Grand Remonstrance

The Grand Remonstrance was a list of grievances presented to King Charles I of England by the English Parliament on 1 December 1641, but passed by the House of Commons on 22 November 1641, during the Long Parliament; it was one of the chief events which were to precipitate the English Civil War.

Relations between King and Parliament had been uneasy since 1625, when Charles I, King of England married the French Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria. In 1626 Charles had dissolved Parliament in order to prevent it impeaching his favourite, the influential Duke of Buckingham. Being in need of money to prosecute war with Spain as part of his strategy for intervention in the Thirty Years War, he resorted to means of dubious legality to raise the necessary funds, imprisoning without charge those who refused to pay. This had resulted in Parliament presenting the King with the Petition of Right in 1628, in response to which Charles had again dismissed Parliament and for the next eleven years – sometimes called Eleven Years' Tyranny – attempted to govern without it.

In 1640, the situation had become desperate enough for Charles to summon Parliament again: faced with the Bishops' War in Scotland, he attempted to raise money for a new royal army and immediately dismissed the Parliament in May when it refused to accede. He attempted to send an army anyway, but starved of funds, the ill-equipped and poorly led English army was easily crushed by Scottish supporters of the National Covenant. Now in need of money to pay indemnities to the Scots, Charles was advised by a hastily summoned Magnum Concilium that he had no choice but to return Parliament, which reassembled in November.

First proposed by John Pym, the effective leader of opposition to the King in Parliament and taken up by George Digby, John Hampden and others, the Grand Remonstrance summarised all of Parliament's opposition to Charles' foreign, financial, legal and religious policies, setting forth 204 separate points of objection and calling for the expulsion of all bishops from Parliament, a purge of officials, with Parliament having a right of veto over Crown appointments and an end to sale of land confiscated from Irish rebels. The document was careful not to make any direct accusation against the King himself, or any other named individual, instead blaming the state of affairs on a Roman Catholic conspiracy, made the easier by his reconciliation with Spain and marriage to Henrietta Maria, a French Catholic. It was strongly anti-Catholic in tone, taking the side of the Puritan party in the English church in opposition to William Laud, whom Charles had appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 and who, by implication, was therefore placed at the heart of the Catholic plot.

...
Wikipedia