EMH EarlyModernHistory

  Bishop John Williams and John Hampden in April, 1640   The failure of King Charles I to secure supply from Parliament in the spring of 1640   for his military plans to defeat his rebellious Scottish subjects and of his critics, principally in the House of Commons, to secure redress for their grievances has long been regarded as a missed opportunity that might have averted the disasters of the civil wars in the Stuarts’ three kingdoms that followed shortly thereafter. There have been a number of studies of the Short Parliament in recent years by scholars like John Adamson, Mark Kishlansky, Conrad Russell and Kevin Sharpe covering the proceedings in the two Houses and their interactions with the deliberations of Charles I and his Privy Councillors. [1] They have built upon the editorial work of Willson H.Coates, Esther S.Cope and Judith D.Maltby in publishing the relevant sources for the Camden Society. [2] Admittedly, there is nothing new in this interest in these proceedings: n

  John Warner, Bishop of Rochester and the authorship of the account of proceedings in the House of Lords in British Library, Harleian Ms.6424 Just over fifty two years ago, Conrad Russell devoted an article published in the Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research to identifying the author of the account of proceedings in the House of Lords from the middle of January, 1641 until the start of January, 1642. He considered that Willson H.Coates’s suggestion that William Juxon, Bishop of London, was a potential candidate for this role and, by a process of elimination, came to the view that John Warner, Bishop of Rochester, was the most likely of the Bishops to have compiled this document which now survives in a copyist’s hand. [1] This view has been widely accepted and the text is now normally referred to as that of Warner.   What Russell overlooked in 1968 was that at least one description of proceedings in the House of Lords in 1641 survived from Warner and had been publi