The king speedily dissolved Parliament, and, the Scots having again invaded England, proceeded to raise an army to resist them.  The Scots entered Newcastle, and the Earl of Strafford, weak after a sickness, was defeated and retreated to Durham.  The king, with his army weakened and the treasury depleted, was in great straits.  He was again constrained to call a parliament, which met on November 3, 1640.  It had a sad and melancholic aspect.  The king himself did not ride with his accustomed equipage to Westminster, but went privately in his barge to the parliament stairs.  The king being informed that Sir Thomas Gardiner, not having been returned a member, could not be chosen to be Speaker, his majesty appointed Mr. Lenthall, a bencher of Lincoln’s Inn.  In this parliament also Mr. Pym began the recital of grievances, and other members followed with invectives against the Earl of Strafford, accusing him of high and imperious and tyrannical actions, and of abusing his power and credit with the king.

After many hours of bitter inveighing it was moved that the earl might be forthwith impeached of high treason; which was no sooner mentioned than it found a universal approbation and consent from the whole House.  With very little debate the peers in their turn, when the impeachment was sent up to them, resolved that he should be committed to the custody of the gentleman usher of the black-rod, and next by an accusation of high treason against him also the Archbishop of Canterbury was removed from the king’s council.

The trial of the earl in Westminster Hall began on March 22, 1641, and lasted eighteen days.  Both Houses passed a bill of attainder.  The king resolved never to give his consent to this measure, but a rabble of many thousands of people besieged Whitehall, crying out, “Justice, justice; we will have justice!” The privy council being called together pressed the king to pass the bill of attainder, saying there was no other way to preserve himself and his posterity than by so doing; and therefore he ought to be more tender of the safety of the kingdom than of any one person how innocent soever.  No one counsellor interposed his opinion, to support his master’s magnanimity and innocence.

The Archbishop of York, acting his part with prodigious boldness and impiety, told the king that there was a private and a public conscience; that his public conscience as a king might not only dispense with, but oblige him to do that which was against his private conscience as a man; and that the question was not whether he should save the earl, but whether he should perish with him.  Thus in the end was extorted from the king a commission from some lords to sign the bill.  This was as valid as if he had signed it himself, though they comforted him even with that circumstance, “that his own hand was not in it.”

The earl was beheaded on May 12, on Tower Hill.  Together with that of the attainder of this nobleman, another bill was passed by the king, of almost as fatal consequences to him and the kingdom as that was to the earl, “the act for perpetual parliament,” as it is since called.  Thus Parliament could not be adjourned, prorogued, or dissolved, without its consent.