ABSTRACT
The Long Parliament opened on 3 November 1640 in much the same fashion as had the Short Parliament six months before. Periodic revelations of papist plots made the wildest seem even more credible, and men more desperate for any solution – one member of parliament even suggested gelding Jesuits. The whirlpool that Knyvett noticed less than three weeks after the Long Parliament opened caught both the king and his senior advisers off-guard. The parliamentarian refused, his shibboleth of the king’s good faith being the complete dissolution of the Irish army. Charles’s warm reception in Edinburgh in August had prompted him to take a hard line with the Westminster parliament. The swing of English public opinion made this more feasible, and the king more anxious to return to London. In the most western of Charles’s kingdoms such exhortations had a distinctly hollow ring, for by now the rebellion in Ireland was well out of control.
