Great Remonstrance

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The Great Remonstrance ( English Grand Remonstrance ) was a letter of appeal of the House of Commons against the government of King Charles I of England , which was passed on November 23, 1641 and was to become one of the triggering factors of the English Civil War .

Content and meaning

In 204 articles, the remonstrance listed all the misconducts that, from the point of view of Parliament, had been committed by the government of King Charles since it took office in 1625 , as well as the resulting claims. These included, for the first time in the history of England, the demand for parliamentary control of the government.

The initiator of the remonstrance, the House of Commons John Pym , supported by John Hampden and Oliver Cromwell , intended to unite Parliament in its power struggle with the king and to bring public opinion on his side. Instead, however, the debate on the document split the House of Commons, which until then had always faced the king as a closed body, into a party loyal to the king and a revolutionary party.

After a heated debate that lasted from noon on November 22nd until the early hours of the next day, the document was only adopted by a slim majority of 159 votes to 148. It turned out that although many MPs supported the list of complaints, they did not support the conclusions drawn by their authors, the demand for parliamentary control of the royal government. They continued to regard executive power as a prerogative of the crown protected by divine law .

In the vote, the exact fault line between the parties that were to face each other a few months later in the English Civil War became apparent for the first time . The document became the manifesto of the revolutionary-minded members of the house who saw kingship as a man-made office. The Great Remonstrance thus stands at the beginning of the process in which the Whigs and Tories parties emerged up to the end of the 17th century and at the end of which there was the parliamentary monarchy as it still exists in England today.

Reaction of the King and Political Consequences

King Karl refused to comply with the demands of the parliamentary majority. Instead, he attempted a coup d'état by appearing in the House of Commons on January 4, 1642 with 400 armed men. He wanted to arrest five MPs who had campaigned for the Great Remonstrance for high treason. The attempt failed because the MPs had fled shortly before. The king's violent repression against parliament represented a breach of the constitutional order that turned the people of London against him. Charles I was forced to flee the city and move his headquarters to York . Like Parliament, he was now preparing for a violent solution to their conflict. In the spring of 1642 the civil war began.

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