Long Parliament

The Long Parliament was an English Parliament which nominally lasted from 1640 until 1660, making it the longest-lasting Parliament in English and British history. It followed the fiasco of the Short Parliament, which had convened for only three weeks during the spring of 1640 after an 11-year parliamentary absence. In September 1640, King Charles I issued writs summoning a parliament to convene on 3 November 1640. He intended it to pass financial bills, a step made necessary by the costs of the Bishops' Wars against Scotland. The Long Parliament received its name from the fact that, by an act of Parliament, the Parliament Act 1640 (16 Cha. 1. c. 7), it stipulated it could be dissolved only with agreement of the members; and those members did not agree to its dissolution until 16 March 1660, after the English Civil War and near the close of the Interregnum. The parliament first sat from 1640 until 1653. Following Pride's Purge in 1648, the remaining members sat as the Rump Parliament until Oliver Cromwell suspended it in April 1653, replacing it with a succession of nominated and elected parliaments. In the chaos following the death of Cromwell in September 1658, the Rump was reinstalled in May 1659, and in February 1660 General George Monck allowed the members barred in 1648 to retake their seats, so that they could pass the necessary legislation to allow the Stuart Restoration and dissolve the Long Parliament. This cleared the way for a new parliament to be elected, which was known as the Convention Parliament. Some key members of the Long Parliament, such as Sir Henry Vane the Younger and General Edmond Ludlow, were barred from the final acts of the Long Parliament. They claimed the parliament was not legally dissolved, its final votes a procedural irregularity (the...