HISTORY OF ENGLAND

FROM THE

ACCESSION OF JAMES I.

ΤΟ

THE OUTBREAK OF THE CIVIL WAR

1603-1642

BY

SAMUEL R. GARDINER, M.A.

FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD

IN TEN VOLUMES

VOL. IX.

1639-1641

NEW EDITION

LONDON

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16th STREET

1894

All rights reserved

If I have striven, in the present volume, and in the one which will succeed it, to take a broader view of the deeds of the great inen who made this England in which we live, and to realise and measure the greatness of Pym, as I have formerly attempted to realise and measure the greatness of Strafford, it must not be forgotten that this has been in great measure rendered possible by the amount of new material which has come into my hands, and which till very lately was entirely inaccessible. The invaluable diary of Sir Symonds d'Ewes, and the State Papers in the Public Record Office, have indeed been studied by previous inquirers, though I have found amongst them gleanings not wholly despicable. The Clarendon MSS., the Carte and Tanner MSS, in the Bodleian Library have also been helpful. But even if these mines had been more thoroughly worked than they have been, little or nothing would have been found in them to fill up the great deficiency which every previous historian of the period must have felt. The suspicions entertained of Charles I. by the Parliamentary leaders form the most prominent feature of the history of the Long Parliament.

The whole narrative will be coloured by the conviction of the writer that these suspicions were either well or ill founded. Yet hitherto there has been no possibility of penetrating, except by casual glimpses, behind the veil of Charles's privacy. What evidence has been forthcoming was too scattered and incoherent to convince those who were not half-convinced already. Though even now much remains dark, considerable light has been thrown upon the secrets of Charles's policy by the copies, now in the Record Office, of the correspondence of Rossett the Papal Agent at the Ccurt of Henrietta Maria, with Cardinal Barberini. The originals are preserved in the Barberini Palace, where the agents of the Record Office were permitted, by the courtesy of the librarian, Don Sante Pieralisi, to make the copies of them which have stood me in such good stead. I do not know any literary service for which I have had reason to be more profoundly grateful than that which was performed by these gentlemen by directions from the authorities at the Record Office, and of which I and my readers have been the first to reap the benefit.

Scarcely less is the gratitude which I feel to the late. Mr. RAWDON BROWN, through whose kindness a great part of the Venetian despatches relating to this period were copied and sent to the Record Office. Those thus forwarded by him are referred to in these volumes as Venetian Transcripts. The few with which I became acquainted through my own exertions are quoted as Venetian MSS.

Of less importance only than these authorities are the French despatches in the National Library at Paris or in the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Dutch despatches and the letters of Salvetti, the agent of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, copies of which are to be found in the British Museum. References to other MSS. in that collection will be found in their proper place. The recently acquired Nicholas Papers have

THE NINTH VOLUME.

vii

already been of considerable service, and will probably be even more useful at a later period. It will be understood that where the name of a printed tract is followed by the letter E. and a number, the reference is to the press-mark of the Thomason tracts in the Museum. A number without the preceding letter is a reference to the press-mark of other tracts in the same library.

Outside the walls of our two national repositories, I have, with considerable advantage, had access, through the kind permission of the Library Committee at Guildhall, to the records of the Common Council of the City of London. Something too has been gained from the Register House and the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. In the latter is to be found a full account of the proceedings of the Scottish Commissioners in London during the first months of 1641, which seems to have escaped the notice of Scottish antiquaries. Of a very different character are the Verney MSS. preserved at Claydon. After the close of 1639, when Mr. BRUCE's selection, published by the Camden Society, ends, the correspondence of the Verney family deals less directly with public affairs, and there are therefore fewer extracts quoted from them in the latter part of these volumes than in the former. But it would be a great mistake to measure the historical value of this correspondence by the number of references to it in these pages. After reading such a mass of letters from men and women of very different characters and in various positions in society, the mind of an historian becomes saturated with the thoughts and ideas of the time, in a way which is most helpful to him, though he may not be making even a mental reference to the writers of the letters themselves, or to the subjects which interest them. No words of mine could adequately express my feeling of the kindness with which I have been received at Claydon by SIR HARRY and LADY VERNEY, and of the liberality with which they regard their possession of