The Parliament of 1614 was the second Parliament of England of the reign of James VI and I and sat between 5 April and 7 June 1614. Lasting only two months and two days, it saw no bills pass and was not even regarded as a parliament by contemporaries. However, for its failure it has been known to posterity as the Addled Parliament.
James had struggled with debt ever since he came to the English throne. The failure of the Blessed Parliament of 1604–1611 to, in its seven-year sitting, either rescue James from his mounting debt or allow the king to unite his two kingdoms had left him bitter with the body. The four-year hiatus between parliaments saw the royal debt and deficit grow further, in spite of the best efforts of Treasurer Lord Salisbury. The failure of the last and most lucrative financial expedient of the period, a foreign dowry from the marriage of his heir-apparent, finally convinced James to recall Parliament in early 1614.
The parliament got off to a bad start, with poor choices made for the king's representatives in Parliament. Rumours of conspiracies to manage Parliament (the "undertaking") or to pack it with easily controlled members, though not based in fact, spread quickly. The spreading of that rumour and the ultimate failure of Parliament have been generally attributed to the scheming of the crypto-Catholic Earl of Northampton, but that allegation has met with some recent skepticism. Parliament opened on 5 April and, despite the king's wishes it would be a "Parliament of Love", flung itself immediately into the controversy over the conspiracies, which split Parliament and led to the exclusion of one alleged packer. However, by late April, Parliament had moved on to a familiar controversy, that of impositions. The House of Commons were pitted against the House of Lords, culminating in a controversy over an unrestrained speech by one prelate.
James grew impatient with the parliamentary proceedings. He issued an ultimatum to Parliament, which treated it irreverently. Insult was added to injury by belligerent and supposedly-threatening attacks on him from the Commons. On the advice of Northampton, James dissolved Parliament on 7 June and had four Members of Parliament (MPs) sent to the Tower of London. James devised new financial expedients to settle his still-growing debt, with little success. Historiographically, historians are divided between the Whiggish view of the parliament as anticipating the constitutional disputes of future parliaments and the revisionist view of it as a conflict primarily concerned with James's finances.
James VI and I (1566–1625) ascended to the Scottish throne on 24 July 1567, and subsequently to the English and Irish throne on 24 March 1603, becoming the first king to reign over both kingdoms. James inherited, with the latter throne, a national debt to the amount of £300,000, a sum that only increased during his reign. By 1608, it stood at £1 million. During his predecessor Elizabeth I's reign, the inward revenue of the crown had steadily fallen; taxes from customs and land were consistently undervalued and the parliamentary subsidies steadily shrank. It did not help that James reigned as "one of the most extravagant kings" in English history. In peace, Elizabeth's yearly expenditure never rose above £300,000; almost immediately after James took the throne, it was at £400,000. James had instituted various extra-parliamentary plans to recuperate this lost income, but these drew controversy from Parliament, and James still wanted money. Moreover, James was keen to not be "a husband to two wives" as king, and to unite his crowns as one kingdom of Great Britain; as his slogan went: "one king, one people, and one law". The first parliament of his reign, also known as the Blessed Parliament, was called in 1604; it took seven years, with proceedings held through five sessions, before James dissolved it, ending unsatisfactorily for both king and Parliament. In the first session, it came to light that many members of the Commons feared James's proposed unification would lead to the dissolution of the English Common Law system. Though many prominent politicians publicly praised the idea of unification and MPs promptly accepted a commission to investigate the union, James's proposed adoption of the title "king of Great Britain" was rejected outright. Between the first and second sessions, in October 1604, James assumed this title by proclamation, controversially circumventing Parliament. Unification was not brought up at the second session, in hopes of assuaging outrage, but discussions of the plans in the third session were exclusively negative; as Scottish historian Jenny Wormald put it, "James's union was killed by this parliament". Unification was quietly dropped from discussion in the fourth and fifth sessions.
During the Blessed Parliament, Parliament's own aims saw similar disappointment; James rebuffed the proposed institution of Puritan ecclesiastical reforms, and failed to address two unpopular royal rights, purveyance and wardship. In the second session, Parliament granted the king a subsidy of £400,000, keen to exhibit royal support in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, but thanks to the reduction of these subsidies under Elizabeth, this was rather less than the king desired. After a three-year delay between sessions due to plague, the fourth session was called in February 1610, and was dominated by financial discussion. Lord High Treasurer, Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury proposed the Great Contract: a financial plan wherein Parliament would grant the Crown £600,000 immediately (to pay off its debts) and an annual stipend of £200,000 thereafter; in return, the king was to abolish ten feudal dues, among them, purveyance. After much haggling, in which wardship was added to the abolished dues, the session adjourned on a supportive note. However, when the next session began, support had cooled. Parliament refused to give an annual stipend unless James abolished impositions as well. Parliament did give the king an immediate subsidy, but the proposed £600,000 was reduced to a mere £100,000. By 6 November 1610, James demanded the other £500,000 and conditioned that, if impositions were to be abolished, Parliament would have to supply him with another equally lucrative income source. Parliament was outraged, and the Contract was abandoned three days later. Though both Salisbury and James made conciliatory gestures in hopes of securing any more financial support from Parliament, James grew impatient. On 31 December 1610, James publicly proclaimed the dissolution of the Parliament. James's first parliament had ended on a bitter note; "your greatest error", he chastised Salisbury, "hath been that ye ever expected to draw honey out of gall."
After this, James was not keen to call another Parliament. However, without Parliament to raise taxes, the treasury was forced to find new ways to raise money. In 1611, the City of London loaned the Crown £100,000; £60,000 was extracted from the King of France over debts accumulated in the reign of Henry IV; honours were sold to wealthy gentlemen, raising £90,000; a forced loan was levied on nearly 10,000 people. Yet, after the death of Treasurer Salisbury in 1612, England's finances still remained destitute, with a debt of £500,000 and annual deficit of £160,000. However, James's principal fiscal expedient was to be the marriage of his heir-apparent, Henry, Prince of Wales, for which he expected a sizeable dowry, not to mention a foreign ally. James went into talks with several Catholic countries but, in late 1612, aged 18, Henry contracted typhoid and abruptly died; Prince Charles, newly heir-apparent at age 12, took his place in the negotiations. Negotiations were going most promisingly in France, where a marriage of Prince Charles to the 6-year-old Princess Christine of France promised a healthy sum of £240,000, almost halving James's debt. However, by early 1614, France's internal religious strife had intensified to such a point that civil war seemed imminent, so negotiations stalled on the French side; James grew impatient. James's financial insecurity had only worsened in this time, the debt now at £680,000 and the deficit, £200,000. Conspicuous consumption had raised yearly expenditure to an unsustainable £522,000. A group of advisors, led by the Earls of Suffolk and Pembroke, encouraged the king to call a parliament to raise funds, convincing James "that"—as he later put it—"my subjects did not hate me, which I know I had not deserved." Suffolk and Pembroke, though not optimistic about the parliament, encouraged James as they held what was then the general view in the Privy Council: that a Spanish or French alliance must be avoided, as to avoid strengthening the power of their allies in Court, the Scots. Northampton stringently opposed this summoning, but, in 1614, James reluctantly summoned another parliament. Writs of election were issued on 19 February that year.