John Pym

English politician

• Born: May 20, 1584
• Birthplace: Brymore, Somerset, England
• Died: December 8, 1643
• Place of death: London, England

Pym, a consummately skilled politician, was the leader of the majority in the Long Parliament, which in 1641 outlawed ship money and the other devices by which Charles I had maintained his government without calling a parliament. More than any other single individual, Pym preserved from destruction the institution of Parliament in England.

Early Life

Born on his father’s estate at Brymore in the western county of Somerset in 1584, John Pym spent his childhood even farther west, in Cornwall. His father, Alexander Pym, was a landowner who had served as a justice of the peace and member of Parliament. By the time John was four, however, his father had died and his mother had remarried. Pym’s stepfather, Sir Anthony Rous of Halton Saint Dominic, Cornwall, was part of a strongly Puritan clan whose views and connections powerfully influenced Pym’s life. After study at Oxford and the Middle Temple in London, he was appointed Receiver of Crown Lands for three counties, which meant that rents from the king’s lands were paid to him before transmission to the Exchequer in London. Unlike many holders of such offices, who used the money speculatively while it was in their hands, Pym opposed such practices and devoted himself to royal interests.

The date of Pym’s marriage to Anne Hooke of Bramshott in Hampshire, a kinswoman of his stepfather, is not certain. They had several children before her death in 1620, and Pym did not remarry. It is difficult even to be certain about Pym’s appearance. One portrait miniature that is sometimes said to represent him has not been authenticated. The only other image is a woodcut on the title page of one of his speeches. If it is accurate, he was a portly man with mustache and a Vandyke beard. Those of his letters that have survived concentrate wholly on matters of business. Although information is scanty before his parliamentary career began in 1621, two themes that were to be prominent clearly have roots in his early life: his dislike of those who defrauded the king of his income (likely a result of his work as a receiver) and his concern for protection of English Protestantism against Roman Catholicism (probably a consequence of his upbringing in the Rous family).

Life’s Work

England in the 1620’s experienced an unprecedentedly large amount of parliamentary activity. Gaps of five years or more between parliaments had not been unusual under the Tudors, and the 1621 Parliament, Pym’s first, was the first in seven years. One reason for the flurry was the international situation. The Thirty Years’ War had begun in Germany in 1618, and many were afraid that Roman Catholic victory there would be followed by an attack on Protestant England. In his first speech, Pym demanded punishment of a fellow member who had denounced a bill for being “Puritan.” To Pym, such statements tended to create divisions among Protestants and thus to weaken their defense against the enemy, Rome. Accordingly, one reason for his crusade against people who defrauded the king of his revenue was that he believed that the king, who ruled at God’s behest, needed money in order to fight against Catholic powers.

In the 1625 Parliament, the first of Charles I’s reign, Pym represented a borough controlled by Francis, Lord Russell (who became the earl of Bedford in 1627 and was associated with the Rous family). By 1626, Pym had realized to his horror that the king and his favorite, the first duke of Buckingham, were behind the rise of a group of anti-Calvinist churchmen known as the Arminians. For Pym, the essence of the Protestant faith was the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and the essence of Arminianism was the rejection of that doctrine in favor of a role for human free will in the process of salvation. To Arminians, all Calvinists were Puritans, and to Calvinists (whether Puritan or not), Arminians were papists. Charles I, by favoring the Arminians, was overthrowing the balance his father had maintained between these factions in the Church of England.

In 1624, Pym had been the first in Parliament to raise the alarm about Arminians, in the conviction that he was helping the king to avoid danger. After 1626, the danger came from the royal court itself, and Pym became a vigorous oppositionist. Encouraged by his patron Bedford, Pym took the lead in the drive to impeach Arminian clerics and even Buckingham. He supported Sir Edward Coke and others in a campaign for the Petition of Right in 1628, but he was more moderate in his tactics and goals than some, hoping that the king could be persuaded to change his advisers and policies. Pym continued to advocate voting the king taxes, understanding that otherwise the king would not continue to call parliaments. Knowing that elsewhere in Europe representative assemblies were disappearing, he was concerned to preserve the traditional English constitution, not least as a means to preserve Protestantism.

During the Personal Rule (the 1630’s), Charles I called no parliaments, and he financed his government by a variety of devices of dubious legality such as ship money. His archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud , pursued a policy of liturgical ceremonialism and suppression of Puritan preaching that heightened the identification of Arminianism with Roman Catholicism.

During this period, Pym used his business experience and financial acumen in a series of endeavors, mostly involving Puritan peers and gentlemen, to found colonies in America: the Saybrooke (Connecticut), Providence Island, and Massachusetts Bay Companies. Among their varied goals was certainly the building of colonies that might be at most models of Puritan governance and society and at least places of escape from persecution. When, in 1637, the Scots rebelled against Laud’s attempt to impose his liturgical requirements there, Pym and his friends must have been delighted. When the king’s efforts to quell the rebellion failed and he was forced to call a parliament in the spring of 1640, they were ready. Pym took the lead in the Short Parliament, speaking forcefully against funding the royal campaign to suppress the Scots. Although Charles quickly dissolved the parliament, he was soon forced to call another.

The Long Parliament , which convened in November, 1640, would outlast both the king and Pym, but it would be the stage on which Pym triumphed. Parliament fully reflected the nation’s hatred of Arminianism and the Personal Rule. Archbishop Laud and his friend Thomas Wentworth, first earl of Strafford , were quickly impeached and imprisoned as the advisers most responsible for unpopular royal policies. Strafford’s trial, however, tested Pym’s political skills to the utmost. Convinced that Strafford had been aiming at making royal authority absolute and destroying Protestantism, his enemies brought about his death by act of attainder. Charles was also pressed into signing a bill that prohibited the dissolution of the Long Parliament without its consent, a constitutional milestone.

Pym’s policy throughout this period was not to make Parliament sovereign but to negotiate a settlement in which the king would receive adequate revenues in return for agreeing to oust the Arminians and appoint advisers in whom Parliament had confidence—such as Pym himself and his patron Bedford. Bedford’s death in May, 1641, undermined the campaign for a political solution. Pym was no extremist; rather, he garnered support by moderating extreme positions. The king, however, continued to give those fearful of Catholic plotting—meaning most of the members of Parliament—cause for alarm.

Pym, who fully shared those fears, was also a master at manipulating them. When the Irish Rebellion exploded in November, 1641, reawakening the terror of “popery,” all were agreed on the need to provide the money for soldiers to suppress it. The difficulty was that Pym and a majority of members suspected that Charles could not be trusted not to use such an army to destroy Parliament before going to Ireland. Pym’s Grand Remonstrance, a lengthy list of grievances concerning the Personal Rule and the Arminians/Papists, narrowly passed the House of Commons late in the month. On January 4, 1642, Charles went to the House of Commons in an effort to arrest his opponents, a breach of the Parliament’s privileges. The king’s effort failed because Pym and his colleagues knew it was coming and escaped to a refuge in the City of London.

On January 10, the king and his family left London, and he soon decided to yield no more powers to Parliament. Civil war, which no one wanted or had expected, became, if not inevitable, increasingly probable. By June, both king and Parliament had asserted authority over the militia, each thinking in terms of self-protection. When the shooting started in the autumn, Pym had only a little more than a year to live. The departure of the king’s supporters left his position stronger, yet Pym still had to navigate a tricky course between the extreme factions, one seeking peace at the risk of the gains that had been made and the other wanting victory over the king. By means of patience, hard work, and good judgment, Pym successfully enacted the fiscal measures needed to support parliamentary armies and negotiated an alliance with the Scots; both accomplishments were essential to Parliament’s survival.

Significance

Without the administrative and fiscal structure that Pym created, Parliament would have lost the Civil War, and without Pym’s deft management of the Long Parliament in its first two years, there would have been no Civil War. Pym’s success owed much to the moderate and nonrevolutionary character of his goals and methods. He led from the center rather than from either end of the political spectrum. He set out not to overthrow monarchy but to make it more powerful—but upon certain terms, especially in religious and foreign policy, to which Charles I was unwilling to agree. Whatever his intentions may have been, Pym preserved Parliament as an effective part of the English system of government.

Bibliography

Fletcher, Anthony. The Outbreak of the English Civil War. New York: New York University Press, 1981. A detailed and perceptive narrative of events from the opening of the Long Parliament in November, 1640, to the beginning of the Civil War late in the summer of 1642.

Hexter, J. H. The Reign of King Pym. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941. Reprint. 1961. A colorfully written analysis of Pym’s political strategy and tactics in the Long Parliament. Contains data on Pym’s connections with the groups establishing colonies in North America during the 1630’s.

Lockyer, Roger. The Early Stuarts: A Political History of England, 1603-1642. 2d ed. New York: Longman, 1999. Includes an overview of parliamentary activity from 1603 to 1642, with reference to Pym.

MacDonald, William W. The Making of an English Revolutionary: The Early Parliamentary Career of John Pym. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. A useful biography of Pym.

Russell, Conrad. The Causes of the English Civil War: The Ford Lectures Delivered in the University of Oxford, 1987-1988. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pym is prominently featured in these transcripts of lectures delivered by a noted historian.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “The Parliamentary Career of John Pym, 1621-9.” In The English Commonwealth, 1547-1640, edited by Peter Clark, Alan G. R. Smith, and Nicholas Tyacke. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1979. Stresses how Pym was unusual among members of the Stuart House of Commons in his lack of a strong county connection and base and how from the beginning of his public career he was deeply concerned about royal finances and Roman Catholicism.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Parliaments and English Politics, 1621-1629. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1979. The definitive study of the parliamentary sessions in which Pym learned his skills. Considers elections, careers of members, patronage, parliamentary procedures, and methods of doing business, and gives a narrative account of each of the sessions.

Somerville, J. P. Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640. 2d ed. New York: Wesley Longman, 1999. A concise, well-organized overview of the political ideologies held by Pym and his contemporaries and their role in causing the Civil War.

Watts, Jonathan. “John Pym.” In Statesmen and Politicians of the Stuart Age, edited by Timothy Eustace. London: Macmillan, 1985. A brief sketch of Pym’s career based on recent scholarship. Includes a short bibliographical essay.