Parliament Man

Abstract

The last years of James’s reign, like those of Elizabeth, were a time of crisis. The early 1620’s saw the convergence of the opening moves of the Thirty Years War in Europe with an internal crisis at home, in which the frustrations, demands, conflicts of the reign as a whole, open or latent, came to a point. The two reacted on one another, inevitably, but also dramatically. Frederick’s loss of Bohemia and imminent loss of the Palatinate to the Catholic cause, Spanish and Imperialist in alliance, aroused the fear, hostility and anger of a country becoming ever more aggressively Protestant. The political crisis was accompanied by economic depression — also interconnected, for European war meant a large loss of textile exports, the ‘decay of trade’ which appears frequently on the lips of House of Commons men, in speeches, petitions, the literature of the time.