King Pym

If Strafford embodied the spirit of tyranny, John Pym, the leader of the Commons from the first meeting of the new Houses at Westminster, stands out for all after time as the embodiment of law.  A Somersetshire gentleman of good birth and competent fortune, he entered on public life in the Parliament of 1614, and was imprisoned for his patriotism at its close.  He had been a leading member in that of 1620, and one of the "twelve ambassadors" for whom James ordered chairs to be set at Whitehall.  Of the band of patriots with whom he had stood side by side in the constitutional struggle against the earlier despotism of Charles he was the sole survivor.  Coke had died of old age; Cotton's heart was broken by oppression; Eliot had perished in the Tower; Wentworth [ie, Strafford] had apostasized.  Pym alone remained, resolute, patient as of old; and as the sense of his greatness grew silently during the eleven years of deepening tyranny, the hope and faith of better things clung almost passionately to the man who never doubted of the final triumph of freedom and the law.  At their close, Clarendon tells us, in words all the more notable for their bitter tone of hate, "he was the most popular man, and the most able to do hurt, that have lived at any time."  He had shown he knew how to wait, and when waiting was over he showed he knew how to act.  On the eve of the Long Parliament he rode through England to quicken the electors to a sense of the crisis which had come at last; and on the assembling of the Commons he took his place, not merely as member for Tavistock, but as their acknowledged head.  Few of the country gentlemen, indeed, who formed the bulk of the members, had sat in any previous House; and of the few, none represented in so eminent a way the Parliamentary tradition on which the coming struggle was to turn.  Pym's eloquence, inferior in boldness and originality to that of Eliot or Wentworth, was better suited by its massive and logical force to convince and guide a great party; and it was backed by a calmness of temper, a dexterity and order in the management of public business, and a practical power of shaping the course of debate, which gave a form and method to parliamentary proceedings such as they had never had before.  Valuable, however, as these qualities were, it was a yet higher quality which raised Pym into the greatest, as he was the first, of Parliamentary leaders.  Of the five hundred members who sate round him at St Stephen's, he was the one man who had clearly foreseen, and as clearly resolved how to meet, the difficulties which lay before them.  It was certain that Parliament would be drawn into a struggle with the Crown.  It was probable that in such a struggle the House of Commons would be hampered, as it had been hampered before, by the House of Lords.  The legal antiquarians of the older constitutional school stood helpless before such a conflict of co-ordinate powers, a conflict for which no provision had been made by the law, and on which precedents threw only a doubtful and conflicting light.  But with a knowledge of precedent as great as their own, Pym rose high above them in his grasp of constitutional principles.  He was the first English statesman who discovered, and applied to the political circumstances around him, what may be called the doctrine of constitutional proportion.  He saw that as an element of constitutional life Parliament was of higher value than the Crown; he saw, too, that in Parliament itself the one essential part was the House of Commons.  On these two facts he based his whole policy in the contest which followed.  When Charles refused to act with the Parliament, Pym treated the refusal as a temporary abdication on the part of the sovereign, which vested the executive power in the two Houses, until new arrangements were made.  When the Lords obstructed public business, he warned them that obstruction would only force the Commons "to save the kingdom alone".  Revolutionary as these principles seemed at the time, they have both been recognized as bases of our constitution since the days of Pym.  The first principle was established by the Convention and Parliament which followed on the departure of James the Second; the second by the acknowledgement on all sides since the Reform Bill of 1832 that the government of the country is really in the hands of the House of Commons, and can only be carried on by ministers who represent the majority of that House.  Pym's temper, indeed, was the very opposite of the temper of a revolutionist.  Few natures have ever been wider in their range of sympathy or action.  Serious as his purpose was, his manners were genial, and even courtly: he turned easily from an invective against Strafford to a chat with Lady Carlisle; and the grace and gaiety of his social tone, even when the care and weight of public affairs were bringing him to his grave, gave rise to a hundred silly scandals among the prurient Royalists.  It was this striking combination of genial versatility with a massive force in his nature which marked him out from the first moment of power as a born ruler of men.  He proved himself at once the subtlest of diplomatists and the grandest of demagogues.  He was equally at home in tracking the subtle intricacies of the Army Plot, or in kindling popular passion with words of fire.  Though past middle life when his work really began, for he was born in 1584, four years before the coming of the Armada, he displayed from the first meeting of the Long Parliament the qualities of a great administrator, an immense faculty for labour, a genius for organization, patience, tact, a power of inspiring confidence in all whom he touched, calmness and moderation under good fortune or ill, an immovable courage, an iron will.  No English ruler has ever shown greater nobleness of natural temper or a wider capacity for government than the Somersetshire squire whom his enemies, made clear-sighted by their hate, greeted truly enough as "King Pym."

Green JR, A Short History of the English People, London: Macmillan and Co, 1885, pp 518-20