The Commons came together in stern temper, Pym standing promptly at the Bar of the House of Lords with Strafford's impeachment for High Treason. The great Earl's apologists among the Lords, his own ingenious and powerful pleadings, the King's entreaties and worthless promises, all were in vain.
The King saw the whole fabric of tyranny crumbling before his eyes. He was over-awed and dared not refuse his signature to the fatal paper. It is said that as Strafford passed to the block, Laud, who was at the window of the room where he too was a prisoner, fainted as his old companion in cruelty stopped to say farewell to him.
There were a few moments of silence, then,—a wild exultant shout. "His head is off—His head is off."
The execution of the Archbishop swiftly followed, then the abolition of the Star Chamber, and of the High Commission Court; then a bill was passed requiring that Parliament be summoned once in three years, and a law enacted forbidding its dissolution except by its own consent.
They were rapidly nearing the conception that Parliament does not exist by sanction of the King, but the King by sanction of Parliament.
What could be done with a King whom no promises could bind—who, while in the act of giving solemn pledges to Parliament in order to save Strafford, was perfidiously planning to overawe it by military force? The attempted arrest of Hampden, Pym, and three other leaders was part of this "Army Plot," which made civil war inevitable. The trouble had resolved itself into a deadly conflict between King and Parliament. If he resorted to arms, so must they.
If Hampden stands out pre-eminent as the Champion who like a great Gladiator fought the battle of civil freedom, Pym is no less conspicuous in having grasped the principles on which it must be fought. He saw that if either Crown or Parliament must go down, better for England that it should be the crown. He saw also, that the vital principle in Parliament lay in the House of Commons. If the King refused to act with them, it should be treated as an abdication, and Parliament must act without him, and if the Lords obstructed reform, then they must be told that the Commons must act alone, rather than let the Kingdom perish.
This was the theory upon which the future action was based. Revolutionary and without precedent it has since been accepted as the correct construction of English Constitutional principles.
Better would it have been for Charles had he let the ship sail, which was to have borne Hampden and Oliver Cromwell (cousin of the latter) toward the "Valley of the Connecticut." When he gave that order, he recalled the man who was to be his evil genius. Cromwell could not so accurately have defined the constitutional right of his cause as Pym had done, nor make himself its adored head as was Hampden; but he had a more compelling genius than either. His figure stands up colossal and grim away above all others from the time he raised his praying, psalm-singing army, until the defeat of the King's forces at Naseby (1645), the flight of the King and his subsequent surrender.