214 Ch. 6 • England and the Dutch Republic
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Riot in St. Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, when the bishop begins to read from the
Anglican Book of Common Prayer.
church assembly in Scotland, but he also began to prepare for an invasion of
Scotland. In the meantime, Scottish nobles and landowners began evicting
Anglican bishops and taking over churches. The Scots rose up in arms.
This was a turning point in the dramatic reign of King Charles I. Desper
ately needing funds to defeat the Scots, in 1639 the king demanded that the
city of London help pay for the war. After several small allocations, London
finally consented to lend the crown a large sum, but only on the condition
that Charles convene Parliament and allow it to sit for a reasonable period of
time.
Nobles and gentry led resistance to royal policies from the beginning;
some were already in touch with the rebellious Scots, who in 1640 occupied
the northeastern English port of Newcastle without resistance. Running
short of cash and facing mutinies in the royal army, in April 1640 the king
summoned Parliament for the first time in eleven years. But when it refused
to allocate money for the war against Scotland until Charles agreed to con
sider a list of grievances, the king dissolved this “Short Parliament” after less
than two months. Charles Is defiance of Parliament initiated a full-fledged
constitutional crisis.The English Civil WarThe political crisis of the Stuart monarchy became a constitutional conflict
about how England was to be governed. To the kings opponents, Parliament
existed to protect fundamental English liberties that had been established
under the Magna Carta in 1215. By this reasoning the king did not have the
right to dispense with its counsel and its traditional authority to allocate