On January 4, 1642, King Charles I of England entered the chamber of the House of Commons at the Palace of Westminster accompanied by approximately 400 armed soldiers. He had come to arrest five members of Parliament on charges of high treason. It was the first time in English history that a reigning monarch had entered the Commons chamber, a violation of parliamentary privilege so fundamental that it has never been repeated. When Charles arrived, the five men he sought were already gone, having been warned of his approach and spirited away by barge to the City of London. Charles looked over the silent benches, asked the Speaker where the members were, received the answer that would become one of the most celebrated statements in English constitutional history, and left the chamber empty-handed. He would not return to London for seven years, and then only for his own trial and execution.
The attempted arrest of the Five Members, as it became known, was the single most catastrophic act of political miscalculation in Charles I’s reign. It transformed the political crisis of 1641 into the military confrontation of 1642. It united London against the King, hardened Parliament’s determination to resist royal authority, and made the English Civil War that followed almost inevitable. To understand why Charles took this extraordinary step, it is necessary to understand the years of constitutional conflict that preceded it.
The Long Background: Divine Right, the Personal Rule, and Parliamentary Opposition
Charles I came to the English throne in 1625 following the death of his father, James I, and from the beginning his relationship with Parliament was adversarial. Charles believed with absolute sincerity in the Divine Right of Kings: the doctrine that monarchs held their authority directly from God and were accountable to no earthly authority. Parliament, in the English constitutional tradition, held an equally firm belief that the Crown could not levy taxes, make laws, or maintain an army without parliamentary consent. These two positions were fundamentally incompatible, and Charles spent his entire reign testing the limits of each.
In the first five years of his reign, Charles summoned and dissolved Parliament three times, each time dissolving it when it challenged his authority or refused him money. In 1629, after Parliament attempted to pass resolutions limiting his power over religious and financial policy, Charles dissolved it and had several members arrested, most notably Sir John Eliot, who died in the Tower of London in 1632 refusing to acknowledge the King’s right to imprison him. Charles then entered a period historians call the Personal Rule, governing for eleven years from 1629 to 1640 without summoning Parliament at all.
To raise money without parliamentary taxation, Charles resorted to increasingly creative and unpopular expedients. He revived the ancient Ship Money tax, originally levied only on coastal counties in times of naval emergency, and extended it to inland counties every year. John Hampden, who would later become one of the Five Members, refused to pay his Ship Money assessment of twenty shillings and took his case to court in 1637 in the Ship Money Case. He lost on a narrow verdict of seven to five judges, but the trial made him a national hero and publicized the constitutional objections to Charles’s fiscal policies across the country.
Charles also attempted to impose religious conformity across his kingdoms in ways that generated fierce opposition. His Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, drove forward a program of ritualistic Anglican practice that Puritans identified with crypto-Catholicism. When Charles attempted to impose the English Prayer Book on Scotland in 1637, Scottish Presbyterians responded with a National Covenant pledging resistance, and in 1639 and 1640 Charles fought two disastrous military campaigns against the Scots, known as the Bishops’ Wars, that ended in humiliating defeat. The cost of these wars, added to the accumulated resentments of the Personal Rule, forced Charles to recall Parliament in 1640.
The Long Parliament, the Grand Remonstrance, and the Path to Crisis
The Parliament that assembled in November 1640, known to history as the Long Parliament because it technically remained in session until 1660, was in no mood for compromise. Led by the brilliant and relentless parliamentarian John Pym, it moved swiftly to dismantle the institutional pillars of Charles’s Personal Rule. The prerogative courts, Star Chamber and High Commission, were abolished. The Ship Money levy was declared illegal. The Triennial Act required Parliament to be summoned at least once every three years. Most significantly, Parliament passed the Act of Attainder against the King’s principal minister, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, condemning him to death for alleged treason, and put intense pressure on Charles to sign it. Charles signed the death warrant of his most loyal servant in May 1641, a decision that tormented him for the rest of his life and which he reportedly said was the greatest sin he had ever committed.
Through the summer and autumn of 1641, a series of events radicalized the political situation further. An Irish Catholic rebellion in October 1641 killed thousands of Protestants in Ulster, and wildly exaggerated reports of the massacre inflamed English Protestant opinion. Parliament was asked to raise an army to suppress the rebellion, but many in Parliament feared that any army raised under the King’s command would be turned against Parliament itself once Ireland was subdued. The question of who should control the military became the central constitutional issue of the crisis.
John Pym responded with the Grand Remonstrance, a massive document of approximately two hundred clauses cataloguing all of Charles’s misgovernment since his accession and making sweeping demands for parliamentary control over the King’s ministers and the church. The Grand Remonstrance passed the Commons on November 22, 1641, by a margin of only eleven votes, 159 to 148, revealing how deeply the country was divided. It was debated through the night in an atmosphere so tense that members reportedly had their hands on their swords.
Charles rejected the Grand Remonstrance. When Parliament threatened to publish it directly to the people over his head, Charles began to consider more drastic action. Rumors reached the court that Pym and his allies were also planning to impeach Queen Henrietta Maria, Charles’s French Catholic wife, for alleged involvement in plots to bring Catholic troops from Ireland and the continent to suppress Parliament by force.
The Decision to Strike: Henrietta Maria, Lord Digby, and the Choice to Arrest
The decision to arrest the Five Members was the result of a combination of Charles’s own determination and the urgings of two principal advisers. Queen Henrietta Maria, impatient and politically reckless, reportedly told her hesitating husband: “Go you poltroon. Go and pull those rogues out by the ears, or never see my face again.” The blunt ultimatum illustrated the dynamic in the royal marriage and the extent to which the Queen’s influence pushed Charles toward a course that more cautious advisers might have prevented.
Lord Digby, George Digby, the Second Earl of Bristol, also urged the King to act decisively and arrest the members in person, accompanied by armed force. The combination of these two voices overcame Charles’s natural hesitation.
The five members whom Charles intended to arrest were John Pym, John Hampden, Denzil Holles, Arthur Haselrig, and William Strode. John Pym was the most important of the five: the supreme parliamentary strategist, the organizer of parliamentary opposition, and the man whom Charles considered the architect of his humiliations since 1640. Pym’s ability to maintain parliamentary unity, manage the negotiations with Scotland, and coordinate popular opposition in London made him the most dangerous man in England from Charles’s perspective.
John Hampden, whose Ship Money Case had made him a national hero, was equally symbolic: his arrest would signal that no act of constitutional defiance against the Crown was safe. Denzil Holles had been one of the members who held the Speaker of the House down in his chair during the tumultuous dissolution of 1629, preventing him from adjourning the session until Parliament had passed its resolutions. Arthur Haselrig was among the most vocal critics of royal policy. William Strode had been imprisoned by Charles in 1629 and had been a consistent opponent of the Crown throughout the Long Parliament.
A sixth target, Edward Montagu, Viscount Mandeville, who sat in the House of Lords, was also named in the charges. Charles formally accused all six of treason before the House of Lords on January 3, 1642, calling for their arrest. The Commons immediately responded that this constituted a breach of parliamentary privilege. The race was on.
The Wikipedia article on the Five Members provides the comprehensive account of the political events leading to January 4, 1642, and the immediate consequences of Charles’s failed attempt.
January 4, 1642: The King Enters the Commons Chamber
On the morning of January 4, 1642, Charles sent a message to the Lord Mayor of London forbidding him from sending men to protect Parliament, attempting to ensure that no armed resistance would block his entry. Then, accompanied by approximately 400 armed men, he set out from Whitehall for Westminster.
Word of the King’s approach reached Parliament before he arrived. Pym and his allies had been warned, and the five members were bundled into boats on the Thames and taken by river to the safety of the City of London, where their allies among the merchants and citizens would protect them. When Charles arrived at the Commons, the five were already gone.
Charles entered the chamber alone, without his soldiers, who waited outside. He removed his hat as he walked down the aisle, saluting some members as he passed. The House sat in absolute silence. He walked to the Speaker’s chair at the front of the chamber and addressed Speaker William Lenthall: “Mr Speaker, I must for a time make bold with your chair.” Lenthall vacated it. Charles then called for each of the five members by name, one by one, and was met each time with total silence. No one answered. No one moved. No one spoke.
Charles asked Lenthall directly where the members were. Lenthall knelt and delivered the most famous words ever spoken by an English Speaker of the House: “May it please your majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this House is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here; and I humbly beg your majesty’s pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this to what your majesty is pleased to demand of me.” It was the first time a Speaker had openly declared his allegiance to Parliament over the monarch, and the words would become a foundational statement of parliamentary independence.
Charles looked over the silent benches for what eyewitnesses described as “a pretty while,” scanning the faces. Then he acknowledged the truth of his situation: “All my birds have flown.” He turned and left the chamber, walking back down the aisle through the silent members, and stepped out into the fury of London.
The UK Parliament’s account of Speaker Lenthall’s defiance of Charles I preserves the full context of this founding moment in parliamentary history, including Lenthall’s celebrated declaration of allegiance to the privileges of the House.
The Aftermath: London’s Fury, the King’s Flight, and the March to Civil War
The reaction to Charles’s invasion of the Commons chamber was immediate and overwhelming. To most Londoners, the King’s march on Parliament with 400 armed soldiers appeared as naked tyranny, confirmation of everything Parliament had warned about his intentions. Charles tried to press his advantage by marching in person to the Guildhall the following day to demand that the City of London’s officers surrender the fugitive members to him. The City officers refused, declaring their support for Parliament. The trained bands of London, under their experienced commander Philip Skippon, a veteran of the Dutch wars, mobilized. Sailors from the port flocked to the city’s defense. Some six thousand armed citizens were ready to resist any royal attack. When Charles returned to Whitehall in his coach, crowds surrounded it, shouting and pressing close, and hands thrust papers through the coach windows bearing the words “Privilege of Parliament.”
Within days, the five members returned in triumph to Westminster by river, escorted by crowds of armed citizens. Parliament had the streets; Parliament had London. Charles had nothing except the theoretical power of the Crown and a personal bodyguard.
On January 10, 1642, six days after his failed attempt to arrest the Five Members, Charles left London for Hampton Court, fearing both for his own safety and that of the Queen. He never returned to his capital as a free man. Over the following months, both sides prepared for war. In March 1642, Parliament passed the Militia Ordinance without royal assent, asserting its right to control the armed forces independently. Charles issued his own Commissions of Array, mobilizing Royalist supporters. On August 22, 1642, Charles raised his royal standard at Nottingham, the formal declaration that England was at war with itself.
The English Civil War that followed lasted from 1642 to 1651, consuming tens of thousands of lives, generating a military and political revolution of extraordinary consequences, and ending with the execution of Charles I on January 30, 1649, outside his own Banqueting House in London. The man who had walked into the Commons chamber with 400 soldiers demanding the arrest of five men walked to the scaffold seven years later, having lost his kingdom, his freedom, and his life in the consequences of that single catastrophic decision.
The Britannica article on the English Civil War covers the full arc of the conflict that Charles’s action helped to make inevitable, from the constitutional confrontations of the Long Parliament through the Battle of Naseby, the King’s capture, and his eventual execution.
The constitutional legacy of January 4, 1642, proved more durable than the Stuarts themselves. Charles’s invasion of the Commons chamber is commemorated every year at the State Opening of Parliament, when Black Rod, the monarch’s messenger, is sent to summon the House of Commons to the Lords, and the doors of the Commons are slammed in Black Rod’s face before he knocks three times and is admitted. The ceremony encodes in annual ritual the principle that the Commons answers to itself, not to the Crown, a principle that Speaker Lenthall articulated on his knees before Charles I on a January morning in 1642.
