Two of the very few parliaments called by Charles I during his entire reign from 1625-49 remembered for the impact they had on the political topography of his reign. The Short Parliament sat from 13 April to 5 May 1640, while the Long Parliament ran from 3 Nov 1640-20 Apr 1653.
Charles I held such a stubborn conviction of the concept of divine kingship he ruled with scant attention to Parliament. In fact he never called one in the first fifteen years of his reign. In 1639, however, he provoked a war with Scotland when he tried to imposed English Episcopacy on the Scottish church (war became known as the Bishops' Wars). He called Parliament to meet to ask for the money to prosecute the war. Parliament, however, took the opportunity so long denied them to settle the other grievances they had with the king before they talked money. After three unnerving weeks of criticism Charles dissolved it. Hence its name, the Short Parliament.
When Charles, forced by circumstances, recalled parliament on 3 November later that year (1640), his quarrels with Parliament just got worse and ended up with fighting against the parliamentarians in a Civil War that ended with the defeat, trial and eventual beheading of the King in 1649. This so-called Long Parliament had not been dissovled when the country descended into civil war and the effect of the war was to reduce it to a "Rump Parliament" which Oliver Cromwell dismissed on 20 April 1653, and replaced it with a handpicked body of Puritans which became known afterwards as the Barebone Parliament (after one of its member called Praise-God Barebone). Despite the presence of a parliament, and the name given to this period as the Commonwealth, England was, until Cromwell's death in 1658, a dictatorship.
©ALBERITH