BRIDGEMAN IMAGES, WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE/ALAMY
- Scottish Covenanters
invade England August 1640
When a Scottish army attacked its southern neighbour
on the invitation of dissident English peersOf all Charles I’s counsellors, Thomas
Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, was the
most intelligent, indifferent to the
traditional rule of law, and readiest to
use force to maintain the authoritarian
monarchy that the king had begun
constructing during the 1630s. So, for
the new parliament’s reformists, the
neutralising of Strafford – by debarring
him permanently from office or by
exacting the death penalty – became a
necessary precondition of any lasting
settlement with the king.
Staged in Westminster Hall in March
and April 1641 before an audience that
ran into thousands, Strafford’s trial was
the parliamentary leaders’ first exercise in
public theatre. The earl stood proxy for
the king’s government during the 1630s,
with the Lords sitting as his judges and
the entire House of Commons arranged
as a tableau vivant of the nation presiding
in judgement on the old regime.But the trial’s managers
had not counted on
Strafford’s brilliance in the
dock. When an acquittal
eventually seemed the
possible outcome, they
abandoned the trial and
took up the cruder weapon
of an act of attainder – by
which the parliament simply
declared his crime and
stipulated the death penalty.
Even this might not have
brought about Strafford’s death,
had not Charles I attempted a
(characteristically botched) coup
d’état, intended to spring Strafford
from the Tower and effect a forcible
dissolution of the parliament. Strafford
was beheaded on Tower Hill, before
a festive crowd of over 100,000, on
12 May 1641. Warwick and Essex
were with him on the scaffold, in orderto be able to observe their victory at
close quarters. John AdamsonTowards the end of June 1640, seven
English noblemen committed treason by
writing to a foreign government and
urging it to undertake an invasion of
England. The foreign government was that
of Scotland, which had risen in rebellion
against Charles I’s political and religious
policies three years earlier.
The Scots had already demonstrated
that resistance to Charles I could be
successful. They had created a de facto
republic north of the River Tweed.
The treasonous English peers who
wrote to the Covenanter government in
the summer of 1640 aimed to achieve a
similar emasculation of royal authority in
England. Led by three daring and
charismatic figures – Robert Rich, Earl of
Warwick; Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford;
and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex –
the dissident noblemen provided the
spokesmen and organisational leadershipfor a much larger body of dissent,
alienated by the policies of Charles’s
decade-long ‘Personal Rule’.
From that treasonous letter of invitation,
a series of momentous consequences
followed: the Scottish Covenanters’
invasion and occupation of the north of
England; the military humiliation of the
king’s forces; a financial crisis that made
the summons of a parliament all but
unavoidable (in November 1640,
parliament met again, and proceeded to
dismantle the structure of Charles’s
personal rule); and a public threat from the
dissident nobles to call that parliament on
their own authority if the king refused.
Yet the new parliament’s ability to
create a stable new political order was
compromised by the treasonous
circumstances of its calling.
With the king intent on revenge, the
‘traitors of 1640’ wouldn’t stop short ofstripping Charles I of his personal
executive powers. And, for the potential
targets of Charles’s wrath, that meant
creating a de facto republic in England no
less dangerous in the eyes of many than
the ‘personal monarchy’ that it was
intended to replace. John Adamson- The prosecution of the
Earl of Strafford March–May 1641
When parliament put one of the king’s
chief henchman to deathRobert Rich,
one of the
‘traitors of
1640’A c1634 oil on canvas of the Earl of
Strafford, an uncompromising
supporter of the old regime