William Prynne passed through Chester on his way to his prison in Carnarvon Castle. The Puritans turned out to welcome and cheer him in the streets, but their leaders were punished by fines and imprisonment for so doing.
Neither James nor Charles got on well with their Parliaments. The Tudor monarchs had for the most part understood the people, and the people in their turn allowed them to have their own way. But the Stuarts began to claim powers which the people would not permit. When Parliament refused to grant money they asked for, the Stuart kings tried to raise money by means which the people thought illegal. Charles borrowed large sums of money without the consent of Parliament. Sir Randolph Crewe, of Crewe Hall, was one of the judges who thought that this was wrong, and he was dismissed from his office by the king.
Charles also tried to impose a tax called Ship Money, a tax which had in former times been levied on the counties on the seaboard for the support of the navy. Now the king proposed that inland counties also should contribute for this purpose. Sir William Brereton, a Cheshire knight, objected strongly to the hateful tax, and was very angry with the people of Chester for rating some land of his near Chester, called the Nunnery Fields, for the payment of the money.
It is not surprising that trouble should arise between Parliament and a king who refused to obey the wishes of the people over whom he ruled. The Stuarts believed in the theory known as the Divine right of kings, that is, that kings are made by God alone, and that from Him alone they receive their power. But from the time of the great awakening the people had begun to think for themselves, and the result of this was that they were now determined that the king should carry out the will of the nation through the mouth of its Parliament.
Moreover, Charles was suspected of being a Catholic; at any rate he had married a Catholic wife, and Parliament was not in a mood to permit a return to the unhappy state of affairs of Queen Mary's reign.
Charles proclaimed war on Parliament in the year 1642, and both sides prepared at once for the struggle. Roughly speaking, London and the south-eastern counties were on the side of Parliament, for they were the chief centres of trade in the seventeenth century, and felt most keenly the evils of bad government. The great modern industrial towns of the northern counties of England were in most cases as yet mere villages.