When Charles orders a parliamentary adjournment in March, members hold the Speaker, Sir John Finch, down in his chair so that the dissolving of Parliament can be delayed long enough for resolutions against Catholicism, Arminianism, and poundage and tonnage to be read out.

The lattermost resolution declares that anyone who paid tonnage or poundage not authorized by Parliament would "be reputed a betrayer of the liberties of England, and an enemy to the same", and, although the resolution is not formally passed, many members declare their approval.

Nevertheless, the provocation is too much for Charles, who dissolves parliament the same day.

Moreover, eight parliamentary leaders, including John Eliot, are imprisoned on the foot of the matter, thereby turning these men into martyrs, and giving popular cause to a protest that had hitherto been losing its bearings.

The parliamentary session of 1629 ends in a breach between the king and parliament which makes the task of a moderator hopeless.

Thomas Wentworth, who, following the assassination of Buckingham, had in December 1628 become Viscount Wentworth and president of the Council of the North, has to choose between either helping the House of Commons dominate the King or helping the King to dominate the House of Commons.

He chooses the latter course, throwing himself into the work of repression with characteristic energy and claiming that he is maintaining the old constitution and that his opponents (Parliament) are attempting to alter it.

From this time on, he acts as one of two principal members (the other being William Laud, named Bishop of London in 1628) in a team of key advisors to the king during an eleven-year period of total monarchical rule without parliament (known both as "the Personal Rule" and the "eleven-year tyranny").

Charles, without the influence of Buckingham or the means in the foreseeable future to raise funds for a European War from Parliament, makes peace with France and Spain shortly after the proroguing of Parliament.

The following eleven years, during which Charles rules without a Parliament, will be referred to as the Personal Rule or the Eleven Years' Tyranny. (Ruling without Parliament, though an exceptional exercise of the royal prerogative, is supported by precedent. Opinion has shifted by the middle of the seventeenth century, and many hold the Personal Rule to be an illegitimate exercise of arbitrary, absolute power.)

The power of the High Commission Court, or Star Chamber, has grown considerably under the House of Stewart, and by the time of King Charles I, it has become synonymous with misuse and abuse of power by the King and his circle.

King James I and his son Charles have used the court to examine cases of sedition, which means that the court could be used to suppress opposition to royal policies.

It comes to be used to try nobles too powerful to be brought to trial in the lower court.

Charles uses the Court of Star Chamber as Parliamentary substitute during the eleven years of Personal Rule, when he rules without a Parliament, making extensive use of the Court of Star Chamber to prosecute dissenters, including the Puritans who are fleeing to New England.

Dr. Alexander Leighton, a Scottish medical doctor and puritan preacher and pamphleteer, had in 1628 published his controversial Zion's Plea Against Prelacy: An Appeal to Parliament, an attack on Anglican bishops, in Holland.

In this publication, he had criticized the church, and in particular the Bishops who rule the Church of Scotland, condemning them as "antiChristian and satanic".

Once the warrant for his arrest is issued by the High Commission Court, Leighton is taken to the house of William Laud, Bishop or London, and then to Newgate prison without any trial.

He is put in irons in solitary confinement in an unheated and uncovered cell for fifteen weeks, in which the rain and snow could beat in upon him.

None of his friends nor even his wife are permitted to see him during this time.

According to four doctors, Leighton is so sick that he is unable to attend his supposed sentencing.

Will Durant notes that Leighton also "was tied to a stake and received thirty-six stripes with a heavy cord upon his naked back; he was placed in the pillory for two hours in November's frost and snow; he was branded in the face with the letters 'SS' (for 'Sower of Sedition'), had his nose split and his ears cut off, and was condemned to life imprisonment" (Age of Reason Begins, pp. 189–190).

Medical records say that, "since he had been censured by the Star Chamber on religious grounds (& had had his ears cropped)", that he should now be 'infamis' in his profession, and he was permanently banned from further practice.

The famous pun, "give great praise to the Lord, and little laud to the devil" is a warning to King Charles attributed to the official court jester Archie Armstrong.

Laud is known to be touchy about his diminutive stature.

Whereas Strafford sees the political dangers of Puritanism, Laud sees the threat to the episcopacy.

But the Puritans themselves feel threatened: the Counter-Reformation is succeeding abroad and the Thirty Years' War is not progressing to the advantage of the Protestants.

Laud's high church policy is seen in this climate as a sinister development.

A year after Laud's appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury, the ship Griffin leaves for America, carrying religious dissidents such as Anne Hutchinson, the Reverend John Lothropp and the Reverend Zechariah Symmes.

Francis Windebank, the only son of Sir Thomas Windebank of Hougham, Lincolnshire, who owed his advancement to the Cecil family, had entered St. John's College, Oxford, in 1599, coming there under the influence of William Laud.

After a few years of continental travel (1605-1608), he had settled at Haines Hill at Hurst in Berkshire and been employed for many years in minor public offices, eventually becoming clerk of the council.

He had been appointed in June 1632 by King Charles I as Secretary of State, in succession to Lord Dorchester, his senior colleague being Sir John Coke, and he was knighted.

His appointment was mainly due to his Spanish and Roman Catholic sympathies.

The first Earl of Portland, Francis, Lord Cottington, and Windebank formed an inner group in the council, and with their aid the king have carried on various secret negotiations, especially with Spain.

Windebank in December 1634 is appointed to discuss with the papal agent Gregorio Panzani the possibility of a union between the Anglican and Roman Churches, and expresses the opinion that the Puritan opposition might be crippled by sending their leaders to the war in the Netherlands.

King Charles I allows increasing Puritan agitation to reform "Romish" practices in the Church of England to be frustrated, which divides the country.

Charles summons Parliament after a several-year hiatus.

The so-called “Long Parliament” begins in 1640.

Parliament, the City, and the Navy line up against the King.

Civil War in England begins in 1642 between Charles and Parliament.

Income and property tax is introduced for the first time.

The Royal Society is formed in 1646 to support science.

Rosicrucians supposedly infiltrate the stone Masons, introducing mysticism and cabalism.

James had taken Scotland only part of the way towards a unified British church; his son Charles has decided it is time to push the matter further.

With a self-assurance born of a unique kind of arrogance and political blindness, he has made no preparation for this fatal step other than to insist that it should be so.

In the worst possible circumstances, having alienated virtually all shades of opinion beyond the Episcopal party and not even troubling to consult his own Privy Council, in 1635 he had issued a royal warrant authorizing a new set of clerical rules—the Book of Canons—to be published the following year.

These new rules begin by emphasizing royal supremacy over the Church of Scotland and, in one of the most remarkable assertions of this supremacy, require the Church to accept a new Liturgy or Service Book sight unseen to replace the Book of Common Order, in use since the Reformation.

This Service Book is to be known by contemporaries and for centuries afterwards as 'Laud's Liturgy'.

In a sense this would seem to be psychologically appropriate, for the simple reason that it expresses a deep sense of national frustration at royal and Anglican arrogance.

In reality it is the work of a panel of Scottish bishops, anxious not to offend the sensibilities of the nation in the way that the straightforward use of the English Prayer Book—the favored solution of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury—would have done.

Spottiswoode and at least some of his colleagues are far more sensitive to Scottish opinion than is often supposed.

Even so, the circumstances under which the Service Book was conceived and born could not have been worse, leading to all sorts of exaggerated rumors about its contents.

In a mood of fearful expectation the Privy Council manages to delay the first reading of the Book to the summer of 1637 but, on the insistence of the king, finally decrees that it will be read on Sunday, July 23, arguably one of the most fateful days in British history.

On the Sunday in question, St. Giles' Cathedral is packed.

Among the congregation are many serving women, seated on three-legged stools, keeping places for their mistresses.

To show support for the Prayer Book the members of the Privy Council are also present, with some ominous exceptions: John Stewart, 1st Earl of Traquair and lord high treasurer of Scotland, had said he had a prior engagement, and Lord Lorne had pleaded sickness.

When Dean John Hanna appears carrying a brown leather book the murmuring begins.

As soon as he starts to read, many people, led by the serving women, raise their voices in protest.

A stool is allegedly hurled at the unfortunate Hanna by one Jenny Geddes.

When David Lindsay, recently appointed Bishop of Edinburgh, tries to quiet the unseemly tumult, he is greeted with a variety of epithets, including one accusation that he is the son of the Devil and a witch.

The commotion radiates out from Edinburgh across the rest of Scotland like a great wave caused by a rock thrown into a silent pool.

Montrose makes the feelings of many of his fellow peers plain when he describes the Service Book 'emerging from the bowels of the whore of Babylon'.

Robert Baillie, the minister of Kilwinning in Ayrshire, expresses the mood of the nation in more measured terms: '...there was in our land never such ane appearance of a sturr; the whole people thinks Poperie at the doores...no man may speak for the king's part, except he would have himself marked for a sacrifice to be killed one day. I think our people possessed with a bloody devill, farr above any thing I could ever have imagined.'

The Council, well aware of the resentment that the reading of the Prayer Book will unleash, are in the weeks that follow placed in an almost impossible position, caught between the anger of the king and the determination of the opposition, for they are now faced with an opposition just as organized as the Lords of the Congregation had been prior to the Reformation.

Petitions hostile to the king's church policy begin to arrive in Edinburgh from all parts of Scotland.

Many share a common theme: the innovations in religion had not been approved by either Parliament or the General Assembly.