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The Short Parliament was a
David Plant, "The Short Parliament"
"John Hampden in the Short Parliament"
{{Authority control 1640 in England Parliaments of Charles I of England 1640 in politics
The Short Parliament was a Parliament of England
The Parliament of England was the legislature of the Kingdom of England from the 13th century until 1707 when it was replaced by the Parliament of Great Britain. Parliament evolved from the great council of bishops and peers that advised t ...
that was summoned by King Charles I of England
Charles I (19 November 1600 – 30 January 1649) was King of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 27 March 1625 until Execution of Charles I, his execution in 1649. He was born into the House of Stuart as the second son of King James VI of ...
on the 20th of February 1640 and sat from 13th of April to the 5th of May 1640. It was so called because of its short life of only three weeks.
After 11 years of attempting Personal Rule
The Personal Rule (also known as the Eleven Years' Tyranny) was the period from 1629 to 1640, when King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland ruled without recourse to Parliament. The King claimed that he was entitled to do this under the Roya ...
between 1629 and 1640, Charles recalled Parliament in 1640 on the advice of Lord Wentworth, recently created Earl of Strafford
Earl of Strafford is a title that has been created three times in English and British history.
The first creation was in the Peerage of England in January 1640 for Thomas Wentworth, the close advisor of King Charles I. He had already succe ...
, primarily to obtain money to finance his military struggle with Scotland in the Bishops' Wars. However, like its predecessors, the new parliament
In modern politics, and history, a parliament is a legislative body of government. Generally, a modern parliament has three functions: Representation (politics), representing the Election#Suffrage, electorate, making laws, and overseeing ...
had more interest in redressing perceived grievances occasioned by the royal administration than in voting the King funds to pursue his war against the Scottish Covenanter
Covenanters ( gd, Cùmhnantaich) were members of a 17th-century Scottish religious and political movement, who supported a Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and the primacy of its leaders in religious affairs. The name is derived from ''Covenan ...
s.
John Pym
John Pym (20 May 1584 – 8 December 1643) was an English politician, who helped establish the foundations of Parliamentary democracy. One of the Five Members whose attempted arrest in January 1642 sparked the First English Civil War, his use ...
, MP for Tavistock
Tavistock ( ) is an ancient stannary and market town within West Devon, England. It is situated on the River Tavy from which its name derives. At the 2011 census the three electoral wards (North, South and South West) had a population of 13,028 ...
, quickly emerged as a major figure in debate; his long speech on 17 April expressed the refusal of the House of Commons
The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of parliament. ...
to vote subsidies unless royal abuses were addressed. John Hampden
John Hampden (24 June 1643) was an English landowner and politician whose opposition to arbitrary taxes imposed by Charles I made him a national figure. An ally of Parliamentarian leader John Pym, and cousin to Oliver Cromwell, he was one of th ...
, in contrast, was persuasive in private: he sat on nine committees. A flood of petitions concerning royal abuses were coming up to Parliament from the country. Charles's attempted offer to cease the levying of ship money
Ship money was a tax of medieval origin levied intermittently in the Kingdom of England until the middle of the 17th century. Assessed typically on the inhabitants of coastal areas of England, it was one of several taxes that English monarchs co ...
did not impress the House.
Annoyed with the resumption of debate on Crown privilege and the violation of Parliamentary privilege by the arrest of the nine members in 1629, and unnerved about an upcoming scheduled debate on the deteriorating situation in Scotland, Charles dissolved Parliament on 5 May 1640, after only three weeks' sitting. It was followed later in the year by the Long Parliament
The Long Parliament was an English Parliament which lasted from 1640 until 1660. It followed the fiasco of the Short Parliament, which had convened for only three weeks during the spring of 1640 after an 11-year parliamentary absence. In Septem ...
.
See also
*List of MPs elected to the English parliament in 1640 (April)
This is a list of Members of Parliament (MPs) elected to the Short Parliament in the reign of King Charles I in 1640.
The Short Parliament at Westminster began on 13 April 1640, and was held until 5 May. It sat for only 28 days, and was then d ...
*List of parliaments of England
This is a list of parliaments of England from the reign of King Henry III, when the '' Curia Regis'' developed into a body known as Parliament, until the creation of the Parliament of Great Britain in 1707.
For later parliaments, see the Lis ...
References
David Plant, "The Short Parliament"
"John Hampden in the Short Parliament"
{{Authority control 1640 in England Parliaments of Charles I of England 1640 in politics