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 signed in Edinburgh and almost all over Scotland, which bound all men by the most solemn oath to maintain the Presbyterian Church and to root out bishops and all their works; the Covenanters flatly refused all compromise, and Charles, if he were to remain a king at all in Scotland, would have to fight. It would be no easy task; for neither Edward I nor Henry VIII at the head of a united England had been successful against the Scots. And Charles and Laud were almost the only people in England who did not think the Scots were right to resist! The Scots got together a much better army than Charles could get, and faced him sturdily; the first the first ‘Bishops’ War’, as the Puritans called it, was a dead failure. ‘Call your Parliament, Sir,’ was the only advice his councillors could give the King.

Charles gave way, and, in April, 1640, called a Parliament which, as he dismissed it in a few days, had the nickname of ‘The Short Parlament’. For, instead of giving him cash to crush Scotland with, it began to pour out a torrent of the grievances of the past eleven years, nay, of the past thirty-seven years; grievances about taxes, customs, ship-money; about bishops, popery in high places, judges who twisted the law to please the the King, and so forth. After one more effort at war with Scotland in the summer, during which the Scots simply walked into England as far as Durham and sat down there, the King had to own himself beaten, and to call, on November 3, 1640, a Parliament that was to be anything but short. History knows it as ‘The Long Parliament’.

The leaders of this body were no revolutionists or ‘radicals’. Nearly all were great lawyers or country gentlemen of old families and rich estates; Hampden,