The king had reason to regret his intrusion since the dispute which he had caused delayed a supply from the commons so much the more. He now had recourse to a compromise. He offered the withdrawal of his claim to ship money in consideration of a grant of twelve subsidies,[368] payable in three years. The commons, perceiving that the proposition, if acceded to, involved the tacit admission that the ship money had been justly laid, insomuch as its removal was obtainable only by purchase, refused to enter into the agreement. But the effect of the message was not quite lost; on the contrary it seemed as though the king would shortly receive his grant. At the moment when the commons were on the point of deciding upon a supply, the amount to be determined subsequently, Sir Henry Vane, secretary of state, precipitated a crisis. He asserted that the supply would not be accepted unless it were to the amount and in the manner designated in the king’s message.[369] The next day, the 5th May, the king dissolved his three-weeks-old Parliament, to his own great distress and the trepidation of the nation. [Dissolution of Parliament] Charles employed the six months which intervened between the dissolution of Parliament and the summons of the Long Parliament in his usual occupations. He locked up several members of the House. He exacted forced loans, created new monopolies, and levied ship money. Prosecutions followed swiftly upon refusals to pay. “Coat and conduct money,” a new exaction from the counties, was demanded to cover the traveling expenses of recruits on their way to fight against the Scots. He obtained six subsidies from the clergy whom he illegally kept in convocation after the dissolution of Parliament. [Sitting of the Long Parliament, 3rd November, 1640] The wind of opposition was rising to a gale. With the sitting of the Long Parliament, which convened on the 3rd November, 1640, the tempest broke. The immediate occasion of the summons was the universal demand of the people and the peers for a session of Parliament, coupled with emptiness of the treasury which came with the commencement of the disastrous Scottish war. The composition of the commons was overwhelmingly anti-regal;[370] the popular leaders had been at work in the counties ever since the dissolution of the Short Parliament looking to the return of a strong majority in opposition to the king. The assembly convened full of the idea that “they had now had an opportunity to make their country happy by removing all grievances and pulling up the causes of them by the roots, if all men would do their duties.”[371]