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 been held for three weeks during the spring of 1640, and which in its turn had followed an 11-years parliamentary absence. In September 1640 writs were issued summoning a parliament to convene on 3 November 1640 by King Charles I. The parliament was summoned to pass financial bills, a step that was necessary as a result of the cost of the Bishops' Wars. It received its name from the fact that through an Act of Parliament, it could be dissolved only with the agreement of the members, and those members did not agree to its dissolution until after the English Civil War and close to the end of Interregnum on 16 March 1660. It sat from 1640 until 1648, when it was purged by the New Model Army. In the chaos following the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658, General George Monck allowed the members barred in 1648 to retake their seats, so that they could pass the necessary legislation to allow the Restoration and dissolve the Long Parliament. This cleared the way for a new Parliament to be elected, which was known as the Convention Parliament. But many of these original members of Long Parliament, such as were barred from the final acts of the Long Parliament, claimed that the Long Parliament was never legally dissolved.

American Whig historian Charles Wentworth Upham thought the Long Parliament comprised "a set of the greatest geniuses for government that the world ever saw embarked together in one common cause" and whose actions produced an effect, which, at the time, made their country the wonder and admiration of the world, and is still felt and exhibited far beyond the borders of that country, in the progress of reform, and the advancement of popular liberty. He believed its republican principles made it a precursor to the American Revolutionary War.

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