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 ...

  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 b...

 

 

  The periodical, Red Pepper, is not my usual reading matter but, at the end of last month, it carried a laudatory review by John Rees of Norah Carlin’s book on petitioning by civilian and military radicals in the final months of 1648. Rees thought it made a notable contribution to the understanding of “the role of ordinary people in the climax of the English Revolution.” Radicals in the New Model Army and across the country sent a wave of petitions to the Long Parliament demanding justice against King Charles I, that “man of blood”, and for a fundamental transformation of the English state. He links this petitioning campaign to the role of the Leveller movement in organising its ‘large petition’ of 11 th September, 1648, which inspired in part, at least, some of the subsequent petitions and forced the army’s commanders into action at Pride’s Purge and the trial of the King that followed. He also has observations on essays by David Como and Clive Holmes which bear on the issues th...

 Mark Hailwood's highly interesting paper on this subject given to an on-line Institute of Historical Research seminar last Monday can be seen here https:// us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/s473 HziLHHK01npURmPTqzABYivY67Z1rbVYU0XMmkvfkXhYWzkGH5r5L4rZ9qpi.0GSKXgF8tsUJ-4cQ … Passcode: ^3g?J9g+ Well worth watching.