-block was the king’s predictable unwillingness to assent to the commissions drafted by Pym and his fellow-commissioners to expand their own powers to recruit for Ireland, which prompted ‘long debate’ (21 Apr.) in the House, and a month later an independent commission from the king, composed in studied indifference to what was proposed at Westminster. Its appearance led immediately to proposals by Pym for further borrowing for the war in Ireland (20 May).438PJ ii. 351, 412, 419-20, 456. The scale of Parliament’s aspiration towards ruling Ireland – and in respect of the governmental means of securing that rule – was evident in Pym’s political activity in the spring and early summer of 1642. Just as demanding of his time was the issue of the security of England. Pym was alive to the dangers in southern England posed by the Kentish proto-royalist petition at Maidstone assizes, promoted by Sir Edward Dering* and Justice Thomas Malet. He was one of four interrogators of Malet (28 Mar.) and led the delegation to the Lords on the subject, which was still active a month later.439CJ ii. 501a,b, 545b; Woods, Prelude to Civil War, 48-50, 54-5. His report on 15 March, by means of the letter conveniently picked up in the street, that the king could rely on the navy was capitalized upon ten days later by a renewed expression of support for Leicester as lord lieutenant of Ireland. The House then backed Pym’s proposals that a modest expansion of the navy should be placed in the hands of a parliamentary committee, with the earl of Warwick as lord admiral, another advance for the junto from its earlier, limited, petition on Warwick’s behalf. This goal was achieved in July.440PJ ii. 88, 89; CJ ii. 361a, 495b, 647a, 650b.

Events in Yorkshire, critical as they now were to the political stability of three kingdoms, absorbed a significant proportion of Pym’s attention in the spring and summer. His sustained correspondence with Sir John Hotham on conditions in Hull was typical of his political approach to building links between the defence of Hull, parliamentary committees on naval matters and supporters of Parliament in the English home counties.441PJ ii. 62-3, 69, 215, 223, 236, 242, 263, 272, 286; Hotham Pprs, 54. Pym offered support to Hotham by drafting instructions for a committee to visit the north, and the Speaker deferred to Pym as signatory of a letter of thanks from the Commons (28 May).442PJ ii. 371, 382, 386, iii. 13, 69; CJ ii. 577b, 578a, 582a, 585a, 588a, 597a;, LJ v. 71b. Adoption by the Lords of the instructions to the committee sent north (15 June) occasioned a speech by Pym in the upper House that was published. Doubt has been cast on its authenticity, but context and content seem genuine enough. It made full use of the by now familiar tropes of parallels between body human and body politic, the persistence of egregiously evil counsellors and popery as prime mover, adding merely new variants on old themes.443A Speech delivered by Mr Pym (1642, E. 200.49); Morrill, ‘Unweariableness’, 37, 51 n. 135. Hull was the most important armaments store north of the Trent, and the king’s presence in Yorkshire fully justified the attention Pym devoted to affairs there. In other respects, his profile in the summer of 1642 diverged markedly from most other knights and burgesses committed to the parliamentary cause. Not for him the visits to the county or borough to activate the Militia Ordinance or to thwart military activity by the king’s supporters. In the case of his home county of Somerset, he confined himself to reports on side-taking, and his standing in Devon may have been somewhat compromised by the acrimonious struggle between the earl of Warwick, his close ally, and Edmund Prideaux I*, emerging as a leader among Devonian legislators, for control of the inland postal service.444HMC Portland, iii. 86; ‘Edmund Prideaux I’, supra. Instead, like several other junto-men, he remained at Westminster, at the hub of concerted opposition to the king and his partisans. Among the first cases outside Yorkshire in which deputy lieutenants hostile to Parliament were reportedly appointed were Lincolnshire (9 June), Dorset (13 June), Warwickshire (21 June), Lincolnshire (27 June), Leicestershire (28 June) and Rutland (16 July), all described to the House by Pym.445CJ ii. 615a,b, 621a, 622a, 623b, ; LJ v. 120b, 130a, 131-2; PJ iii. 70, 112, 136, 145, 156, 224. A number of these cases figured in the Declaration to the North of 11 July, another appeal on behalf of Parliament, heavily influenced, if not sole-authored, by Pym.446LJ v. 201b-203a; HMC Portland, i. 43. This amounted to an appeal to the public against the aggression by the king and his party, on the basis of a narrative of events in the counties.

He made no attempt to soften his rhetoric on the efforts to encourage lending to Parliament, D’Ewes noting his ‘virulent expressions touching the malignant party’ (24 May) and Pym’s cheerful report of an opponent of the City loans being ‘hissed down’ (3 June).447PJ ii. 365, iii.10. He was quite happy to allow debate on the Nineteen Propositions to be displaced in favour of emergency discussions on the taking of sides (e.g. 28 June, 1 July).448PJ iii. 145, 156. One of the diarists captured his mood of apparent willingness to listen to what the king might say but to continue with thorough-paced preparations for military confrontation:

If we receive a gracious message from the king, as I hope we shall, then we shall easily and quickly undo that which we have done. If not, then we are in a forwardness.449PJ iii. 220.

This came on the day that Parliament appointed the 3rd earl of Essex as captain general of parliamentary forces (15 July), the culmination of a challenge to the king’s control of the military that had figured in the junto’s planning since at least November 1641. The vehicle for the appointment was the bicameral Committee of Safety, brought into being on 4 July, but prefigured by a committee of 27-28 May and adumbrated further in a published speech by Pym on 7 June, where it was added to the familiar litany of remedial suggestions.450‘Committee of Safety’, supra; Severall Propositions presented from the House of Commons ... by Master Pym (1642), last page. The gestation of the Committee of Safety is sufficient to explain Pym’s impatience with the urge towards an accommodation, however unlikely, implicit in the Nineteen Propositions. As was the case with regard to the Commission for Irish Affairs, Pym was also the most prominent Commons-man in the counsels of the Committee of Safety, at least as measured by the scale of signed warrants. In fact no-one from either House matched his attendance record at it or came anywhere close to his total of signed warrants and orders.451L. Glow, ‘The Cttee. of Safety’, EHR lxxx. 313. Through this committee, he played a central part in the immediate tasks of securing the Isle of Wight and the Solent ports, pushing through the ordinance allowing lords lieutenant to raise county regiments, and issuing directives to a range of counties embarking on resistance to the king’s commission of array.452CJ ii. 702b, 706b, 710a, 719b, 736b; PJ iii. 284-5, 299, 304. An additional benefit for Pym personally was the harnessing of the talents of Henry Parker, already an effective apologist for Pym as well as for Parliament, as secretary of the Committee of Safety. The Committee of Safety evidently allowed Pym very considerable executive authority and latitude, visible in the terms of its surviving warrants.453‘Committee of Safety’, supra; Mendle, Henry Parker, 19-21.

Pym was also the most frequent reporter from the Committee of Safety to the House, again an echo of his position with regard to Irish affairs. Pym attended every meeting of the Commission for Irish Affairs between 7 June and 12 October, regularly reporting to and from the House.454PJ iii. 363-437, 438. Though he was thus an obvious direct conduit between the Committee of Safety and the Commissioners for Irish Affairs, he seems to have exploited his dual dominance surprisingly rarely.455‘Committee of Safety’ supra; CJ ii. 712a; PJ iii. 424. The acceptance by the Commons of the Committee of Safety into the parliamentary structure was evidently a boost to Pym’s uncompromising line. D’Ewes’s criticism of it got him into trouble, and Pym urged the House not to waver from the scheme of raising subscriptions in London for Parliament, on the grounds that ‘the same jealousies still remain ... the king is still ruled by the same counsels’.456PJ iii. 256-60, 265, 284-5. As the summer wore on, Pym’s name was being invoked increasingly outside the House as synecdoche for parliamentary opposition to the king: ‘Methinks you speak Mr Pym’s language’ despaired the 1st earl of Denbigh (William Feilding) of his parliamentary-inclined son.457HMC 4th Rep. 259. This personification alone would be sufficient to account for the re-appearance of earlier speeches of Pym, such as that of 7 November 1640, versions of which were published on 14 July 1642 and 6 Apr. 1643 as well as on 8 October 1641; and one of July 1641, apparently re-hashed a year later.458His Maiesties Resolution (1642, E.155.9); A Motion Humbly Presented (1642, E.172.29); A Remonstrance or Declaration (1643, Wing P4274); The Reasons of the House of Commons (1641, E.164.3); Exceeding Joyfull Newes from Hull (1642, E.155.19) ; A. D. T. Cromartie, The Printing of Parliamentary Speeches’, HJ xxx. 41. Pym was a natural dedicatee of authors attempting by arguments drawn from both the law and pragmatic necessity to defend the resistance to the king at Hull.459P. Bland, Resolved Upon the Question (1642, E.119.4). One short speech of that summer, published on 30 June, was a vindication of the Five Members, and it may have been composed by Pym for propaganda purposes in the wake of the failure of the bill clearing Pym and the others to secure royal assent.460The Qveenes Majesties Propositions (1642), sig. A3 (E.153.10); CJ ii. 495b; Morrill, ‘Unweariableness’, 37, 51 n. 135.

The propaganda effort, Aug.-Nov. 1642

Security and the creation of an armed response to the king necessarily crowded out other topics from Pym’s workload. Contrary to a recent assessment which gives central place to religion in Pym’s concerns in the summer of 1642, the sum of the evidence suggests that practical reform of religious observance was by this point notable as a subject beyond Pym’s sphere of activity.461Oxford DNB, ‘John Pym’. Between February, when proceedings against the bishops, a bill against pluralities and a catechism in Irish briefly claimed his attention, until September, the Journal records only a single committee on the subject, on the preaching ministry (4 Apr.), which may or may not have secured a contribution from him.462LJ iv. 609b; CJ ii. 427a, 510b, 748a. Though he certainly welcomed it, he was not active in pushing through the bishops’ exclusion bill, given royal assent on 13 February, and an attempt to revive the stalled prosecution of Laud (26 Mar.), which absorbed some of his time, was hardly religious in content.463Mr Pym his Speech (1642, E.200.26); CJ ii. 499b. Winning the advantage in the propaganda war, as a prelude to winning the military initiative, was much more important. On at least 16 working days in July and August, up to and just beyond the king’s raising of his standard at Nottingham (22 Aug.), Pym was central to some new Commons or Lords action involving the preparation or amendment of publications – declarations or other published statements – on matters of security, all intended to persuade readers of the justness of the parliamentary cause. They included letters of the king’s party intercepted by agents of Parliament; expressions of support for Warwick as lord admiral, and naval news from Warwick himself; comminations against those resisting or defying the Militia Ordinance; supportive messages from the counties; the last few salvoes in the paper war with the king; expressions of loyalty to the earl of Essex following the king’s branding the peer a traitor; diplomatic approaches to the United Provinces to win Dutch support; modifying existing instructions on disbanding recusants, and designing responses both to friendly pronouncements from the Scots and hostile ones by the king’s generals.464CJ ii. 647a,b, 650b, 651a, 654a, 659a, 663b, 664a, 665a, 667b, 674a, 679a, 692a, 706b, 715b, 729b, 733b, 737a, 740b, 745a.

The appointment of Essex as lord general should for Pym, as the most visible spokesman and activist on behalf of the junto, have marked the high water mark of his own authority. The fact that the number of times he acted as a conference reporter or manager fell off sharply after June (a total of 11 occasions in July, but only 3 in August) did not reflect on his standing. Much of his energy had been diverted into the new Committee of Safety, which offered a route to faster decision-making than cumbersome inter-cameral processes. But when the Scots commissioners visited the Houses (24 Aug.), Pym was on hand to offer authoritative guidance on protocol, and a few weeks later the Commons Speaker turned to him for corroboration that a messenger from the Lords was mistaken. Pym confirmed his ‘intimation’ independently of the message system.465PJ iii. 315, 340. But by late August, there was an emerging hard-line body of opinion in the Commons with which he was not always in sympathy. For example, in the debate on whether to expel Sir John Culpeper (27 Aug.), Pym’s arguments in favour of allowing Culpeper to continue to sit, because of his usefulness as an intermediary with the royal entourage, were shouted down by ‘fiery spirits’ such as Henry Marten. Complaints by Members who were Irish adventurers that the Commissioners for Irish Affairs were not sitting often enough were taken by Pym as a personal criticism, provoking him to insist that the continuing crisis in Ireland was owing to shortage of money rather than committee inactivity.466PJ iii. 320, 331-2. From the opposite persuasion among the Commons-men remaining at Westminster, too, Pym was criticised. D’Ewes censored him (15 Sept.) for taking an ‘insolent’ stand towards the king in the dying days of meaningful communications between Charles and Parliament.467PJ iii. 357. What appears to be a fabricated speech (10 Sept.) defending himself against the king’s charges of high treason against him nine months earlier may in this context be read as a collaborative attempt to recover some of his lost ground of esteem at Westminster.468Mr Pym His Vindication (1642, E.116.29); Morrill, ‘Unweariableness’, 37, 51 n. 135.

Despite these criticisms in the early days of the war, Pym’s devotion to the two most powerful, and bicameral, executive committees that he had done so much to bring into being, suggests that he invested his trust in the administrative capacity of both Houses of Parliament, steered by the Committee of Safety and the Commission for Irish Affairs, to mount and win a campaign against the king. This confidence is evidenced further by his (albeit unsuccessful) motion at a very early stage in the war (17 Sept.) for a great seal to be devised for the use of Parliament.469PJ iii. 361. This was to meet a deficiency caused by the king’s removal of the seals, and the need for a remedy had been evident at the latest since a conference between the Houses on 6 September.470CJ ii.754b. Pym’s directives to the mayor of Exeter made explicit the absence of the seals while allocating a central part to Devon MPs in fortifying the city and commanding the return of its burgesses to Westminster.471CJ ii. 755a.

Pym was an unswerving supporter of the command of the earl of Essex, and took care to present early actions by Essex’s army in the best possible light. On 27 September he claimed the modest and brief skirmish (23 Sept.) of Powick Bridge, near Worcester, as deserving of a day of public thanksgiving, until the Speaker brought him down to earth with an insistence on waiting for fuller news. Some six days later, he was able to give centre stage to Essex’s own report from Worcester in a round-up of military intelligence.472Add. 18777, ff. 8, 12v; Harl. 163, ff. 385v, 412; CJ ii. 783b, 791a; LJ v. 367a. He had taken the lead in liaising between Essex and the Houses when the lord general set out for the west midlands, conveying the peer’s expressions of loyalty to both Lords and Commons. He reported from the committee which drafted Essex’s instructions and the abortive petition he was supposed to deliver to the king, and it was Pym who took responsibility for the further instructions for the parliamentary committee sent to accompany Essex’s army as a monitoring group.473CJ ii. 760a, b, 770b, 771a, 774b, 775b. The predictable refusal by the king to negotiate with men he deemed traitors inspired Pym to make what D’Ewes, who from this point onwards was a suspicious and hostile critic of him, called a speech ‘with very great vehemence and passion’ (20 Oct.). It sought to remind the House of the reckless counsellors with whom the king continued to surround himself. Pym called for a new form of protestation to be tendered to Members as a means of defining loyalty and identifying backsliders, a weapon always at hand in his strategic armoury. According to D’Ewes, although it met with approval from the ‘fiery spirits’, it never emerged from the committee tasked with considering it. The diary of Walter Yonge I*, however, shows that Pym brought in a text on the 22nd, which was then further amended in committee and reported again by Marten on the 24th. There were obvious similarities with the Protestation of May 1641, but the text required an admission of sin and a promise of repentance and reformation from those subscribing it, with an obvious nod to satisfying Covenanter opinion. It failed to secure adoption by the House.474CJ ii. 817a,b, 819b; Harl. 164, f. 38; Add. 18777, ff. 18v, 34v, 41, 41v, 42.

This was a minor setback for a policy of forging closer links between the Scots and the English Parliament, a policy in which no-one had played a greater part than Pym since August. He had been involved in inter-cameral conferences on Declarations between the two nations, including on discussions with the general assembly of the Church of Scotland. He had reported a draft Declaration and taken it to the Lords (6 Sept.), and was evidently taking the lead in discussions on relations with the Scots between Lords and Commons around that time.475CJ ii. 737a, 748a, 754a, 761b; LJ v. 345a, 346a. The Declaration, as it was accepted by the Lords on 10 September, called for closer unity between the kingdoms, and progress towards ‘one confession of faith, one Directory of Worship, one public catechism, and one form of church government’, as well as a general assembly of divines.476LJ v. 349a. Another declaration to the Scots, presented to the Commons by Pym from the Committee of Safety, and which went through the Houses to publication on 7 November, called on them ‘to assist us in suppressing the army of papists and foreigners’. It was soon repudiated by a message from the king to the Scots, which Charles demanded be published. The parliamentary agent in Scotland, John Pickering, felt wrong-footed without direct authority to publish the 7 November Declaration, but a version was printed in Oxford and was available in London (17 Dec.) even before he composed his letter to Pym asking for a directive.477The Declaration of the Lords and Commons (1642), 3-4 (E.244.13); HMC Hamilton (Supp.), 62. From this point, as faction began to weaken the junto, the Committee of Safety receded as an engine for forging the alliance between the two kingdoms.478CJ ii. 832a; ‘Committee of Safety’, supra. Thereafter, the agent reported directly to Pym, evincing no reluctance to urge him and the Parliament to do more to win over the Scots – ‘it is a wonder you are not more earnest in it’ – in the light of their own petition to the king, which included the need to eliminate popery in England and to find ways of converting the queen to the Reformed religion. The impact of the November Declaration and the king’s message was significant enough to polarise opinion in Edinburgh, so that, as Pickering imparted to Clotworthy, ‘a little quickening and backing from London would set us agog’.479HMC Hamilton (Supp.), 63, 65-6, 67.

Despite Pickering’s impatience, doubtless born of his isolation from Westminster politics, Pym supported the Scottish agent, and defended him against royalist denigration.480CJ ii. 866a; Add. 18777, f. 72v; ‘Committee of Safety’, supra. He could not safely advance far ahead of parliamentary opinion. On 3 January 1643, a bill clearing the Five Members and Edward Montagu† (now the 2nd earl of Manchester) of treason was given a second reading. The same day, Pym’s motion for a national association of England and Scotland, involving his favoured instrument of a loyalty oath, again failed to find favour, though a committee including himself was empowered to consider how to introduce an oath of abjuration against Catholics in England and Wales.481Add. 18777, f. 112; CJ ii. 912b, 913a. On the other hand, he had evidently abandoned his personal ambivalence on religious reform by the time of the September 1642 declaration, which contained an unambiguous commitment to the abolition of the existing church hierarchy in England. This was a politic move, in the light of the junto’s need to appeal to the Presbyterian Scots. The essence of his position on religion was distilled in a speech he gave in the Lords on 10 September, or earlier, which was published around 30 September, carrying Pym’s portrait but an inaccurate date.482A Most Learned and Religious Speech (1642, E.200.65). This uncompromising and well-publicised line was also evident in his attitude to the king. It is clear that in his speeches in the Commons he made little or no attempt to argue for any concessions towards the king and his advisors, denouncing the cavaliers on the basis of sinister reports of their bloodthirsty or reckless utterances, and rejoicing when news came of defectors from the king.483Add. 18777, ff. 5v, 6, 6v, 8. He reinforced in the Commons the speech in the Lords by the earl of Holland (1 Oct.), which reported the king’s dismissal of the Lords as ‘rebels, Brownists, Anabaptists, atheists and traitors’, by an expression of solidarity with the peers: ‘if they are, so then are we’. Unusually, quotations from Pym’s speech were copied into the Journal record, including the inference drawn by the king that voting down bishops had meant the abolition of the Book of Common Prayer. The outcome was a committee to work on a new protestation.484CJ ii. 789b-790a; Add. 18777, f. 17

It seems inconsistent with his decisive position on religion and his confidence that Parliament had in hand the wherewithal to fight the king that Pym should have persisted in defending the earl of Leicester, who continued to vacillate over his commission to command in Ireland. Although as the leading Commons-man among the Commissioners for Irish Affairs Pym might have been expected to bring reports from the Lords of Leicester’s views – and actions, such as they were – he went beyond mere reporting to defend him robustly against critics such as Henry Marten, attributing the continuing delays in the earl’s departure to delays in finalizing his commission, the need to appoint his successor as lord lieutenant of Kent and the obstacles in the way of the Houses’ perusal of the instructions he had been given by the king. On 17 October, Pym reported that Leicester had said he would risk incurring the king’s displeasure before that of Parliament, but that would hardly have convinced the earl’s critics in the Commons of his intentions in Ireland on their behalf.485Add. 18777, ff. 10v, 11, 30v, 4; CJ ii. 795b, 811b, 823a; Armstrong, Protestant War, 72n.

Pym was in fact drawing back somewhat from managing Irish affairs. He was named to the new Committee for Irish Affairs (3 Sept. 1642), a fresh and inclusive effort to bring together the groups interested in a Protestant victory in Ireland, but his later reports on Irish business were mainly from conferences with the Lords or from the Committee of Safety. By January 1643, Pym was no longer in the core group attending the new committee on Ireland, his withdrawal perhaps related to its formation as a Commons-only committee.486CJ ii. 750b, 751a, 781a, 797a, 883b, 905a, 964b, 984a; Armstrong, ‘Ireland at Westminster’, 84, 86. A reluctance to provoke a rift with the Lords in times of such political instability probably largely accounted for Pym’s adherence to Leicester and his subsequent distancing of himself from the unicameral new committee. Pym was also unwilling to widen political divisions already apparent between Leicester and his more effective son, Philip Sidney*, Lord Lisle, who was already serving with distinction in Ireland; and personal factors cannot be discounted. He evidently corresponded regularly with the Sidneys’ seat at Penshurst, Kent, including with the countess, Leicester’s wife; and by January 1642 had become friendly with her sister, Lucy, countess of Carlisle, who had been among those warning Pym of the king’s intention to arrest him.487HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 412; Oxford DNB, ‘Hay, Lucy, countess of Carlisle’.

Building alliances, Nov. 1642-Feb. 1643

From the start of armed conflict with the king, Pym actively managed the relationship between the Houses and the United Provinces, to which Parliament looked as the foreign state most likely to sympathize with its stance against the king. Early in 1642, the Low Countries had been a source of anxiety to Pym because of its potential for hatching conspiracies against Parliament on behalf of the king, but by 9 June he was encouraging ambassadors from Holland, despite difficulties in securing their visit.488PJ iii. 54; LJ iv. 582b, CJ ii. 486b, 603b. The obstacles had been removed by mid-August, however, when letters of accreditation were being prepared by the Committee of Safety, under Pym’s direct supervision, for an agent of Parliament, Walter Strickland*, to visit the States General.489CJ ii. 729b. With Sir Henry Mildmay, Denzil Holles and William Pierrepont he was tasked with preparing a declaration to the Dutch, which he presented to both Houses and sent to Strickland for onward despatch (23 Sept.). Thereafter, it was Pym who wrote letters of thanks to the States General for their goodwill, and who supervised and supported Strickland, mediating between him and the Commons.490CJ ii. 792a, 816a, 873a; Add. 18777, ff. 23, 23v, 55. He envisaged the kind of close working with the Dutch, as a major maritime Protestant power, that had since the 1620s been discussed among hotter Protestant politicians. Through such alliances, including through the one now being constructed with the Scots, could the international Protestant cause be built up.

By the end of October 1642, Pym was declaring himself confident that the States General would ‘embrace a near union and alliance’, and worked actively towards a formal treaty.491Add. 18777, ff. 46v, 71v, 87. Even if that might have been optimistic, friendship with the Dutch was a necessary investment of effort, since even in mid-December 1642 George Goring* was able to attract mercenaries in Holland to fight for the king, news of which brought what D’Ewes considered a ‘violent and vehement’ speech from Pym in support of another Declaration against the popish core of the king’s army.492Harl. 164, f. 263v. The Declaration to the Dutch, which Pym must have written and which passed the Lords on 12 December, argued that the conspiracy by evil counsellors was extending across the North Sea: England’s case could become that of the United Provinces.493LJ v. 486a,b; CJ ii. 882b; Add. 31116, p. 27. Pym and Strickland stuck together, despite some difficult episodes involving the Dutch, such as when a parliamentarian naval commander interfered with the victualling of Dutch ships (11 Feb. 1643), or when the Dutch seemed to be condoning or assisting communications between Prince Rupert and the Bohemian royal family, usually taken to be sympathetic to Parliament (3 Mar.).494CJ ii. 962b, 989a. To reinforce the links with the States General, Pym wrote letters of accreditation for Strickland to present to each of the seven states of the Netherlands. As part of the closer links Pym and the Committee of Safety were forging with what would become a dependable ally, he kept the States General abreast of proceedings in the abortive treaty of Oxford, and as late as August 1643 was continuing to back Strickland against attempts by the king’s advisers to bring him into bad odour with the Dutch.495CJ iii. 34a,b, 99b, 100a, 140b, 141a,b, 205a.

The stalemate of the battle of Edgehill (23 Oct.) was soon followed by a fracturing of the junto into rival war and peace factions, and was manifested in a failure to progress the Scots alliance. Pym and Hampden were prominent among the war party in the Commons, with Essex, Saye and Warwick like-minded in the Lords. Holles and Pierrepont (and Northumberland among the peers), Pym’s former allies, were now leading proponents of peace. This shift in allegiances propelled Pym towards fresh manoeuvrings around peace negotiations. On 22 November 1642, Pym delivered a speech in a committee of the whole House on peace propositions to the king. He characterised the war as defensive on Parliament’s part, because there was a continuing attempt to destroy Parliaments. Religion and liberties had been threatened, with a concomitant plan to reshape the state. Time was required to secure the public safety, so a treaty should consist of a few simple propositions. The king should be invited to put himself under the protection of Parliament, to ensure the security of the monarch, the Houses and the people and to wean himself from his delinquent advisors, among whom foreigners (the Princes Rupert and Maurice, for instance) should be deported. After everyone in both armies had taken an oath not to disrupt whatever settlement had been agreed, there should be a general disbanding.496Add. 18777, f. 67. In this debate, Pym’s insistence on simple terms – the king to return to Westminster and the surrendering of delinquent civilian and military advisers – put him closer to the position adopted in the same debate by Vane II, as against calls by Holles and Pierrepont for a more elaborate and more compromising strategy.497Add. 18777, ff. 66, 66v. Pym’s outlined principles were the only proposals to pass the House on that occasion, but in fact, there is little to suggest that Pym had any interest in a treaty, and he must surely have judged his own proposals to be totally unacceptable to the king.498CJ ii. 858b. Pym was still able in early November to move the House to reject a peremptory rebuff from the king against ‘traitors’, including himself, as a breach of privilege, and the debate in the committee of the whole House on 22 November can be seen as an effort to resolve the contradictory impulses towards accommodation and towards winning the war which had been evident over the previous month in Pym’s own activities.499CJ ii. 832b, 833b, 836a,b, 838b, 839a, 840b, 845b, 849a, 852a, 856b. In Pym’s vision, the relationship with the City was of paramount importance.

Pym’s own political analysis had not developed noticeably since the start of the war, and his busy schedule with the Scots and Dutch relationships demonstrates that he was much keener to cement deals with them than with Charles. His policies required money, and the City was Parliament’s banker. Only weeks before the 22 November debate, Pym had moved a bill to grant substantial financial aid to the Scots (1 Nov.), led a committee on further negotiations with them and insisted on the need for a committee to visit Scotland to prevent the discussions becoming ‘but as a dead letter’. Only days before, he had praised the ‘bountifulness’ of the City in funding the war effort, and had proposed that the Thames should become an exclusion zone for all but traffic loyal to Parliament.500Add. 18777, ff. 48v, 49, 55, 57v, 63v. In preparation for the confrontation at Turnham Green (13 Nov.) between Essex’s forces and those of the king, Pym had stiffened the resolve of the City with a speech at the Guildhall (10 Nov. and published the following day) which cast doubt on the efficacy of paper resolutions – ‘to have printed liberties and not to have liberties in truth, and realities, is to mock the kingdom’ – and urged them to dig in for the long haul: ‘I shall commend to you that you would not let fall any part of your contributions’.501Two Speeches (1642, E.126.48). Three days after his guarded remarks on a treaty, he was at the Guildhall again, to celebrate the victory at Turnham Green and to encourage further donations to the parliamentary cause by announcing not only that contributions would shortly be demanded from those who had so far failed to volunteer any, but also that a special levy would be imposed on Parliament’s enemies. The address was again published immediately.502CJ ii. 863b; Two Speeches delivered by the Earl of Manchester (1642), 5-7 (E.128.18). Both of Pym’s Guildhall speeches were printed to a very high standard by the same printer, and were not printed on the authority of Parliament, perhaps not even with the approval of the Committee of Safety, where peace-inclined peers formed a significant membership element.

Because of the principles by which Parliament’s army was financed from its creation, the particular contribution of Pym is hard to detect in the evolution of the parliamentary administrative machine. A central treasury in the City and the construction of regiments in counties favoured the corporate approach embodied in the Committee of Safety, and in the Committee for Advance of Money, which enshrined the fiscal principle of lending on the ‘public faith’ (26 Nov.), in which Pym was prominent at the outset.503‘Committee for Advance of Money, supra. The new tax of the ‘fifth and twentieth’ also embodied the political principle that all taxpayers, not just Parliament’s active supporters, should expect to pay for the parliamentary war effort. Despite the corporatism, it fell to Pym in particular to act as intermediary between the Commons and its often petulant lord general, Essex. As well as reporting regularly on all the stages by which Essex prepared to set out with his army, Pym reported the various attempts to establish a military association in the western counties of England, with initially Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, and then Denzil Holles proposed for a commission of command.504Add. 18777, ff. 33, 91v. After Turnham Green, and the king’s withdrawal towards Reading, Pym moved that a provost marshal in each county should be appointed to prevent recruitment to the king’s army. He argued that this should be managed independently by the time-honoured county machinery of the lieutenancy, thus making it seem a modest enough suggestion, but it was in essence a call for the introduction of martial law in the regions, proposed with the typical Pymian justification that necessity demanded it.505Add. 18777, ff. 72v, 74v. This ran parallel to efforts to seize the king’s revenues, and to declare royalist sheriffs delinquent. Pym invoked necessity again in debate on 13 December, when his fellow war party grandee St John and Samuel Browne* outlined the legal difficulties which Parliament would encounter were it to impose oaths in cases involving resistance to its tax assessments. Pym drew the distinction between ‘settled times’, when such oaths would not be in order, and current conditions, when they would be. D’Ewes was disgusted, confiding how the three ‘minced the business’.506CJ ii. 867b; Add. 18777, ff. 73, 92; Harl. 164, f. 248.

Pym’s principal contribution to the financial aspect of the war effort was probably his willingness to persist in courting or targeting a range of potential lenders and financiers, in which task his patience was characteristically inexhaustible. With war party men Sir Philip Stapilton, Sir Peter Wentworth* and William Armyne*, but also with Denzil Holles, who could no longer be counted on to offer support, he was sent to confer with the customs collectors on a large advance for Essex’s army (24 Dec.), and in the following weeks considered the more detailed topics of warrants by sheriffs to receive money and the regulation of the acquiring of horses for the service of Parliament, so as not to prejudice the interests of the well-affected, particularly, it seemed, of peers.507CJ ii. 901a, 909b, 916b, 917a, 940b, 941a, 943a, 948b; LJ v. 532a. More important than these relatively low level interventions were his efforts to court the City, where his task was to present the management of the war in the best light, persuade the business community to keep lending and to head off any suggestions that approaches to the king should be made by the City or that there should be a separate military entity accountable solely to the lord mayor and common council – anathema to the lord general, Essex. To maintain unity between the Houses and the City, Pym managed conferences in the Lords (12 Jan. 1643) and spoke effectively on 13 January at the Guildhall. In the Lords he argued strenuously that Parliament had ‘done nothing but what is warrantable’. The king had not been obliged to leave London, and was now slandering Parliament as maintaining ‘Brownists’ and the City fathers as ‘desperate men’.508Add. 18777, ff. 124, 124v; CJ ii. 921b, 924a,b, 925a.

Pym was maximising the propaganda potential of the king’s message to the Scots, which had traduced Parliament’s own appeal to them, and which was read in London on 17 December. The subsequent speech to the City against the king’s ‘many scandalous aspersions’, containing a point-by-point rebuttal, was ‘very much applauded’ and published three days later: Pym was ordered to have the public thanks of Parliament for his effective handling of the king’s appeal for defections to his cause. His success was measured not least in the keenness of the lord mayor, Isaac Penington*, himself close to the war party grandees, for the king to learn that there were no disorders in London after all.509Add. 31116, p. 38; Harl. 164, f. 276; CJ ii. 926b, 927a; Two Speeches (1642), 15-23 (E.85.7). In the early months of 1643, Pym was involved in further approaches to the City; for money, approaches generally conducted with less publicity. By 20 February he was able to report to Sir John Hotham that ‘now the City is fallen into a vein of giving money’, although this was a placatory reply to an angry letter on the shortage of supply.510Hotham Pprs. 81; Oxford Newsbooks I, 124-5. Among parallel financial expedients at that time where Pym played a part were efforts to pre-empt any loans to the king by the Merchant Adventurers (27 Feb.) and the freeing up of money bills detained in the lords (28 Feb.). The eight-man committee of 8 March, to which he was first-named, subjecting all money warrants of Commons or Committee of Safety to scrutiny before the army treasurers could pay on them, was particularly important.511CJ ii. 981b, 983a,b, 994b, 995b, 999b; Harl. 164, ff. 308v, 309. However, his contribution to the most significant piece of fiscal legislation in these months, the ordinance for the weekly assessment (24 Feb.), which levied sums on counties in order to allow local negotiations on the tax burden, was slight. The principal author of the assessment ordinance was John Wylde*, and its early administration was supervised by the Committee for Advance of Money, which Pym attended only four times after its inception early in December 1642.512CJ ii. 977b; LJ v. 619a; SP19/1, pp. 54, 119, 126, 129.

While Pym was doing what he could to integrate the Scots into the military and propaganda campaigns against the king, and satisfying opinion in the City, he was also contending with attempts to negotiate with the king. From 20 December 1642, when he was named a reporter on a conference with the Lords on peace propositions, he was prominent in the peace process. As Parliament’s most experienced draftsman of declarations and apologetics, and as the leader of the Commons in the public mind if not in official office, it was virtually inevitable that Pym would be well to the fore, even though it was the peace party peers who framed the proposals. Any aloofness from it on his part would not only vitiate the enterprise but, more importantly from his point of view, markedly deepen divisions already evident among Members of both Houses. Pym presented the preamble to the propositions (27 Dec.), which he had presumably drafted himself (although it ran into the sands two days later), and was among the committee working on propositions involving indemnity. His own grave reservations about the process were evident from the outset. On the day he reported on indemnity, his war party colleague William Strode I raised the subject of further loans from the City (6 Jan.), and on 7 January Pym called for a proposition that the Petition of Right and other statements should be laid before assize judges for subscription, a typical intervention that was ‘put by’. Nothing daunted, two days later he called again for a protestation.513CJ ii. 897b, 903a, 904a, 905b, 911a; Add. 18777, ff. 118, 119v, 121. Work on the propositions proceeded alongside Pym’s well-publicized efforts to energise the City to contribute more to the war-chest, but D’Ewes, for one, was under no illusions that he was sincere in seeking peace. He saw Pym as acting in concert with men like Marten and Strode, interpreting postponement of a vote on the peace propositions in order to consult Essex (18 Feb.) as mere subterfuge intended to kill off a treaty.514Harl. 164, ff. 296v, 301v, 302. D’Ewes was now convinced that Pym was acting usually in bad faith, moreover, interpreting announcements of contributions from the City and expressions of hopes that Parliament would respond in the same spirit as merely a ruse by Pym and his intimates, such as Hampden and Rous, to extract money from MPs themselves, or to bamboozle the House yet again into agreeing to an unlawful oath, as when the aldermen seemed to be requiring a new covenant in return for more money (11 Mar.).515Harl. 164, ff. 303, 324, 324v; Oxford Newsbooks I, 159. The more sympathetic Walter Yonge I captured Pym’s unwillingness to negotiate over Parliament’s ‘undoubted rights’, which should not be subject to compromise; but Pym’s view of inalienable parliamentary rights now included the right to punish delinquents against them.516Add. 18777, ff. 146v, 147. Pym’s account of forthcoming discussions on a treaty between both Houses, Essex and the council of war laid weight on inevitable ‘doubts and objections’.517Hotham Pprs. 82.

Pym was particularly interested in the course of the war in the west of England. Not only was his own modest patrimonial estate there, but his eldest son was in arms in the south west. Early in February he acknowledged that the pay of his son Alexander should be met from the ‘fifth and twentieth’, and later in the month announced the skirmishes between Henry Grey*, 1st earl of Stamford and Sir Ralph Hopton*, on the basis of intelligence supplied by his son-in-law, Sir Francis Drake*. On 16 February he moved that money should be supplied for the defence of Plymouth.518Harl. 164, ff. 298v, 299; Oxford Newsbooks I, 93. He was hostile to the peace treaty concocted between the Cornish royalists and the Devon parliamentarians including Sir John Northcote*. Edmund Prideaux I and Pym’s nephew Anthony Nicoll went to Exeter to scotch it, on instructions which Pym helped to draft.519CJ ii. 998b, iii. 8a; Harl. 164, ff. 313, 321, 323v. The reasons for his objections to this local initiative are not hard to discern, as he was above all working for a consistent and unified response by Parliament to anything the king might do or announce. In a speech of 8 February, he blamed the king for starting the war, but insisted that while no settlement would ever be achieved by arms, a treaty would not eliminate the burden on the country of the army. Nor would treaty discussions freeze external involvement in the war by foreign powers. A disbandment must come first, but Pym surely knew how impractical and dependent on implicit trust this would have been.520Add. 18777, f. 148. He pursued this line in speeches over the next two weeks, arguing that as the king was the aggressor, he should provide assurances on questions such as the intentions of the popish courtiers and the security of religion. Specifically on the question of law-making he was adamant that the war was not fought to compel the king to grant new laws, but laws passed after a disbanding would be free of blemish: ‘If the king yield not to a disbanding, we shall have no hope of peace’. His efforts to maintain the narrow war party majority in the Commons and the City were weakened by the Lords’ unilateral agreement to a 20-day truce (17 Feb.), which Pym interpreted to the Commons as a lesson in the need for unity, and for alertness on behalf of religion. Were differences between the Houses like this one to widen, Pym continued, the Commons would need to adopt policies that the country would support.521Add. 18777, ff. 151, 153, 157.

The Lords and the city, Feb.-Aug. 1643

February 1643 saw a rise in the number of conferences Pym either managed or reported with the Lords. All of these that were initiated by the peers were about the Oxford treaty, whereas the topical range of those with origins in the Commons extended to efforts to sustain or develop the war effort, such as setting out the fleet (4 Feb.) and a confrontation with the peers on the money bills that stuck in the upper House waiting completion (28 Feb.) because of the peace party’s majority there.522CJ ii. 950b, 955a, 956b, 959a, 963a,b, 969a, 970b, 972b, 974a,b, 975a, 978a, 979b, 981b, 982a, 983a,b, 984a. The quickened pace of conferencing did not reflect closer unity between the Houses, but rather its opposite, evidenced not only by the disobliging treatment by the Lords of money bills and their independent approach to negotiations with the king, but also by a failure to agree even the preamble to the treaty document that might be sent to the king. Political advantage lay now with those peers in favour of peace. Pym’s draft of the preamble incorporated his own stated view that the first subjects for negotiation should be ammunition stores, forts, the navy and army disbandment. The frankness and assertiveness of this so upset some of the peers (27 Feb.) that they drafted their own version, which the Commons then declined to adopt in preference to Pym’s document.523Harl. 164, f. 308. Pym’s uncompromising attitude at this point made some in the Commons uncomfortable also. He was evidently incensed at the king’s proclamation denouncing those forming the military association in southern England as traitors (2 Mar.), and the ‘smart declaration’ he drafted at his own suggestion in response originally contained a paragraph reflecting on the king’s mental condition (‘distemper of senses’). His committee colleagues persuaded him to drop it, even though the result was to D’Ewes ‘one of the weakest pieces I had seen this Parliament’.524CJ ii. 986b, 988b; Add. 18777, f. 169v; Harl. 164, f. 311; Oxford Newsbooks I, 124; J.S.A. Adamson, ‘Pym as Draftsman: An Unpublished Declaration of March 1643’, Parlty. Hist. vi. 135, 137.

On the other hand, it was under pressure from the most determined elements in the war party, men such as Marten, Sir Peter Wentworth and Alexander Rigby I, that the war party grandees such as Pym agreed to reduce the Committee of Safety to its original size (1 Mar.), a reform which in fact could only have enhanced Pym’s own authority, as he was one of the core.525Oxford Newsbooks I, 134. It is the combative, not to say truculent, tone of Pym’s political behaviour at this point that calls into question the authenticity of the Declaration and Vindication allegedly written by him and published on 4 March. Written in the first person, it purports to vindicate its author from calumnies by ‘malignants’, and particularly from the suggestion that his opposition to bishops implied that he was a Brownist or Anabaptist. The author insists ‘I am, and ever was, and so will die a faithful son of the Protestant religion … no way … guilty of revolt from the orthodox doctrine of the Church of England’.526A Declaration and Vindication of John Pym (1643), 4 (E.91.34). It certainly captures an authentic Pymian note in insisting that it was the king who had deserted Parliament, and that the war would end when there was a reconciliation; but the pamphlet’s origins are probably to be sought in an informal willingness by Pym to allow a ghost writer to proceed. There is no record of any angry repudiation of the work on his part.

Pym continued to devote a great deal of his time to the work of the Committee of Safety, and specifically to supporting the earl of Essex. He managed the often difficult relations between Essex and the Houses, drafting letters and managing conferences to encourage the often petulant earl, or to channel the peer’s opaque and seemingly wilfully unforthcoming and obscure views on the Oxford treaty.527CJ ii. 974b, 975a, 978a, 1000b; iii. 3b, 27a; Add. 18777, ff. 173, 173v; Add. 31116, p. 54. He was as supportive towards Sir William Waller*, encouraging him in his march to relieve Gloucester to do what he could to advance the cause in Dorset and Somerset, and reporting (14 Mar.) somewhat fatalistically that the treaty articles were not progressing.528Belvoir Castle, original letters vol. ii, f. 1. He up-dated the House regularly on military conditions across the country and dominions, which were not improving as the year progressed. He rebutted pugnaciously allegations by MPs such as Alexander Rigby I that the Committee of Safety was dilatory, although the House backed Rigby not Pym in the confrontation (22 Mar.).529Harl. 164, ff. 327v, 328, 330, 337, 338v, 339. The need for money for military activity was increasingly pressing. There were reports emanating from Oxford in mid-March that warrants signed by Pym on the public faith had to be cancelled because of doubts whether they could be honoured, and it was for financial reasons that Pym was strongly in favour of the sequestration ordinance (27 Mar.), even though, despite the generally accepted statement, he played no active part in devising the legislation or seeing it through the Houses.530Oxford Newsbooks I, 169; CJ iii. 21a; Harl. 164, ff. 344v; ‘Committee for Sequestrations’, supra; Hexter, Reign of King Pym, 23. Although he was included as a member of the Committee for Sequestrations, he seems never to have attended a meeting of it.531SP20/1, pt. 1. He was certainly privileged by it, however, if a royalist press report is to be believed. It was said that by favour of the committee, Pym moved into Derby House, Canon Row, a property confiscated from James Stanley†, 7th earl of Derby, in April 1643.532Oxford Newsbooks I, 209.

Whatever his involvement in instigating sequestrations, it certainly was Pym who on 28 March proposed to a committee of the whole House a new tax, on commodities supposedly ‘superfluous’, based on a Dutch model.533Add. 31116, p. 75. The debate had begun on the problem of MPs who were not contributing to the parliamentarian war effort, and in the teeth of opposition to his suggestion, Pym was forced partially to blunt the thrust of the proposal before the Commons in any case rejected it.534Harl. 164, ff. 345v-346v. A few days later, Pym and Strode I justified levies for Essex’s army, against criticisms by Holles, on grounds of necessity. Pym was tasked with pacifying both the Surrey gentry who complained of the burden of taxation, and Essex, who complained of inadequate financial resources. The notion of the excise re-appeared, again without success.535Harl. 164, f. 350; Oxford Newsbooks I, 195-6. But the excise idea was not discarded by Pym, and by 22 May it was back on the Commons agenda. By mid-July an ordinance was in the Lords, and Pym kept a watchful eye on it to fruition (22 July).536CJ iii. 97a, 168a, 176b, 177a, 178b. A royalist commentary attributed to Pym the view that the people would become ‘inured … by little and little’ to the excise.537Oxford Newsbooks I, 344. Rather than the excise as evidence of ‘miserable failure’, it was testimony to his persistence and patience.538Morrill, ‘Unweariableness’, 35.

It was also Pym who organized the fine tuning of the assessment, after Wylde’s ordinance had extended the new direct tax beyond the City to the rest of England and Wales. One of the few examples of Pym being asked to bring in legislation came on 15 March, when he and John Lisle accepted responsibility for an additional assessment ordinance, which finally passed the Lords on 11 April.539CJ iii. 2a, 29a; LJ v. 713a. To an initially sceptical response in the Commons, he began to argue in favour of refining the distinction between loans, gifts and taxes. He brought in an ordinance on 5 April, by which the Houses gave security to the City for an advance of £40,000 for the army, and after passing the Commons the legislation was taken by Edmund Waller to the Lords, where it was readily adopted.540Oxford Newsbooks I, 187; CJ iii.31a,b; Harl. 164, f. 356. The ordinance made clear that the device of an intended refund was a concession to the City for its special contribution to the war-chest. The following day, Pym managed a conference to persuade the Lords to pass the additional assessment ordinance, which had languished in the upper House, and argued that as the war was being conducted for the defence of religion, law, the liberties of the subject and the privileges of Parliament, all should pay. The high tone of his case, based on arguments of necessity and equity, was undermined by a truculent Henry Marten, who told the Lords that matters of supply rested with the Commons and implied strongly that the peers had no business holding up the ordinance.541CJ iii. 32b; LJ v. 697b; Harl. 164, f. 358v. The subsequent interest among the peers lay in the perceived insult by Marten, and Pym’s work on securing the ordinance bore fruit only after further delay. Neither did things always go Pym’s way in the Commons. The efforts he made on behalf of John Langham, sheriff of London, to exempt him from the general order prohibiting imports from Venetian territories (in this instance, in a curious echo of the subject of Bate’s case of 1606, namely currants from Zante) provoked a long debate, but the eventual division (4 Apr.) was a humiliation, as Pym’s side lost by 72 votes to 36.542CJ iii. 26a, 30a; Harl. 164, f. 355. In typical fashion, however, Pym revisited the issue (22 Apr.), and in August an order relaxing the ban on imports of currants passed the House.543CJ iii. 56b, 57a, 191b.

During March and April 1643, Pym managed 22 conferences which the Commons had initiated, and reported on 14 requested by the Lords. The figures demonstrate Pym’s continuing centrality in parliamentary politics, but they conceal his narrowing power base. As the leading war party manager in the Commons, he had presided over disappointing military setbacks in the field, and had struggled to maintain the total commitment of Essex, who was now becoming alienated as rival commanders challenged his supremacy. Pym’s intransigence on the question of a peace treaty was evident, and widely reported. The Oxford press quoted him as believing ‘no hopes of safety in a peace’, but through most of April he was ostensibly at the forefront of the efforts to reach a deal with the king.544CJ iii. 26b, 27a, 28a, 30b, 31a, 32b, 33a,b, 34a,b, 35a, 36a,b, 38a, 39a, 41a, 42b, 44b, 46a. His part in this lay mainly, but not wholly, in the management of the tripartite relationship of Commons, Lords and their lord general. Apart from conferencing and drafting communications with Essex, Pym was at the centre of the instructions for the committee Parliament sent to Oxford to treat with the king’s advisers (6 Apr.), but the instructions were hedged with qualifiers about time expiry. On 15 April, the commissioners were instructed to return from Oxford, and Pym was left to manage the inquest on the treaty’s failure.545CJ iii. 33a, 36a, 44b, 46a, 50b, 51a, 52a, 58a. He was first named to the committee to produce a Declaration to review the treaty (24 Apr.), which reached fruition with a Lords order of 15 May that it should be printed. The Proceedings in the Late Treaty was a compilation of documents associated with the failed treaty, including correspondence of the parliamentary commissioners, appended with a long retrospective apologia for Parliament’s actions, surely written by Pym, which went back to 1641 and which contained no discernible new insights into the causes of the war or any fresh proposals to end it.546CJ iii. 58a, LJ vi. 46b; The Proceedings in the Late Treaty (1643), 77-103 (E.102.6). There had consistently been more support for the treaty in the upper House, where the peace party peers had held sway since November 1642. Pym’s reliable allies there included Manchester, Warwick and, increasingly, Saye; Essex, as ever, was the object of much of Pym’s political effort, but gave little in return.547Harl. 164, ff. 359, 359b, 390v, 391, 396, 397; CJ iii. 38b; Oxford Newsbooks I, 214, 226, 295; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 141.

In the wake of the failure of the Oxford treaty, Pym redoubled his efforts to secure further advances to sustain the war against the king. He was in the City to meet the lord mayor, aldermen and the London militia committee at least three times in April, promoting the excise, thanking the City men for their most recent contribution of £44,000 for the army and to encourage further loans, including on the security of assessments raised in the English counties. On 1 May, he met London merchants to explore another loan from them.548CJ iii. 59b, 61b, 62a, 65b; Oxford Newsbooks I, 220. In conjunction with this drive for resources, he moved (1 May) that the Lords should be asked to join the Commons in approaches to Scotland and the Dutch to advise them how things in England stood, with a request for assistance. Marten predictably urged a unilateral approach from the Commons, on the basis that the Commons was taking the people under its protection, and equally predictably Pym insisted on his original proposal, objecting, as D’Ewes understood it, to Marten’s motion as ‘tending to the utter subversion of this monarchy and the dethroning of the king’. The Speaker ignored Marten and the question was put as Pym framed it.549Harl. 164, f. 381v. The following day, this spat still reverberated, as there came objections from some ‘fiery spirits’, who were overborne, to the conciliatory tone of Pym’s message to the Dutch, which put the most constructive gloss possible on reports of Dutch involvement in attacks from the privateer base of Dunkirk on parliamentarian ships.550Harl. 164, f. 382. Through May, Pym served on a number of committees making a fresh approach to the Scots, which culminated in his being included among those responsible for formalizing a treaty between the English Parliament and its Scottish counterpart (20 May), and was prominent in the flurry of diplomatic activity immediately afterwards.551CJ iii. 67a, 78a, 82a,b, 93b, 96b.

As part of the same policy of extending Parliament’s capacity to wage war came the need to create new instruments of government. Wylde, who had been the architect of several keystone fiscal ordinances, brought in legislation for Parliament’s own great seal (11 May). Pym seems to have responded coolly, but this was probably because he sought to organize support in the Lords so that it could proceed. He spoke to outline the rationale for a new seal on the 22nd, supported by Wylde and John Glynne, who dealt with the legal aspects of the innovation, and cited precedents from over 300 years previously.552Harl. 164, f. 387v; Add. 31116, p. 102. An even bolder gesture than this assumption of a device generally viewed as peculiar to the crown was the impeachment of the queen. From the early months of the war, Pym had read letters to the king from his wife, correspondence which promised arms from continental Europe. Any moves that Parliament might take against her would be interpreted as proxy action against Charles himself. It was the Lords that requested a conference about the queen on 3 April, but Pym’s belief in the value of an impeachment ran ahead of thinking in the upper House, even of that of Saye, according to D’Ewes.553CJ ii. 797a, 948b, iii. 29b; Hotham Pprs. 82; Harl. 164, ff. 390, 391v. However, according to reports at Oxford, any doubts the peers might have harboured had been swallowed by 23 May, when his fellow war party grandees Saye, Manchester and Essex were in support of Pym who, ‘in the name of the Commons of England’, impeached Henrietta Maria in the Lords of high treason.554Add. 31116, p. 103; LJ vi. 59b; Oxford Newsbooks I, 295. In the light of his considerable experience, a royalist report that he did so ‘with great paleness of face and trembling of his body’ seems unconvincing.555Oxford Newsbooks I, 304. A letter from the queen to the king, dated 5 May, purports to expose secret correspondence between Henrietta Maria and Pym, in which the latter urged her to convince her husband of the merits of the treaty terms recently tabled at Oxford; but in the light of Pym’s scepticism towards the treaty and his suspicions of the royal family, this strains credulity.556Letters of Henrietta Maria ed. M.A. Everett Green (1857), 193-4; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, i. 133. Correspondence in late May between Pym and one of his closest allies, Sir Thomas Barrington, demonstrates how hungry Pym was for military victories and how convinced he was of the need to annihilate ‘malignants’.557Eg. 2643, f. 5.

The impeachment of the queen was virtually symbolic, but of much greater practical import was the discovery of the plot in which Edmund Waller* was said to have played a central part. On 30 May, Speaker Lenthall, supported by Pym and others, moved that the following day, scheduled as a fast day, would be interrupted by examinations of individuals detained in connection with a plot against the kingdom and the City. When the Commons met, Pym, with Sir Gilbert Gerard, Vane II and Glynne, his closest colleagues in the House, were given plenary powers to ‘do whatsoever they think good’ to expose the extent of the plotting and make good any damage. Walter Long moved that Pym could choose whoever he liked to join him on the committee, but the House jibbed at the suggestion. D’Ewes thought the interruption of the fast day – MPs duly filed out of St Margaret’s church and into the Commons chamber to hear the revelations – was entirely for maximum impact on Parliament and City, and concluded that Pym had in fact known about the plot for some days.558CJ iii. 110b; Harl. 164, ff. 210, 210v, 401v; Add. 31116, p. 107. Highly unusually, six whole days elapsed before Pym’s name appeared again in the Commons Journal, days which must have been devoted to rooting out the details of the conspiracy. When he reported to the Commons on 6 June, he named Saye, Lord Wharton, Stapilton, Hampden, Strode I and himself as the plotters’ intended targets. Among the responses advocated by his committee was a vow and covenant, which he and Glynne were invited to submit to the House, and did so apparently after only a 15 minute interval. Immediately afterwards, the Commons-men took the new covenant. It was accepted by the Commons because it stopped short of being ‘an absolute oath’, and therefore was less likely to challenge consciences. Even the Oxford press had to admit that 150 took it without demur, with only 16 reserving their position.

The conference on 7 June with the Lords, when Pym briefed the peers on the plot, lasted between three and four hours.559CJ iii. 117a,b, 118a, 119a; Harl. 164, ff. 396, 397, 398v, 399, 399v; Oxford Newsbooks I, 338. Pym’s next stop was the Guildhall, where on the 8th, he delivered a long address on the details, dwelling on those aspects which showed the conspiracy to have been hatched in the City with betraying the City to the king as a principal aim. Concluding with renewed thanks to the citizens for their part in exposing the design, and for their ‘continual bounty’ in supporting Parliament, Pym explained how the covenant had been designed for the Houses of Parliament, with a modified version for the City and the country. His speech, ‘afterwards corrected by his own hand for the press’ was then published.560A Discovery of the Great Plot (1643, E.105.21). Pym had wrung maximum political advantage from the revelations, which had enabled him without a struggle to introduce the new covenant: a device, as D’Ewes had long observed, he promoted regularly as a means of binding interest groups more closely together, and of course spotlighting opponents. The City itself had requested a new ‘covenant and ... oath of association’ early in April, and now Pym was able to satisfy their desires with some aplomb.561Harl. 164, ff. 38, 248, 324, 324v; CJ iii. 37b. He was able to consolidate his position during the prolonged investigation into the plot, which included the interrogation of individual peers, his peace party opponents (20 June, 29 June, 1 July), in which Pym sided with the Commons against the Lords’ claims of privilege, and the trial in the City of two of the plotters (3 July).562CJ iii. 126b, 133a, 150b, 151b; Harl. 165, ff. 106v, 107, 114; Add. 31116, p. 115. The trial itself was conducted according to martial law, which enabled Pym to try to exert some new leverage against Parliament’s troublesome lord general. Pym wrote to ask Essex to supervise the tendering of the new covenant to the soldiers, and to authorize the impanelling of commissioners for the trial.563CJ iii. 144b, He went further, however, sufficiently emboldened to convey to Essex the commonly held view at Westminster that he was insufficiently energetic in pursuing the war. When the touchy general immediately offered to resign, Pym was obliged to write an emollient letter of retraction (29 June), which disgusted Marten, but which passed the Commons without alteration. This had the desired effect on Essex, who responded in kind.564Harl. 165, ff. 100v, 101, 101v, 106.

Parliament could ill afford to alienate its principal general at this point, because the war was not going its way, particularly in the west, where the battle of Stratton (16 May 1643) had seen defections among leading parliamentarians. A royal proclamation of 20 June had offered pardons to all but a handful, Pym inevitably among them.565LJ vi. 110a.b. When news came that both Sir John Hotham* and his son, John Hotham*, had defected in the north (3 July), it would have hit Pym badly, since the surviving correspondence speaks of cordial and enduring relations between them.566CJ iii. 152a; Harl. 165, f. 106v. However unreliable the Oxford press might have been in its commentary, the report that Sir William Brereton* had written to Pym that without Scots aid, the ‘whole game [was] lost’ seems perfectly plausible.567Oxford Newsbooks I, 382. The intervention of Scots military aid was indeed at the heart of war party policy, the intention of which was to reshape the political and religious polity with an acquiescent king. The opening of the much delayed Westminster Assembly (1 July), to which Pym had been appointed as a lay member, helped focus attention on closer relations with the Scots. Pym reported an ordinance to send a delegation to Scotland (12 July), and steered the instructions to the commissioners through the Houses over the ensuing week.568CJ iii. 164a, 165a, 168a, 169a, 171b, 172a. The aim was to harness military help from the Scots, but he was contending against a viable peace party which persisted with the notion of a treaty with the king. He was evidently having to work hard to counter the peace party, describing their policy as hopeless, reading selectively from Essex’s letters to edit out the lord general’s gloomy prognostications, and apparently losing his temper on 5 August when a long debate about a fresh peace party-inspired treaty seemed to frustrate the plans he had made for a conference with the Lords on Scots assistance.569Harl. 165, ff. 123v, 124v, 129, 138, 141, 141v; CJ iii. 195b, 196a.

The long-planned excise tax came to fruition (22 July) with an ordinance pushed through by Pym.570CJ iii. 168a, 176b, 177a, 178b. The new excise commissioners included a strong showing of London aldermen, and a feature of the new tax was its strongly metropolitan administrative structure. Like the vow and covenant, and for that matter his determined effort to cut a deal for favoured merchants (witness the affair of Langham’s currants), it was another of the fruits of Pym’s determined attempt to bind the City to his overall aim of imposing a settlement on the king by means of military victory. When the vow and covenant was rejected violently in Kent, leading to a revolt against the parliamentarian county committee there, Pym was active in winning the Lords’ approval for the strong response against the insurgents. He reported a pardon drafted in the Committee of Safety for those who disowned the uprising (20 July), but wrote to the leading Kent loyalists with directions on how to proceed, and with St John and Clotworthy brought in an ordinance to try the rebels by martial law.571CJ iii. 176b, 177a, 180a, 187a; Add. 18,778, f. 6v; Everitt, Community of Kent. 188-90. Support from the City was acknowledged by Pym in a major speech at the Guildhall on 29 July, misdated in the published version as the 28th.572CJ iii. 187a, b. This came as the culmination of a week of work in the City by a committee at Merchant Taylors’ Hall, to which Pym was not named, to promote an injection of vigour into the war, with London as the driving force.573A Declaration of the Proceedings (1643, E.63.10); To the Honourable the Knights, Citizens and Burgesses (1643, 669 f.8.15); ‘Henry Marten’, supra. Whether or not this committee was initiated with Pym’s active approval (it seems doubtful), he was hardly able to oppose it since the Merchant Taylors’ committee members were furthering his professed policy of courting the City.

In his speech, delivered after Manchester had thanked the citizens for helping to suppress the Kent rising, and had announced that Sir William Waller* would henceforth command all the London soldiery, Pym characteristically structured his address around two documents he showed his audience. The first was the king’s helpfully timely proclamation prohibiting trade with the rebellious City, which Pym milked for maximum persuasive effect, showing how London’s efforts to protect Parliament and suppress violent risings were in the king’s eyes ‘making war against the whole kingdom’; its sanctuary for refugees ‘a den, a receptacle of rebels and traitors’.574Three Speeches (1643), 3-12 (E.63.8). Pym drew out the sinister implications of the proclamation, invoking the threat of ruin that would face the City if the king was not robustly opposed. ‘Raise all the forces you can’, urged Pym, before brandishing an examination taken in Flanders that purported a plot abroad to liberate Catholics in England from legal constraints. He then introduced Henry Marten, who characterised the commission to Waller as an opportunity for a general ‘unanimous rising’ to ‘take down the partition wall betwixt well affected and ill-affected’, a conscious or unconscious echo of Pym’s imagery in his landmark speech of 7 November 1640.575Three Speeches, 13-18. A week later, Pym was named (but not first-named) to a council of war charged with raising 6,500 men in the City.576CJ iii. 191b. His principal contribution to this episode was his flattering appeal to the self-interest of the City, all the more skilful in that it managed to stifle any objections that Waller, returning from his humiliating defeat at Roundway Down (13 July) might not be up to the job of commanding the City force.

According to the royalist press, Saye and Pym were given a rough ride in the City a week before this speech, when the City militia commanders objected to a pledge they would receive half their pay arrears immediately and half on the public faith. The two men were allegedly obliged to take to their coaches back to Westminster after the officers invaded the council chamber.577Oxford Newsbooks I, 404. This seems exaggerated, but even if partially true would have been a setback for Pym after all his attempts at wooing City interests. After the busy round of conferencing between the Houses which Pym had managed between April and the end of June, there came a sudden diminution in the scale of this part of his workload. In July he managed eight conferences at the Commons’ request and reported three initiated by the Lords, but thereafter only four conferences called by the Commons fell to his lot to manage, and in those two months he reported on six convened at the Lords’ request. This falling-off cannot convincingly be attributed to a deterioration in Pym’s health, as he remained as active as ever in the Commons, and seems more suggestive of his efforts to forge closer and more productive relations with extra-parliamentary interests in London.

Pym and the war party grandees were in no position to dismiss Marten’s call for a general rising under Waller, and made sure they burned no bridges with Essex. Pym provided the earl with the usual level of support through July, and even on the day he went to the Guildhall he apparently tried to persuade the House, without success, to hear new proposals from Essex.578CJ iii. 149a, 162a, 165b, 178b, 180b; Oxford Newsbooks I, 448-9. He was obliged to return to Essex’s latest complaints two days after his City speech, when he read in the Commons the Lords’ response to them. Most of the lord general’s proposals, on recruitment, pay, aspersions against himself and his insistence on sole authority to issue military commissions, were accepted by both Houses under Pym’s guidance. The only notable exception taken to Essex’s analysis was on his recommendation that no recruitment to any new force should be undertaken until vacancies in his own regiments were filled, which was overlooked in the recommendations adopted by the Houses; to have accepted the principle would have vitiated Pym’s efforts to raise a new army from the City.579CJ iii. 188b, 189a, 191b, 193a. Pym’s rationale for enhancing the force under Waller that would develop from the City militia was that it would secure the safety of the kingdom, not simply London.580Add. 18,778, f. 8.

Pym had been encouraged by the response of the citizenry to his Guildhall speech on 29 July, and reported developments in London in positive terms to Barrington (2 Aug.), to a significant extent viewing City support as helping compensate for the ‘great loss’ of Bristol.581Eg. 2643, f. 13. However, a major new threat to the war party’s viability came early in August, when peace party peers devised new peace proposals to the king, and tried to persuade Essex to adopt them. The proposals included the handing back to the king of all fortifications and the readmission to Parliament of all expelled Members. The terms were so much to the king’s advantage that they implied an abject surrender of all that Pym had worked for since 1640. Essex had been increasingly attentive to the blandishments of the peace party peers, but finally refused to take the bait of the peace proposals. Simultaneously, there was fresh unrest in the metropolis, which historians attribute to war party orchestration.582Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, i. 183-4; Gentles, ‘Parlty. Politics and the Politics of the Street’, 153-4. Scepticism was prevalent in the Commons towards the Committee of Safety, as well as towards Pym personally. Some argued that it should be dissolved, owing to a lack of confidence that the new taxes, despite the burden of them, were reaching Essex’s army.583Oxford Newsbooks I, 448-9; ‘Committee of Safety’, supra. The peace proposals undermined the war party policy of speeding up military intervention in England by the Scots. Pym failed to find a seconder for his motion to go to the Lords on 5 August, the House preferring to consider the peers’ proposals. On the first day of public clamour outside Parliament, Pym spoke ‘very vehemently’ against peace, disparaging the Lords’ proposals as incoherent and stressing instead the importance of persisting with the Scots. He led committees to the upper House to tell the peers why the Commons would not support their propositions (7, 10 Aug.).584Harl. 165, ff. 141, 141v, 147v, 150v, 151; CJ iii. 197b, 200b. When seven peers, having failed to secure the new peace proposals, defected in August to Oxford, Pym’s strategy of integrating ever more closely the House of Commons and its supporters in the City seemed vindicated.585Gardiner, Great Civil War, i. 199-200.

The crowds were milling outside Parliament on 7 August, hostile to the new peace proposals. D’Ewes thought the disturbances were to Pym’s ‘great content’, but he nevertheless secured the Commons’ agreement to investigate the causes.586CJ iii. 197a; Harl. 165, f. 146; Add. 18778, f. 12v. The following day, women appeared on the streets clamouring for peace. Pym had encountered women petitioners outside the Houses before. In February 1642, he had successfully reassured the wives of tradesmen that Parliament was addressing their economic grievances. In August 1643 the women peace petitioners were less easily placated. Pym and his war party allies Saye and Strode I were particular objects of their wrath, and on the 9th, they refused to be appeased, threatening ‘to take the round-heads out of the Parliament’.587CJ ii. 413a; Add. 18778, ff. 12v, 13v; Add. 31116, p. 140; HMC Cowper, ii. 336. On Pym’s orders they were dispersed by horse-guards and foot soldiers.588Harl. 165, f. 150; I. Gentles, ‘Parlty. Politics and the Politics of the Street: the London Peace Campaigns of 1642-3i, Parlty. Hist. xxvi. 154-5. At the same time, allegations calling into question Pym’s probity were sufficiently prevalent to justify a Commons committee of investigation. The report that Pym and Saye had taken £100,000 out of the kingdom was believed to be linked to an allegation by the disgraced and captive Sir John Hotham, but he vehemently dissociated himself from it when questioned. The rumour was still politically viable in September.589CJ iii. 196b, 228b, 232a, 234a; Add. 31116, p. 151; Hotham Pprs. 112; Oxford Newsbooks I, 423; Add. 18778, f. 9v. Though ultimately they led nowhere, the August peace proposals and attendant disturbances were the greatest threat to Pym’s political survival since January 1642.

Pym’s solution to the growing unrest inside and outside Parliament was to busy himself in encouraging Essex and Waller to set out with their armies in what remained of the campaigning season of 1643. There was sufficiently encouraging news from the City to hold out hope of a military break-out. He was able to report an advance from the money-men to fund an attempt at relieving the south west, or at least lifting the siege of Plymouth (15 Aug.), and there were consultations with Essex on whether the lord general should set out for Gloucester or Oxford or Exeter.590CJ iii. 204b, 205a, 207b, 210a; Add. 31116, p. 139. There seems no evidence that Pym was transferring his allegiance wholesale from Essex to the City-supported Waller, although Essex had to be persuaded by Pym and Glynne to agree to the terms of Waller’s commission. Pym seems to have been frank in reporting to the House that factions coalesced around Essex and Waller, but urged the House not to goad the lord general into a frame of mind that might hold up military preparations. 591CJ iii. 211b, 219a; Add. 18778, ff. 19v, 21v; Add. 31116, p. 146. By mid-August it was apparent that the initiative of the Merchant Taylors hall committee for a general rising under Waller, predicated on the notion of voluntary enlistment, would come to nothing.592Gentles, ‘Parlty. Politics and the Politics of the Street’, 152. Pym’s willingness to exploit the committee’s failure, in order to enhance his own authority, is evident in his treatment of Marten, who unwittingly invited his political enemies to strike at him (16 Aug.) when he uttered some rashly republican and vaguely regicidal remarks in a Commons debate. Although it was not a motion of Pym’s that led to Marten’s expulsion and brief incarceration in the Tower, it is evident that the outcome was attributed to Pym’s speech and orchestration.593Harl. 165, f. 152; Add. 37343, f. 272; Oxford Newsbooks I, 476. Pym had once been a collaborator of Marten’s, but the conference in the Lords of 6 April that year had shown how destructive the Berkshire man could be of Pym’s patient statesmanship. If there is any revenge detectable in Pym’s conduct in the breaking of Marten, it would have arisen from the competing strategies for treating with the City, not over support for Sir William Waller, still less over the need to intensify the war effort. The principle of voluntaryism, embodied in the Merchant Taylors hall committee’s plan, had not been embraced by Pym. Although there is nothing to connect Pym directly with the ordinance for impressment (10 Aug.), he certainly supported conscription, and appreciated its value for the conduct of the war away from London.594Eg. 2643, f. 13; Hexter, Reign of King Pym, 135. The Merchant Taylors hall committee had included at least one other enemy of Pym’s, Harbert Morley*, whom he had denounced in June with ‘bitter and sharp girds’.595To the Honourable the Knights, Citizens and Burgesses (1643, 669 f.8.15); Harl. 165, f. 241. At the direction of the House he prevailed on the radical Morley to desist from damaging a house of Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, a peace party peer, when arresting Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire prior to his appearance before him for examination.596CJ iii. 217b, 218b. Pym also adopted a disobliging attitude over the summer towards the Commons grandee Holles, and other peace party absentees from the House such as Sir William Lewis and Evelyn.597Harl. 165, ff. 151v, 152v; CJ iii. 211b.

While Waller was nominally preparing his new army to march, Pym was busy in trying to ensure adequate supply to Essex’s army, which was reviewed at Hounslow Heath (22 Aug.) before marching out of the south east to lift the siege of Gloucester. Reports from Oxford suggested that Pym resisted St John’s suggestion that two auxiliary City companies should be seconded for the use of Essex in his march. Pym was said to have defended the terms of the auxiliaries’ enlistment, that they would not be compelled to leave the capital. This would suggest that Pym was keen to see the armies of Essex and Waller maintain their separate identity, probably to avoid muddying still further the difficult waters surrounding Waller’s commission, even though St John insisted that the auxiliaries could be deployed as the Commons saw fit.598Oxford Newsbooks I, 483. Pym went to consult Essex several times before he left, to bind the unbiddable peer more closely to the war party. On the 19th he was accompanied by a number of reliable war party allies, including Sir Neville Poole (whose motion had brought down Marten), Glynne and Clotworthy, and Clotworthy went to the Lords to organize another delegation to the City.599CJ iii. 211b; Harl. 165, f. 153. In another effort to heighten dramatic tension amid echoes of earlier plots, Pym had the outer door of the House shut before announcing likely defections to Oxford by Northumberland and Evelyn of Wiltshire (24 Aug.). The following day, with Glynne and Lords Saye and Wharton, he visited Essex again to extract from him a commission for Waller, and it was he who announced to the House that Essex’s commission had been issued, but with a blank for the name of Parliament’s appointee, hardly a solid endorsement of Waller by the lord general.600CJ iii. 219a; Harl. 165, f. 156, 157, 157v; Add. 18778, f. 21v; Add. 31116, p. 146.

Covenant and decline, Aug.-Dec. 1643

The struggle in London during the summer of 1643 concealed progress with Pym’s long-pursued policy of inviting in the Scots, which was at last coming to fruition after his shaping the terms of the English negotiating plan in July. On 26 August, news reached London of a Scots proclamation calling for a new covenant, and Pym moved that the divines of the Westminster Assembly should be alerted to this development.601Add 18778, f. 24. By early September, the text of what was to become the Solemn League and Covenant was in debate, and Pym joined St John, Glynne, Rous, Wylde, Whitelocke, Robert Reynolds, John Selden and William Wheler, mostly long-standing collaborators of Pym’s, in drafting the parliamentary response to what was proposed, and to act as a committee to receive the Scots commissioners. On 2 September, the House debated the second clause of the Covenant, on the extirpation of popery and episcopacy. Glynne balked at the idea that Parliament could go beyond reducing episcopacy to its primitive state to complete abolition without royal consent. Pym, as usual, argued in response that necessity again obliged them to concur with the Scots. To the objection that after abolition no-one would be able to enter the ministry if he had taken an oath of loyalty to the episcopal church, he argued that if bishops had been imposed by human law, then so had the oath. In the case of government in both church and state, he argued, the submission to government did not preclude attempts to reform or alter it as burdensome. He had no doubt that if episcopacy could be shown to have derived its authority from divine right, it might have been restored to its primitive state; but it could not be thus demonstrated, was a rotten structure, and should be swept away. Pym’s response to qualms about taking the new Covenant was to remind his audience that the king had withdrawn from Parliament, another point he had made many times previously. He linked the new covenant with the wider aspects of the Scots intervention. Against the doubters, he compared the condition of the English parliamentarian cause to a sick man, holding medicine in his hand, but approached by an armed assailant intent on killing him. In those circumstances, the patient would throw away his physic and defend himself by all means possible.602Add. 18778, ff. 29a, 29b, 30.

This speech shows that however long Pym had clung to a belief in the practicality of reforming episcopacy to recover the pristine qualities of the early church, he had certainly become an all-out abolitionist by September 1643. He reported from the revising committee the proposal, which was accepted, that the church in Ireland should be included in the text of the Covenant (6 Sept.), and under his direction secured agreement on the text between the Houses and the Scots commissioners (14 Sept.).603CJ iii. 230b, 235a, 236b, 241a. He reported to the Commons, prior to the adoption of the Covenant by the House, how his committee had also received representations from the Assembly which had produced modifications of the text. He then moved on to justify the pursuit of delinquents in terms of removing obstacles to access by Parliament to the king, an argument that might have carried conviction in 1642 but hardly by this stage in the war.604Add. 18778, f. 43.

The Covenant was published on 25 September and was Pym’s last policy achievement, just as the speech on 2 September was the last major and closely-argued one he delivered. Through September he had to defend himself against allegations, variants on the theme that he had enriched himself by exporting bullion, that he had betrayed the west and the north. These charges emerged as testimony imputed to Sir Edward Bayntun* by John Lisle* and the governor of the Isle of Wight, Thomas Carne. There was a conclusive rejection of Bayntun’s charges against Pym and Saye on 9 September, after Pym had been obliged to defend himself in the House. It emerged that Bayntun had lost a purchase of woodland because of some actions of a kinsman of Pym’s. The other canard, that Pym had taken money out of the country, continued to have life in it.605CJ iii. 228b, 234a, 235b, 236a, 246a, 247b; Add. 18778, ff. 32v, 36, 36v, 44, 45. The relief of Gloucester by Essex (5 Sept.) was of enormous psychological value in turning the attention of the House away from such introspective enquiries into rumours, and Pym was the first in the Commons on 15 September to propose rewards for Edward Massie*, who had commanded the long resistance of the city to the besieging royalists.606CJ iii. 242a; Add. 18778, f. 43v.

By this time, Pym was suffering from the illness which was to prove fatal. At the end of September it was thought he was recovering, but the signs of decline are visible in the reduction of his workload.607HMC 7th Rep. i. 565. After August he was no longer managing relations between Commons and Lords, and the charges he fought off in the Commons can be read as evidence of encircling critics and enemies. Among the last reports he made to the House, and among the last conferences he managed, were those on the defeats in the west, at Bristol and more recently in Devon, where Exeter surrendered to the king; and on the success for Essex at the first battle of Newbury (20 Sept. 1643).608CJ iii. 249a, 258b. During the inquiry into the disastrous surrender of Bristol by Nathaniel Fiennes I*, Pym intervened to remind the House that investigations into military misconduct had been delegated entirely to Essex, and that if Fiennes was to be scrutinized by the Commons, it would have to be by impeachment rather than by a committee.609Add. 18778, f. 55. Typically, the news from the main army was immediately capitalised upon by orders to hasten Waller’s expedition, to be supervised by the Committee of Safety, and by a delegation from both Houses, in which Pym led the element from the Commons, to the City for further support.610CJ iii. 249a, 253a,b. This expression of confidence in Waller produced only the opposite result from what had been intended, as he offered to resign his commission (9 Oct.) because of the continued lack of trust between Essex and himself. Pym urged that his resignation should not be accepted, but that an orderly transfer of authority over Waller’s soldiers should be arranged between Waller and Essex, so as not to damage the integrity of Waller’s force. In the event, the Commons accepted Waller’s resignation, but it is clear that this was on the understanding that he would be given another one by Essex, on the assurances given to the House by Pym.611Add. 18778, f. 63v; CJ iii. 269b; Add. 31116, p. 164.

Pym’s appearances in the Commons thereafter became intermittent. On 12 October, he was first-named to yet another committee to the City on the supply of Essex’s army, and was included in one on how parliamentarian garrisons and forts could be supported from revenue confiscated from the king. This may have been his last appearance in the House. His last committee appointment, probably made without his involvement, came five days later, and would have been his 226th committee since the start of the Parliament. He was first-named to a body with a membership of powerful Commons-men, all in favour of prosecuting the war vigorously, including Vane I, Prideaux I, St John and Hesilrige, charged with creating a council of war, with a secretariat and intelligence agents.612CJ iii. 278b. Although Laurence Whitaker interpreted this as an expedient to address the suspension of Committee of Safety meetings because of Pym’s illness, it was surely intended as an attempt at reforming the Committee. In fact, the reform drive came to nothing until the arrival of a Scots delegation spurred on the creation of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, after Pym’s death.613Add. 31116, p. 168. As if to compensate for the recent slurs on Pym’s integrity, or to acknowledge his financial insecurity, the House included his name as a member of the Committee for Foreign Plantations (31 Oct.) when the ordinance of 2 November was debated, and belatedly bestowed on him the office of lieutenant of the ordnance, purely for the modest profit it might bring him (7 Nov.).614Add. 18778, ff. 78, 83; CJ iii. 303a. His last days, confined to Derby House, were overshadowed by another dispute over loyalty to Parliament. Sir Henry Mildmay* was said to have doubted the suitability of Lord Wharton for high office as a commissioner of the great seal, on the basis of reports he had heard that the peer had approached the king prior to a planned defection to Oxford. As Mildmay’s defence rested on a private conversation he had held with Pym some time previously, there was a need to retrieve Pym’s testimony. The means of doing so quickly became a source of conflict between the Houses, since a joint committee of investigation would need to enquire into conversations between Commons-men, a procedure inherently suggestive of breach of privilege.615CJ iii. 333a; LJ vi. 330a; Add. 31116, p. 192; Add. 18779, ff. 16v, 17, 23v, 24.

Whether any investigative parliamentary delegation ever reached Pym is doubtful. He died during the night of 8 December, almost certainly of bowel cancer.616Add. 18779, f. 25. On the 11th, doubtless in unofficial tribute, his long and detailed speech of 17 April 1640 was republished, followed the next day by a dignified summary of his views and beliefs.617The Kingdomes Manifestation (1643, E.78.12). These, despite all that had intervened, could in essence have been attributable to him in 1640. Any misdeeds by the king were in fact those of his advisers; Parliament was the court of highest jurisdiction, to which judges were subject; the persistent ‘innovations’ underlain by popery needed to be rooted out; the pretensions of bishops to divine right deserved refutation. The author of the work was unambiguous in making Pym unsympathetic towards ‘separatists, Brownists and Anabaptists’.618A Short View of the Life and Actions of ... John Pim (1643), sigs. A2, A3 (E.78.13). Echoing some of Pym’s more recent concerns was the interest attributed to him in an alliance with foreign Protestant nations (the subject of a committee of 12 September), and the pamphlet reviewed some of the attacks on him, with murderous intent, over the course of the Long Parliament.619A Short View, sig. A3; CJ iii. 237b. The pamphlet insisted that he left ‘a clear and fair corpse’, a refutation of rumours that he had died of morbus pedicularis, the so-called ‘lousy disease’, in which the living patient was eaten alive by the lice generated by the body. Even sympathetic colleagues were willing to give credence to the notion that he had been poisoned, and sinister and grotesque causes of death were again explicitly refuted at his funeral, the first public announcement of how he had died.620HMC 6th Rep. 335; HMC Hastings, ii. 108; Add. 18779, f. 25; S. Marshall, Threnodia. The Churches Lamentation (1643), 37-8 (E.80.1). Another didactic commentary on his demise was published by Parliament on 30 December, this time a dispassionate autopsy report, on which modern historians base their judgment that Pym died of cancer.621A Narrative of the Disease and Death (1643, E.79.27); Brett, Pym, 249.

After a lying in state, Pym’s funeral was held in Westminster Abbey on 13 December before the whole House of Commons, those Lords still in London and the Westminster Assembly. The funeral sermon was delivered by Stephen Marshall, and the principal mourners included Charles Pym* and Anthony Nicoll*. His body was buried in the chapel of Henry VII, at public expense, and a committee of his closest and oldest allies in the Commons, including Rous, Clotworthy, St John and Nicoll (but also the peace party grandee, Holles) were to commission a fitting monument.622CJ iii. 336b, 341b; SP16/498, f. 140; Marriage, Baptismal and Burial Register of the Collegiate Church or Abbey of St Peter, Westminster, ed. J.L. Chester (1876), 521-2; Add. 18779, ff. 28, 29v; Add. 31116, p. 200. These, augmented soon afterwards by Strode I, Denis Bond and John Gurdon, were made a committee to put Pym’s affairs in order, and by mid-January 1644 their brief had been defined and clarified as one to meet his debts and compensate his living descendants.623CJ iii. 355a, 365a. This unusual assignment sprang from a motion and speech by St John on 11 December, echoed by Marshall in his sermon, recounting that Pym had liquidated his disposable assets in the early 1630s – a reference to his losses mainly in the Providence Island Company – and had since ‘in using his best endeavours for the service of the Parliament ... wasted his estate and his person’. There were reports that he used up his own resources in order to fund intelligence services. St John went on to move that the recently-bestowed office of lieutenant of the ordnance should be granted to Pym’s eldest surviving son, but the Commons demurred and the position went elsewhere.624Add. 31116, p. 198: Add. 18779, f. 27v; CJ iii. 357a; Marshall, Threnodia, 35.

Early ideas on how Pym’s family might be compensated included hypothecating the proceeds of a new duty on soap, stifled perhaps because it would have provided a wonderful opportunity for ironic comment from Westminster, let alone from Oxford – or indeed from any who could recall Pym’s opposition to the soap monopoly.625Add. 18779, f. 34v. In February 1644, the Commons decided to limit its liability for Pym’s debts to £10,000, and like so many similar cases before the House, where there was no principal protagonist to drive things along, the matter dragged. The Committee for Advance of Money, where Strode I was in the chair, undertook to meet army pay arrears of Alexander, Pym’s eldest son. In July, Francis Rous was to bring in an ordinance that would have settled the estate of a papist, Thomas Morgan of Northamptonshire, on Pym’s posterity, but three months later, instead of the originally intended ordinance, Morgan’s estate was vested in Sir Benjamin Rudyerd* as a trustee by means of a Commons order sent to the Lords for approval (12 Oct. 1644), with the intention of bringing in a more expansive ordinance.626CJ iii. 399a, 489b, 517b, 523b, 568b, 661b, 722b.

In June 1645 an ordinance was again contemplated as a future prospect, despite the augmentation of the committee in March by 17 additional names, including that of Sir Arthur Hesilrige. In September 1645 the matter passed to Edmund Prideaux I, who did some work on an ordinance before handing it over to Rous to take to the Lords, whose amendments were accepted by the Commons on 5 January 1646, more than two years after Pym’s death.627CJ iv. 69a, 161a, 189b, 269a, 396b, 397a. The perils of assuming unscheduled debts became apparent in 1648, when Rudyerd faced action from a merchant who produced a bond of Pym’s for settlement, which bizarrely led to Rudyerd’s arrest and imprisonment for Pym’s debt on two occasions, in 1651 and the following year.628CJ v. 649a, vi. 587b; ‘Sir Benjamin Rudyerd’, infra. Perhaps inevitably, during the 1650s Pym’s debts gradually passed to the major executive bodies of the Rump Parliament, the Committee for Advance of Money and then the Commissioners for Compounding. The last Commons order on the subject was made nearly nine years after Pym had died.629CJ vi. 19a, 19b, 587b, 589a, 607b; vii. 131b. Estates in 5 or 6 English counties were affected by the Pym case, and it afforded plenty of grist to the mill of the Committee for Indemnity.630CCC 214, 220, 315, 1898-1902; Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warws. (Cambridge, 1987), 269.

After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 it was inevitable that the Stuarts would not tolerate the presence of the remains of enemies and judges of the late king in the royal place of burial, and on 9 September 1661 an order was given to disinter Pym’s body. It was flung into the common pit, but was spared the ghoulish treatment meted out to the corpses of the regicides.631Marriage, Baptismal and Burial Register ed. Chester, 521-2.

Assessment

The trend of recent scholarship has been towards a dethroning of ‘King Pym’. He has been seen as less than sure-footed in the Commons on a number of occasions when his set-piece speeches were in earlier accounts masterful or dominant, and as sometimes fading from the forefront of activity there.632Adamson, Noble Revolt, 104-8, 246, 310; Morrill, ‘Unweariableness’, passim. It has been argued that contemporaries would have found incredible the assertion that Pym rather than an English or Scots peer might have been prime mover of a development like the expeditionary force to Ireland.633Adamson, Noble Revolt, 456, 701 n. 24. Not only has Pym been repositioned to a somewhat subordinate role to junto peers, but also his contribution in the Commons has been revised downwards, so that he has been seen as a useful messenger between the Houses, and in complete contradiction to the dominant view, has been stripped of his reputation as a principal legislator. Even the substantial monolith of speeches in print attributed to him has been eroded by the listing of unreliable fabrications. Pym is certainly an untypical Commons-man. For someone of his stature, his complete aloofness from the mechanics of Commons divisions is remarkable, and even more so is his virtual permanent occupation of the Palace of Westminster. He was rarely absent from the Commons chamber for more than five working days at a time. There were periods in December 1640 and January 1641 when he was working on the Strafford trial, doubtless not far from the chamber, and again in the spring and summer of 1641; there was his enforced brief absence in January 1642, and his work in the City in June 1643; but from the outbreak of civil war until his withdrawal through ill-health in October 1643, the evidence of the Commons Journals shows that his attendance was virtually unbroken. He may have severed his roots in the country, but no-one was more at home in Westminster than Pym. Because of his occasional verbal stumbling, he is sometimes said to have been no great orator. He tended to trade in homely or well-worn metaphors, and even allowing for republication and fabrication, his utterances had a well-worn quality to them; but he was the master of the gesture, whether in having doors locked to heighten a mood of anxiety, or flourishing documents to enhance immediacy or impact on his audience.

He was no political theorist. Although it has been proposed that he had read the Huguenot tract Vindiciae contra Tyrannos of 1579, and although he certainly took a significant interest in contemporary European humanist scholarship until his parliamentary career absorbed all his energies, his political philosophy and outlook hardly developed in the period of the Long Parliament. From early in 1641 at the latest, he appealed to necessity to justify every political twist that raised eyebrows and sometimes voices in the House. In both the Parliaments that met in 1640 his aim down to the outbreak of civil war was to provide the king with a more than sufficient financial supply, provided by properly and freely elected Parliaments in return for inroads into the king’s capacity to rule without Parliament: all in the interests of inaugurating a more keenly Protestant state playing a leading part in Protestant Europe. Inevitably, his view of the king hardened after the implied threat to his life in January 1642. Once civil war had been embarked upon, there is little or nothing to suggest he ever sought more than to bring the king to the negotiating table by military force, so that a settlement acceptable to the junto members of both Houses (from December 1642 to the war party) could be imposed on him. His interest in the abortive Oxford treaty was not feigned, but he was more concerned to maintain unity in and between the Houses during the attempt at a peace process than he was in the outcome, probably because he expected it to fail. His standing as the leader of the party most committed to war seems confirmed by a study of Journals and parliamentary diaries. Although there were ‘fiery spirits’ like Marten whose intransigence and rhetoric were far harder than his own, none of them was as integrated into a political grouping in both Houses so securely as Pym was, and from that integration derived much of Pym’s authority.

If any particular remedy can be described as Pymian it is his belief in declarations and associations of loyalty through oaths, or at least covenants, a distinction that was intended to satisfy as many tender consciences as possible, as well as to substantiate or reify opposition. The oath or covenant was thus not a mere casuistical device. He had first promoted this as a political tool back in 1621, and it recurred in his political recommendations, mutatis mutandis, in May and June 1641, October 1642, January, March and June 1643, culminating in the Solemn League and Covenant of September that year. One prominent practical reason for his adherence to this nostrum, of much greater importance than sentimental nostalgia for the Elizabethan polity in church and state, was its value as a means of bringing together and transcending diverse interest groups into a working political union, whether it was fusing City-Commons interests, or Commons-Lords, or Parliament and political nation. Oaths of association were the most obvious practical manifestation of Pym’s gift for making links in his political advocacy and strategizing, a far-sightedness that entitles him to be considered statesmanlike. It was he who more than anyone pressed the case for Strafford and Laud to be viewed as part of the same political problem; who made links between the Strafford trial and the army plot; who in the build-up to war could create a dynamic between the assumption by Parliament of control of the navy, the threat to the security of Hull garrison and the safety of the home counties.

It was typical of Pym that he progressed the debate over who should control the Tower of London by broadening it into the much bigger and more significant question of who should control the militia. The Nineteen Propositions were another facet of his skills in co-ordinating; in this instance in bending debates and amendments into shaping a summary and summative political artefact. The broadest and most sustained ideological outcome of this link-building, albeit hardly the most constructive in the political long view, was the ‘grand conspiracy’ evident in embryonic form in Pym’s earliest speeches, but fully-formed as a usable political tool by July 1641. His rootedness at Westminster, his published and unpublished speeches (whether actually delivered or not), his centrality as a recipient of friendly as well as intercepted hostile letters, and his command of the House on occasions when this intelligence was imparted, made him an unrivalled narrator and analyst of what became in his telling of it a pan-European popish plot reaching into the heart of the English state.

It is clear from the enormous numbers of transactions between the Houses, and the speeches attributed to Pym in both Commons and Lords Journals that any attempt to reduce Pym’s contribution to that of inter-cameral messenger is well wide of the mark.634Morrill, ‘Unweariableness’, 30. There were plenty of messengers in both Houses, but Pym’s leadership was of great importance in harmonizing policy and legislation between upper and lower House, insofar as that could be achieved. This was visible in his 27 April 1640 speech; in November 1640 at the outset of what would develop into the Strafford trial; in maintaining a degree of unity sufficient to hold a line against the king in June 1641. The most practical expression of his standing in both Houses was the Strafford trial, of which he was the principal practical manager. The frequency with which Pym reported or managed conferences can be read as an index of political relations between the Houses, and as a measure of the political viability of the junto, of which he was a leading member. Pym sought unity with the Lords, and worked assiduously for it down to the summer of 1643. Thereafter, in the wake of the collapsed peace talks, with defections from the Lords to Oxford, and with the undoubted need to construct more secure financial underpinning for the parliamentarian war effort, Pym could count on only a small number of the upper House. The discovery of Waller’s plot encouraged him to consolidate and develop his interest in, and sympathy with, the London mercantile and governmental community, which had long been apparent in Pym’s pronouncements. He protected the Merchant Adventurers from censure in the spring of 1642, and the origins of what was to become a slew of major executive bodies, taking expert extra-parliamentary advice and supported by dedicated secretariats, began not under his sole supervision, but certainly with his unfailing encouragement. In his own lifetime, he undoubtedly led the Committee of Safety and the Commissioners for Irish Affairs, which both depended on an input from the City which he did everything to encourage. He rightly saw the City as essential to Parliament’s survival, and made sure that the Merchant Adventurers, the customs collectors, the wider merchant community and the London common council were all kept sweet, so far as was possible. No-one in the Commons was more adept at co-ordinating between the Commons and other public agencies. For personal reasons his warmness towards London is hardly surprising, since it offered him effective protection during the Five Members episode, which had a great and lasting impact on his view of the king and his ministers, gradually hardening his outlook. His vision of a parliamentary executive must have been brought into focus by the experience of the Recess Committee (9 Sept.-20 Oct. 1641), which he steered and which earned him his regal sobriquet.

The number of motions introduced into the Commons by Pym was so large that no useful purpose would be achieved by accurate calculations. Between January and the end of July 1642, for example, he brought in 90, and generally Members took heed of what he introduced, even though by no means all found seconders and acceptance. He was not a lawyer, and so it is certainly the case that the financial legislation of 1643 cannot be attributed to his draftsmanship. If a single figure has to be singled out in that particular regard it is John Wylde, author of the sequestration and assessment ordinances. Pym’s enthusiasm for and persistence with the principle of the excise probably lay in its value as an expression of collaboration between City and parliamentary interests. Nevertheless, it would be going too far to claim that he was responsible for no legislation at all. The ordinance governing the despatch of commissioners to Scotland while the king was there (20 Aug. 1641) was his, as was probably (with Saye) the ordinance for disarming recusants (30 Aug.), redrafted and pushed through the Houses after an earlier bill failed.635LJ iv. 372b (Scots); 316b, 318b, 319b, 328b, 333b, 368a, 373b, 369b-370a, 384b-387a, CJ ii. 268a (recusants); Morrill, ‘Unweariableness’, 31. His was the order encouraging resistance to the king’s commissioners of array (9 Aug. 1642) and an ordinance modifying and explaining the assessment ordinance (13 Apr. 1643).636LJ v. 271b; (1642, E.109.30); A. and O. i. 100, 128; CJ iii. 2a. This is small beer compared to the claims made for his legislative ingenuity that have been made by some historians, but there is no doubt that his law-making reach usually exceeded his grasp. His advocacy, for example, of legislation to create a parliamentary great seal in September 1642 was a long way ahead both of his colleagues’ thinking and of the Houses’ capacity to deliver such an instrument, but an ordinance for it duly passed the Lords in November 1643, a month before Pym’s death.

Though Pym should undoubtedly be described as a puritan, his religion was rooted in Elizabethan notions of church-state relations. He was second to none in his detestation of popery, and he sought Protestant unity under a protective state in which the king would champion the pan-European Protestant world view of Parliament. It followed from this that religious diversity had no appeal for him at all, and he opposed it on various occasions. His apparent conversion to the cause of abolishing episcopacy was surely motivated by the need to demolish every obstacle possible to the intervention of the Scots in the civil war in England on the side of Parliament. His last major project, the Solemn League and Covenant, brought together his long-held interest in oaths of association and his long-standing, if not quite so long, interest in the Scots as an agency in reaching a settlement with the king; its doctrinal aspects surely appealed less to him. His recorded pronouncements on it seem those of a politique, and he played no major part in the Westminster Assembly as a lay member. In religion, as in politics, his goal was to create a state in three kingdoms of ‘united brethren under one God, in one religion, faithful subjects under one sovereign’.637Mr Pym his Speech (1642), sig. A3i (E.200.26). His patience in working to that end was remarkable, and his perseverance with the self-regarding Essex while encouraging in Sir William Waller a commander that would satisfy the aspirations towards military proprietorship of the City a further example of his political flexibility.

Had Pym not been removed from the political scene in 1643, his enthusiasm for the Scots, the Assembly, the moneyed City interests and for religious uniformity would have taken him towards the position adopted by the Presbyterians after his death; but such speculation is pointless since a vigorous Pym would have continued to work for unity in both Houses, and the divisions of ‘party’ may not therefore have fallen into the pattern they did. As things stood at his death, he has a claim (taking into account his lack of landed wealth, his distance from virtually all offices of state and in the period 1640-3 his independence from any controlling patron) to be considered England’s first career politician.