JOHN PYM
By STEPHEN G. LEE
THREE hundred years ago, on December 8th, 1641 died John Pym, probably the greatest Parliament man of this or any other country. Somerset born, Cornish bred close to Plymouth Sound, the management of considerable family estates in the West Courtry and the office of Receiver for Hants, Wilts and Gloucestershire had given him business experience before he entered Parliament for the first time in 1621 as one of the members for Caine.
Pym, with Cromwell and Hampden, is one of the three great figures on the Parliamentary side in the Civil War, and of the three he is the least familiar. Cromwell's skill and success as a soldier, together with the despotic power which he eventually wielded, have ensured him a place if not in the hearts, at any rate in the heads, of most of his later compatriots. Hampden has been immortalised by his resistance to Ship Money and by Gray's reference to him in the Elegy. Pym, though his story provides fewer picturesque incidents than do those of the other two, nevertheless had qualities which made him the statesman of the Puritan Revolution.
In Parliament his qualities soon emerged. Even in the bald summaries which is all we have of many of his speeches he shows himself clear-headed, business-like, hard-working and a cogent reasoner. He is constantly to be found on committees, often as chairman, and he was appointed by the Commons one of the managers of Buckingham's impeachment in 1626. By this time he was sitting as member for Tavistoc.k, his seat for all his Parliaments except the first. His political principles soon emerge, on the one hand a great reverence for the Law, on the other a strong con- viction, so typical of one who had been growing to man's estate in the years after the Armada, that Popery was the enemy, the hidden hand behind most things that went awry in Church or State. His reverence for the Law may be supposed to have been one of the reasons which prevented him from having any part in the violent scene at the termination of Charles's third Parliament when the Speaker was forced back into his chair to forestall an adjournment.
During the eleven years of non-Parliamentary government he occupied himself with the business of the Providence Company, one of those colonising projects dear to the hearts of well-to-do English- men, Papist, Anglican and Puritan alike, during the century in which Pym flourished. This gave him further business experience and, what was more important, brought him into close touch with leading Puritans such as the Earl of Warwick and Lord Saye and Sete, a connexion valuable to him during his later political career.
In the Short Parliament, which came together in April, 1640, Pym at once took the lead. in the House of Commons, and his speech of
two hours, an unprecedented length for those days, was acknow- ledged as a masterly expression of the grievances pent up since 1629. It was probably well for the Parliamentary opposition to the King that the hot-headed Eliot had died in the Tower. He was more useful as a martyr to the cause than he would have been as its spokesman at this time of golden opportunity. From the first day of the Long Parliament, Pym's leadership becomes obvious. He it was who brought about the rapid attack on Strafford before the Earl could elaborate counter-measures. It was he who delivered the most notable speeches in the long-drawn-out trial in Westminster Hall, and it was he who, with his reverence for the Law, insisted on continuing the impeachment parallel to the Bill of Attainder which others took the lead L. carrying through. He had probably an impossible task in trying to show that Strafford, the King's most faithful and efficient servant, had been guilty of treason ; but no other man in the House of Commons could have come nearer to success. Hear him speak on the final day :
" It remains clearly proved that the Earl of Strafford hath en- deavoured by his words, actions, and counsels, to subvert the fundamental laws of England and Ireland, and to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government. . . . The law is that which puts a difference betwixt good and evil, betwixt just and unjust ; if you take away the law, all things will fall into a confus:on, every man will become a law to himself, which in the depraved condition of human nature, must needs produce many great enormities. . . . Law is the boundary, the measure, betwixt the King's prerogative and the people's liberty ; whilst these move in their own orbs, they are a support and a security to one another. . . . If the prerogative of the King overwhelm the liberty of the people, it will be turned to tyranny ; if liberty undermine the prerogative, it will grow into anarchy."
Undoubtedly Pym felt that Strafford had broken the spirit of the Law, and that this amounted to treason, whether or not he had
contravened particular statutes. To put it in another way, Strafford was guilty of treason against the Commonwealth, however difficult it might be to show that ht had committed treason against the King. The matter never came to an issue, for Strafford was wiped out by Attainder before the Lords could pronounce judgement.
The arch-enemy out of the way, Pym devoted himself to the task of pruning what he and his friends regarded as the abuses which had grown up under the shadow of Black Tom Tyrant and his colleague Laud, the latter by this time under lock and key, for Pym had already presented to the Lords the fourteen articles of the Archbishop's impeachment. Pym shared with the Pope and with many others the conviction that Laud was a crypto-Papist, and the impeachment was based on that assumption. Increasingly Pym became involved in the problem of religion. On the vexed question of Church government he took for long a middle line. Clarendon says that he was not for "root and branch," although Hampden had already gone over to that way of thinking on Church matters. It may be assumed that a man of Pym's statesmanship saw that the Church issue would smash the large majority, including the "Constitutional Royalists," Hyde, Falkland and Culpepper, which had been solid against Strafford. Consequently he staved off a decision as long as he could. Only gradually did he move over definitely to the anti-episcopal position, influenced more by the attitude of actual bishops than by theories as to Church government.
Pym has been criticised for continuing the pressure on the King ,after the latter's return from his visit to Scotland in the autumn of 1641. It is arguable, however, that the King's failure really to accept a position of partnership with Parliament forced Pym to lead in the direction of the hegemony of the House of Commons. True, it made him leader of a party rather than of Parliament as a whole, but it was becoming more and more clear that a revolution was in progress, and a revolution cannot stop without failing. At any rate, Pym's conduct of the revolution was masterly. He had pre- eminently the statesman's gift of seizing upon events and moulding them to his purpose. The Irish rebellion played into his hands, enabling him to point the moral that this was the kind of thing Papists did when they got the chance. Again he got news of the impending arrest of himself and the four other members of the House, and was thus able to take steps to make the King's attempted coup d'etat a bungled fiasco.
When an armed struggle became inevitable, he carried out with endless resource the heartbreaking task of waging war by debates 'and through lengthy discussions in committees. Whatever may be said of Puritans, they were not yes-men. They had to be persuaded, they would not be driven. The Parliamentary war-machine creaked and groaned, but, largely thanks to Pym, it did at last lumber off. Recent research has shown that, with a small party of steady adherents, he was continually playing off a knot of "fiery spirits," as d'Ewes calls them, and a group of faint-hearts eager for an accommodation with the King. By this Parliamentary juggling he was just able to prevent the pedestrian and gloomy Essex from throwing up his command in disgust, and to keep some sort of co- ordinated control among the leaders of the local Parliamentary armies. At the same time he was negotiating with the Scots, and, as a dying man, he had the satisfaction of seeing the Solemn League and Covenant accepted by all the Lords and Commons who still remained at Westminster. It was at the darkest hour of the fortunes of Parliament in the field, after a year of frustration and humiliation, which had narrowly missed being a year of triumph for the Royalists.
In building the Scottish alliance, Pym had made the preparations which were to lead to the battle of Marston Moor, seven months after his death, a battle in which the Scots played a prominent part and which made it clear to most men that even though the King might not lose the war he was not likely to win it. After Pym's death the leadership fell into less able hands, and the result was the eventual breach between Parliament and Army. It is a not unreasonable speculation that if Pym had lived that breach would have been avoided. Then there would have been no King Charles the Martyr and no Protector Oliver.
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