History of England 1-6

came near the bread, which was cut and laid in a fine napkin, and then he gently lifted up one of the corners of the said napkin, and peeping into it till he saw the bread (like a boy that peeped after a bird-nest in a bush), and presently clapped it down again, and flew back a step or two, and bowed very low three times towards it … then he laid his hand upon the gilt cup … so soon as he pulled the cup a little nearer to him he let it go, flew back and bowed again three times towards it.

This was a keen burlesque of the services imposed by Laud.

The archbishop was concerned to augment the beauty and holiness of the rites of the Church, thus inducing respect if not awe. He had previously complained that ‘’tis superstition nowadays for any man to come with more reverence into a church, than a tinker and his bitch into an alehouse’. It soon became a serious offence for a minister not to bow his head at the name of Jesus. Choirboys came in two by two, and were instructed never to turn their backs upon the altar. Music returned to the cathedrals.

Laudianism, however, was not popery. The archbishop had a distaste for Roman Catholicism that was quite genuine. He was hoping to create a truly national Church devoid of the zealotry and intolerance of the puritans as well as the Mariolatry and superstitions of the papists. He had no appetite or aptitude for theological argument and, on the everlasting debate between free will and predestination, he said only that ‘something about these controversies is unmasterable in this life’. He was indifferent towards Geneva and Rome, and looked only towards the king.

Laud was also attempting to fashion religious developments of a structural kind; he appointed only bishops who were of firmly anti-Calvinist persuasion. Charles himself believed that the episcopacy was the fundamental buttress of his sovereignty; no bishop, as his father had said, implied no king. It was believed essential to augment clerical power. The corporations of cathedral towns were called upon to appoint more clerics as justices of the peace, and were further obliged to attend Sunday service in their ceremonial robes. Within a short time Laud was joined by two bishops in the king’s council; Bishop Juxon of London, who had been only the king’s chaplain two years before, was appointed as lord treasurer of the kingdom. The last cleric to fill the post had been promoted in the reign of Henry VII (1485–1509). England might be considered to have re-entered the world of medieval polity.

A series of ‘visitations’ to the various parishes followed in order to investigate cases of clerical disobedience and nonconformity. In Manchester, for example, twenty-seven clerics were charged with failing to kneel at the time of communion. Richard Mather of Toxteth, near Liverpool, admitted that he had never worn the surplice. ‘What!’ exclaimed the Visitor, ‘Preach fifteen years and never wear a surplice? It had been better for him that he had gotten seven bastards!’

The old processions and festivals also returned. With the republication of Declaration of Sports came a general relaxation of social custom. The ritual of ‘beating the bounds’ was soon followed by the parishes of London; such holy days as All Saints were celebrated once more. The custom of the Lord of Misrule returned with its attendant atmosphere of party games, dancing and drinking of spiced ale. These feasts had never completely died away but, in the new atmosphere of anti-puritanism, they flourished.

*

The king was further to test the loyalty of the nation. In the autumn of 1634 writs of ship-money were issued once again, for the first time in a period of peace. They had previously been sent out in 1626 and 1627, in the face of a threat of war against both France and Spain; payments had been grudging, but they had been made, and so it was deemed plausible to repeat the exercise. The proximate cause for the reintroduction of the tax was the prospect of new combinations in Europe. The French and Dutch had entered an unlikely alliance to dominate the continent, and a secret treaty between England and Spain was believed to be necessary.

There was no hope, however, that the members of the king’s own council would countenance the fact of an English force taking the part of Spain against the Dutch; how could the king ally himself with the pre-eminent Catholic power attacking a Protestant republic? Once again Charles relied upon intrigue with any or every party that seemed likely to favour him. He had to conceal his alliance with Spain and pretend that the ships were being prepared as a defence against attacks from all quarters. It was said that English trade had to be protected from Tunis and Turkey as much as from France or Spain. So the king claimed the right of sovereignty in all of his seas, including the English Channel and the North Sea.

The first writs of ship-money were dispatched only to the ports and to the towns along the coasts; they were ordered to provide a sum sufficient to fit out a certain number of ships as well as to maintain them and their crews for six months. The money was to be given to a collector appointed by the Crown. London alone attempted to oppose the tax, having been required to raise one fifth of the total, but was quickly subdued by threats and talk of treason. The Venetian ambassador commented of ship-money that ‘if it does not altogether violate the laws of the realm, as some think it does, it is certainly repugnant to usage and to the forms hitherto observed’.

Yet for what purpose was the fleet being prepared? What was the king to do with his newly fitted ships? Was it enough that they should enforce his sovereignty of the seas by making sure that passing vessels struck their flags and lowered their topsails? In the spring of 1635 the first fleet raised by ship-money finally took sail. The forty-two vessels, nineteen of them over 50 tons, set forth with orders to curb piracy, protect English traders, prevent the Dutch from fishing in English waters and, according to one news-writer, Edward Rossingham, ‘to preserve the sovereignty of the narrow seas from the French king who hath a design long to take it from us and therefore he hath provided a very great navy’. They were meant, in other words, to do everything and nothing.

So ship-money had indeed been raised, out of fear or loyalty, and the success of the tax ensured its survival; in the following year it was enlarged to take in the whole country. It was argued that, since the counties and urban corporations were interested in their ‘honour, safety and profit’, it was appropriate that ‘they should all put to their helping hands’. The appeal worked, and the tax of 1635 became the model for the next five years in which 80 per cent of the money demanded was actually paid.

In 1634 the first hackney carriages were allowed to stand for hire in the streets of London, a novelty that generated the usual amount of horror and indignation. It was proposed that no hackney could be hired for a journey of less than 3 miles. The suggestion was accepted on the grounds that too many coaches going on brief expeditions would create a ‘lock’ or traffic-jam in the streets, damage the pavements and increase the price of hay. Other contemporaries suggested that no unmarried gentleman should be allowed to ride in a hackney carriage without being accompanied by his parents.

17

Sudden flashings

In the summer of 1636 Charles and Henrietta Maria paid a visit to Oxford; it was now, in essence, Laud’s university. Yet only the academic officials paid homage to the royal couple. As they rode through the streets there were no calls of ‘God save the king’. The scholars and the citizens alike were silent. This did not bode well, and was a salutary reminder that Charles was steadily building up grievances among his people.

Among the aristocracy and the greater gentry, for example, much anger had been aroused by the exactions of the various courts Charles had established to extort money – the court of wards and the court of forest law principal among them. Of the former it was said that even those devoted to the Crown saw that they might be destroyed, rather than protected, by the law. Of the latter, the fines for encroachment upon the royal forests had, according to Clarendon, ‘brought more prejudice upon the court, and more discontent upon the king, from the most considerable part of the nobility and gentry in England, than any one action that had its rise from the king’s will and pleasure’.

Charles was also in the process of alienating his subjects elsewhere. He had unilaterally published a body of ‘canons’ to be adopted by the Scottish Church; the people themselves interpreted these requirements as nothing more than new laws imposed upon them by strangers. No one could receive the sacrament except upon his or her knees. No man should cover his head during the divine service. No person should engage in spontaneous prayer. The clergy should not allow private meetings for the expounding of Scripture. These were all novel commandments, and caused much disquiet that soon enough would break out in riot.

The puritan reaction in England to the Laudian orthodoxy was no less strong if, perhaps, more carefully concealed. In London, for example, a secret network of conventicles and discussion groups had been established; they communicated with each other by means of manuscript tracts and sermon notes as well as by conferences and ‘conversations’ behind closed doors. This was a world of fasts, of prayer meetings and of scriptural discussions in such centres of sectarianism as Coleman Street and Friday Street in the capital.

Lady Eleanor Davies, who had the reputation among the godly of Lichfield as a prophetess, entered Lichfield Cathedral on one communion day at the end of 1636 with a brush and kettle. She announced that she had come to sprinkle her ‘holy water’ on the hangings and newly decorated communion table; the holy water itself was composed of tar, pitch and puddle-water which she then liberally distributed with her brush. She was deemed to be out of her wits and sent to Bethlehem Hospital. By curious chance Charles and Henrietta Maria had visited that institution just a few months before, according to Edward Rossingham, ‘to see the mad folks where they were madly entertained. There was every one in his humour. Two mad women had almost frighted the king and queen, and all their attendants, out of the house, by their foul talk.’

Lady Eleanor Davies was not alone in her disgust at the Laudian innovations. One puritan writer, John Bastwick, complained that ‘the Church is now as full of ceremonies as a dog is full of fleas’. Oliver Cromwell, looking back at the end of his life, remarked in a speech to parliament that Laud and his allies had wished ‘to innovate upon us in matters of religion, and so to innovate as to eat out the core and power and heart and life of all religion, by bringing on us a company of poisonous popish ceremonies…’ The conditions were, in a phrase of the day, ‘too hot to last’.

In the summer of 1637 three sectarians were led before the Star Chamber on the charge of maligning the bishops of England. William Prynne was well known to the judges, and four years earlier had lost his ears before being consigned to the Tower; yet somehow he had managed to write pamphlets in his prison cell which were then smuggled away by friendly visitors.

He was joined now in court by Henry Burton and John Bastwick. In The Litany of John Bastwick the latter had written, ‘From plague, pestilence and famine, from bishops, priests and deacons, good Lord, deliver us!’ When the chief justice saw Prynne he asked the officers of the court to hold back his hair so that he might see the scars of the mutilated ears. ‘I had thought Mr Prynne had no ears,’ he said, ‘but methinks he hath ears.’ The executioner had not been as savage in his punishment as he might have been, which left open the possibility that a further assault might finally sever them altogether. The sentences were as brutal as they were predictable. Loss of ears, and life imprisonment, were the verdicts upon the three men.

Many contemporaries were still unsympathetic to the condemned. News-writer John Burgh remarked that ‘they are desperate mad factious fellows, and covet a kind of puritanical martyrdom or at least a fame of punishment for religion’. In that expectation they were successful. The previous sentence upon Prynne had been carried out with no obvious signs of public displeasure. Now the three men were cheered to the foot of the pillory, their path strewn with herbs and flowers. They stood in the pillory for two hours. They were not attacked with dirt or stones. They talked freely and cheerfully to the crowd around them, and their words were greeted by some with applause and shouts of approval. Burton’s wife sent him a message that ‘she was more cheerful of that day than of her wedding day’.

After two hours it was time for the more severe punishment. The hangman began to cut away at the ears of Burton, and as each ear was severed there came a roar of pain from the members of the crowd, so deep was their sympathy with the victims. When the blood came streaming down upon the scaffold, some of the crowd dipped their handkerchiefs in it. The stumps of Prynne’s ears were further mutilated in a very contemptuous and brutal fashion. Bastwick was similarly treated. The fortitude of the men, in not flinching during their ordeal, aroused much admiration.

The prisoners were then taken out of London to their respective dungeons in the castles of Carnarvon, Launceston and Lancaster. When Prynne travelled with his gaolers along the Great Northern Road, he was greeted with shouts of sympathy. When Burton left London by the Western Road, calls of ‘God bless you!’ echoed around him. Bastwick was followed by what seemed very like a triumphal procession. It was not a victory for Archbishop Laud. The rigour of the punishment had not overawed the crowd and Wentworth told the archbishop that ‘a prince that loseth the force and example of his punishments loseth withal the greatest part of his domain’. The fate of the three men only served to alienate still further those who believed that Laud and the king were becoming a weight upon the body politic. The archbishop’s own chaplain, Peter Heylyn, later wrote that the whole occasion ‘was a very great trouble to the spirits of many very moderate and well-meaning men’. A proverb was current: ‘To break an egg with an axe’.

The news from Edinburgh was even more disturbing. In the spring of 1637 a new Service Book for Scotland was published by the king. It applied much of the English Book of Common Prayer and abolished most of John Knox’s Book of Common Order. It was in effect another English imposition, bearing all the marks of the intervention of Archbishop Laud. It was first read in public at St Giles, recently become the cathedral church of Edinburgh. The dean ascended the pulpit, but when he began to recite the words of the new book, shouts of abuse came from the women of the congregation. ‘The Mass is entered among us!’ ‘Baal is in the church!’ The bishop of Edinburgh then stepped forward to calm the angry women and begged them to desist from profaning ‘holy ground’. This was not a phrase to be used in front of a puritan assembly, and further abuse was screamed against him; he was denounced as ‘fox, wolf, belly god’. One of the women hurled her stool at him which, missing its target, sailed perilously close to the head of the dean.

The magistrates were then called to clear the church but the women, once ejected, surrounded the building; its great doors were pummelled and stones were flung at its windows as the unhappy ceremony proceeded to its end. Cries could be heard of ‘a pape, a pape, antiChrist, stone him, pull him down!’ When the bishop came out, the women shouted ‘get the thrapple out of him’ or cut his windpipe; he barely escaped with his life. This was not a spontaneous combination of irate worshippers, however, but a carefully organized assault on the Service Book; certain nonconformist gentry and clergy had been planning the event for approximately three months, even though the scale of the riot was not perhaps anticipated. The incident became known as ‘Stony Sunday’.

On hearing the news of the riots in Edinburgh the king ordered the immediate suppression of the malcontents. In a city where the majority of the populace was on their side, this was not a plausible command. Laud asked the Scottish bishops if they were ready to ‘cast down the milk they have given because a few milkmaids have scolded at them. I hope they will be better advised.’ Yet the archbishop was the one in need of counsel. The Edinburgh magistrates stated that no member of the clergy would be able to read the new service. Most of the ministers abhorred its contents, and all of them feared further riot.

Petitions were now arriving from all parts of Scotland deploring the papistical intentions of the new prayer book, so far from the old form and worship of the Kirk. The Scottish council wrote to the king that ‘the murmur and grudge’ at the innovations were unprecedented. Their remonstrances became all the more urgent after a second riot broke out in Edinburgh; the news had spread that the lord provost had tried to prevent a petition against the Service Book from reaching London. The petitioners, as they became known, were now by far the largest element in the city.

A moderate Presbyterian minister, Robert Baillie, confided to his journal that ‘what shall be the event, God knows … the whole people thinks popery at the doors; the scandalous pamphlets which come daily new from England add oil to this flame; no man may speak anything in public for the king’s part, except he would have himself marked for a sacrifice to be killed one day’.

Charles did not know what to do. He had not anticipated such an unwelcome act of defiance and disobedience. It is reported that his first words were ‘I mean to be obeyed’. Yet how was he to enforce his will? He had no army, and only unwilling support from his representatives in Scotland. A solution to the immediate impasse was then suggested by members of the Scottish privy council. The petitioners would leave Edinburgh and return to their homes, leaving a group of commissioners to speak and act in their name. It was clear that, in effect, these commissioners would become the voice of Scotland.

It is possible to see the incidents in Edinburgh as a prelude to the more fatal antagonisms that led to civil war in England; yet no one at the time could have conceived such an outcome. One event just followed another in apparently random or at least unconnected fashion, and only at a later date could a pattern be discerned. Some time afterwards, for example, Henrietta Maria called the new order of service for Scotland ‘that fatal book’. But who would have believed that a woman throwing a stool would mark the beginning of a great war?

Scotland had set an example of defiance that was regarded with admiration by some in England. Charles ruled over three kingdoms that were as vitally connected as filaments in a web; a disturbance in one part affected the equilibrium of the whole. Another great controversy concerning the king’s authority now emerged in London. In the summer of 1637 the king decided to call John Hampden before the court of the exchequer for refusing to pay his portion of ship-money. Hampden had been imprisoned ten years earlier for declining the king’s forced loan, but the experience does not seem to have curbed his independence.

At the beginning of the year twelve senior judges had declared that, in the face of danger to the nation, the king had a perfect right to order his subjects to finance the preparation of a fleet; in addition they declared that, in the event of refusal, the king was entitled to use compulsion. Leopold von Ranke believed that ‘the judges could not have delivered a more important decision; it is one of the great events of English history’. The royal prerogative had become the foundation and cornerstone of government. Simonds D’Ewes wrote that if indeed it could be exacted lawfully, ‘the king, upon the like pretence, might gather the same sum ten, twelve, or a hundred times redoubled, and so to infinite proportions to any one shire, when and as often as he pleased; and so no man was, in conclusion, worth anything’. It was a powerful argument, to be tested in the trial of John Hampden.

The court case lasted from November 1637 until the following summer and was watched with extreme interest by the political nation. It was a test of power between sovereign and subject, and was considered to be one of the most significant cases ever put to judgement. The prosecution essentially rested upon two points. The Crown contended that all precedents, from the time of the Anglo-Saxons, allowed the king to gather money for his navy; Hampden in turn maintained that previous methods of taxation had in no way resembled the recent writs for ship-money sent to the inland counties. The Crown also defended the reasonableness of its claim for financial assistance in the face of foreign danger; by the time any parliament could be assembled to debate the matter, the country might have been attacked or even invaded. Hampden argued that the writs had been sent out six months before any ships were fitted, and there had been ample time for an assembly at Westminster; the writs were in any case contrary to statutes forbidding any tax without the consent of parliament.

The court was packed with spectators. A squire from Norfolk had come to London simply to attend the trial but when he arrived ‘at peep of day’, the crowd was already so great that he could get only 2 or 3 yards from the door of the court. Those who did obtain entrance seem largely to have taken Hampden’s part. When one of his counsels, Oliver St John, opened the defence he was according to a puritan observer, Robert Woodford, ‘much applauded and hummed by the bystanders, though my lord Finch [the chief justice] signified his displeasure for it’; at the close of St John’s argument, ‘they adventured to hum him again’. The argument continued beyond the walls of the court, where debates between the opposing sides could become very fierce. The vicar of Kilsby, in Northamptonshire, had exhorted his congregation ‘to pay his majesty’s dues’; whereupon the parish constable told him that the king’s taxes were worse than the pharaoh’s impositions upon the Israelites. Conversations of a similar kind took place all over the realm.

The judges deliberated and eventually gave a decision in favour of the court, seven against five. It was the smallest of all possible majorities for the king. Nevertheless the words of the chief justice in his support were repeated throughout the country. Finch declared that ‘acts of parliament to take away his royal power in the defence of the kingdom are void’. Or, as another judge had put it, ‘rex est lex’ – the king is the law. The ancient rights of Englishmen were of no importance, and the declarations of Magna Carta or the ‘petition of right’ were inconsequential. Neither law nor the parliament could bind the king’s power. Clarendon, in his History of the Rebellion, states that ‘undoubtedly my Lord Finch’s speech made ship-money much more abhorred and formidable than all the commandments by the council table and all the distresses taken by the sheriffs of England’.

When a judge at the Maidstone assizes read out the judgment of the court in London the people, according to a contemporary, Sir Roger Twysden, ‘did listen with great diligence and after the declaration made I did, in my conceit, see a kind of dejection in their very looks…’ A justice of the peace in Kent wrote in a memorandum that ‘this was the greatest cause according to the general opinion of the world was ever heard out of parliament in England. And the common sort of people are sensible of no loss of liberty so much as that hath joined with it a parting from money.’ The opposition to ship-money became much more fierce than before; some refusing to pay now cited the arguments made by those judges who had favoured John Hampden.

In the middle of the trial, on 9 February 1638, the king issued a proclamation to Scotland in which he stated that ‘we find our royal authority much impaired’ and declared that all protests against the new prayer book would be deemed treasonable. The king’s response was characteristic. Any attempt to curb his power was of course treachery and he believed that, if he made any compromise or accommodation, he would be fatally weakened; he did not want to become as powerless as the doge of Venice and he informed his representative in Scotland, the marquis of Hamilton, that he was ‘resolved to hazard my life rather than suffer authority to be condemned’. He was not simply referring to his authority but to the concept of ‘authority’ itself. Yet he could be wily and secretive at the same time, and told Hamilton that ‘I give you leave to flatter them with what hopes you please’. Since the leaders of the prayer book rebellion were essentially traitors, they could be deceived and betrayed with impunity.

In response the commissioners in Edinburgh, representing the petitioners, drew up a national covenant in which the precepts of the Kirk were re-established. Among its declarations was one that the innovations of the new prayer book ‘do sensibly tend to the re-establishing of the popish religion and tyranny, and to the subversion and ruin of the true reformed religion and of our liberties, laws and estates’. The people were in truth not rebelling against their king per se, but at the alliance of secular and religious authority that he had come to represent. The elect were now bound to God in solemn contract, as the Israelites once had been, with a clear moral obligation to fulfil His commands. ‘If thou walk before me, and serve me, and be perfect … I am willing to enter into covenant with thee’ (Genesis, 17: 1–2). The national covenant was carried in triumph through the streets, accompanied by crowds of women and children who alternately cheered and wept.

The people of Scotland took their lead from the inhabitants of Edinburgh and signed the covenant in their hundreds of thousands, declaring that they would rather die than accept the new liturgy. They raised their right hands to heaven before they took up the pen. Many of the orthodox Scottish bishops fled to England, with the archbishop of St Andrews, John Spottiswoode, lamenting that ‘all we have been doing these thirty years past is now thrown down at once’. This came from the king’s attempt to master his subjects in the same way as he mastered his horse.

The responses of others were mixed. The great minister of France, Richelieu, was inclined to support and even to aid the Scottish rebels on the grounds that trouble for the English king was always welcome. In turn Charles did not wish the world to believe that his authority had been spurned by some of his subjects; all his life he feared to appear weak. The English dissenters, already excited and agitated by the trial of John Hampden, welcomed the defiant actions of the Scots; many of them hoped that the Scottish example might be followed closer to home. The most impassioned denunciations of the king’s policy could be read in the verses and broadsides distributed in the streets of London.

Laud wrote to Wentworth that ‘my misgiving soul is deeply apprehensive of no small evils coming on’. Wentworth himself was urging the king to stricter measures. He believed that, if the arrogance and bravado of the Scots were not ‘thoroughly corrected’, it would be impossible to know how far the evil of dissension might spread. Some people were already wary of the coming conflict. When in 1638 one of the godly in the Wiltshire village of Holt found a beggar at his door he refused to give him alms on the grounds that ‘shortly you will be pressed for war, and then you will fight against us’.

When the general assembly of the Church of Scotland met in Glasgow Cathedral towards the end of November, the bishops were charged with violating the boundaries of their proper authority. The marquis of Hamilton attended in the name of the king, and he reported to his master that ‘my soul was never sadder than to see such a sight; not one gown amongst the whole company, many swords but many more daggers – most of them having left their guns and pistols in their lodgings’. The voting of course went against the orders and wishes of the king. Hamilton thereupon declared the assembly dissolved but, after he had left the church, the delegates voted to continue their debate. They also passed a resolution declaring that the Kirk was independent of the civil power, in effect stripping Charles of any religious supremacy he had previously claimed.

For the next three weeks the delegates revised the whole form of the Scottish faith that had recently been imposed upon them. The new liturgy was abolished. The bishops were excommunicated. The king’s writ no longer ran in Scotland.

The preparations for war were now intensified. The king ordered a convoy of military supplies to be sent from the Tower to Hull while the marquis of Hamilton advised him to take in hand the further fortification of Berwick, Carlisle and Newcastle. The lords-lieutenant of the counties were ordered to organize and exercise their local militias for readiness in combat. The leaders of the Scots, in turn, divided their country into seven military regions from which recruits would be taken; the commissioners also requested that the Scots mercenaries, fighting for the cause of Protestantism in Germany, should come home for a more significant war. Their lord general, Alexander Leslie, knew that they would bring with them new forms of military training and expertise taught by Dutch and Swedish commanders. It was believed that they would be a far more professional force than their English adversaries.

Omens were noticed and reported. A Yorkshire gentleman, Sir Henry Slingsby, confided to his diary an old prophecy that, after the victories of the Saxons and Normans, England would next be mastered by the Scots. Freak winds and lightning were seen. Henry Hastings reported to his father that, at eight o’clock one evening, the clouds dispersed to reveal apparitions ‘like men with pikes and muskets, but suddenly the scene being changed they appeared in two bodies of armed men set in battalion, and then a noise was heard and sudden flashings of light seen and streaks like smoke issuing out of these clouds’. The forces of war were gathering.

18

Venture all

At the beginning of 1639 Charles sent out a summons for the soldiers of his kingdom to meet him at York. The peers of the realm were ordered to appear in person, together with the retinues that befitted their status. The trained bands – the local militia made up of citizens – of the north were required to attend under the command of the lords-lieutenant of their counties. The rest of the men were conscripted, mainly from the midlands; they were formerly ploughmen or carters or thatchers, and had no stomach for a fight. Neither trained nor organized, they were being sent to unknown regions of the country for a cause about which they knew very little or nothing.

The men raised from Herefordshire attacked and wounded their officers before returning to their towns and villages. Other conscripts proceeded to pillage the hamlets through which they passed. They tore down the hated enclosures that parcelled up previously common land; they fired the gaols and freed the prisoners, many of whom had been detained for refusing to pay royal taxes; they attacked the undergraduates of Oxford; the more precise of them attacked the altars and communion rails of the churches. They were, as one royalist commander, Lord Conway, put it, ‘more fit for Bedlam or Bridewell’ than the king’s service.

The peers and nobles, gathered about the king by old feudal bonds, were equally reluctant to risk their lives in the royal cause. Many of them pleaded sickness, and the majority of them travelled to York against their will. If the king lost, their lands and even their lives might not be spared by the Scottish covenanters; if he won, and became supreme, their liberties would be further at risk. The prospect of another parliament, for example, would recede even further into the distance. The puritan party, in particular, had no reason or desire to fight against their co-religionists in Scotland. It would be an act of faithlessness on an unparalleled scale. Many of them believed that the war was being fought on behalf of the episcopate, and that its principal aim was to restore the bishops to their authority in Scotland. So the war became known as bellum episcopale or the Bishops’ War. It was all the more hated by some because of it.

Yet it was abhorred principally because it was an unfamiliar and unwelcome intrusion into the affairs of the nation. England had avoided foreign wars, and enjoyed domestic peace, for many years; no shots had been fired, and no drums heard, in the land. Yet that quiet was about to be shattered. Sir Henry Slingsby wrote that it was ‘a thing most horrible that we should engage ourself in a war one with another, and with our own venom gnaw and consume ourself’. The long period of peace also meant that the instruments of war had been degraded; the swords and muskets and pikes, laid aside, were now tarnished or broken. Horses were in short supply.

At the end of March 1639, the king rode into York to meet his army. Charles and his principal officers were lodged at the King’s House, the residence of the lord president of the north, while other officers and gentry found room in the various inns of the city such as the Talbot and the Dragon. The king was also graciously pleased to watch his ‘cavaliers’ exercising on their horses in the meadows known as the ‘ings’. The ‘cavaliers’ were now a recognizable body of officers attached to the king’s cause; some of them were already professional soldiers who had seen service in the European wars, while others were the sons of gentlemen in search of martial glory. Many of them, however, earned a reputation as braggarts and as anti-puritan bullies given to drink and gaming. According to a pamphlet of the time, ‘Old News Newly Revived’, anyone with ‘a tilting feather, a flaunting periwig, buff doublet, scarlet hose, and a sword as big as a lath’ could be mistaken for one. They were now ready to fight what one of the king’s men, Sir Francis Windebank, in turn castigated as ‘those scurvy, filthy, dirty, nasty, lousy, itchy, scabby, shitten, stinking, slovenly, snotty-nosed, loggerheaded, foolish, insolent, proud, beggarly, impertinent, absurd, grout-headed, villainous, barbarous, bestial, false, lying, roguish, devilish … damnable, atheistical, puritanical crew of the Scottish Covenant’.

The king seems to have presumed, as Clarendon put it in his History of the Rebellion, that his calling together the peers of the realm with their retinues meant that ‘the glory of such a visible appearance of the whole nobility would at once terrify and reduce the Scots’. In that presumption he was quite wrong. He could not even rely upon the nobility itself. Alarmed by talk of collusion with the covenanters, the king demanded that the lords and gentry at York should take an oath of allegiance. Two of them declined, Lord Brooke and Viscount Saye refusing to do so on the grounds that it was unconstitutional to demand any such oath that had not been approved by parliament. Saye added that, since the crowns of England and of Scotland were now unified, he could not take it upon himself to kill a Scot. Charles remonstrated with him angrily: ‘My lord, there be as good men as you that will not refuse to take it, but I find you averse to all my proceedings.’ He ordered that both men be arrested.

It was the talk of the city, and it seems to have been generally agreed that the peers had become martyrs to the king’s will. Charles was soon advised that they had done nothing illegal in refusing the oath; much to his chagrin he was obliged to release them. His authority had suffered another grave blow. It transpired soon enough that Viscount Saye had indeed been in secret discussion with the leaders of the covenant cause. They held the puritan creed in common, and their clandestine collaboration would be significant in the events of later months.

On 1 May Charles advanced to Durham. His envoy to Scotland and now commander of his ships, the marquis of Hamilton, wrote to him that ‘your majesty’s affairs are in desperate condition. The enraged people here run to the height of rebellion, and walk with a blind obedience as by their traitorous leaders they are commanded … You will find it a work of great difficulty and of vast expense to curb them by force, their power being greater, their combination stronger than can be imagined.’ Hamilton, himself a Scot, declared that ‘next to hell I hate this land’. His discomfort was also heightened by his mother’s threat that, if he returned in arms to his native country, she would shoot him.

Charles could not afford ‘expense’ of any kind. By the best estimate he had enough money to support his army to the end of the summer, but no longer. By the end of May, however, the lord treasurer announced that the revenue was exhausted. The knight marshal, Sir Edmund Verney, wrote to his son that ‘our men are very raw, our arms of all sorts naught, our victual scarce, and provision for horses worse’.

The Scots were soon on the move. The drums were beaten, morning and evening, to summon the soldiers for divine service; they listened to two sermons each day in support of their cause. When the men were not engaged in martial exercise, they studied the Scriptures or sang hymns or prayed aloud. It was a formidable force. At the beginning of June they set up an armed camp at Kelso on the Scottish borders. The king ordered the earl of Holland to march 3,000 men to the north and drive them out. So the earl led his cavalry forward to test the purposes of the Scots. The English forces climbed an incline from which they could see the enemy below them. Holland was about to order a charge when a cloud of dust could be seen approaching very quickly; this was taken to be the token of a larger Scottish army. The English retreated in order but in haste; discretion, as on many other occasions, surmounted valour. It was said that they were spared a slaughter by the elders of the covenant who only wished for the strangers to leave their country.

The fiasco was a double blow to the English forces. They had not only been humiliated by the Scots but the Scottish lord general, Alexander Leslie, seemed to know in advance the movement of Holland’s men. It looked very much as if there was a spy or traitor in the camp. Sir Edmund Verney wrote once more to his son that ‘I think the king dares not stir out of his trenches. What counsels he will take, or what he will do, I cannot divine.’ It had become clear to everyone that the enterprise was a huge mistake.

On 5 June Alexander Leslie arrived with an army of 12,000 men, and encamped on a hill about 11 miles from the king’s position. Charles was devoid of fear, or indeed of any other emotion except perhaps curiosity; he took a view of the Scottish forces through his telescope. ‘Come let us go to supper,’ he said, ‘the number is not considerable.’ Yet he could not afford to fight them. The Scots were well-disciplined and ready to fight for ‘Christ’s Crown and Covenant’; he had only an ill-organized and largely apathetic army already painfully aware of its lack of provisions.

The king had to gain time to prepare himself more fully for armed warfare. The Scots, in turn, were reluctant to invade England; the temper of an aroused nation would then be such that victory was by no means certain. Parliament might be called, and all the material wants of the king resolved. It could become a hard fight. So the conditions were right to obtain a truce and agree to a treaty. On 11 June six commissioners from the Scots and six commissioners from the king sat down together at Berwick in the tent of the earl of Arundel; Charles himself then joined them.

The covenanters were described by one Scottish historian as ‘men a little too low for heaven, and much too high for earth’. But on this occasion they were willing at least to treat with the king. In the event the negotiations at Berwick meant nothing. Ambiguities, confusions and caveats were the sum of all talk so that in the end, according to Clarendon, ‘there were not two present who did agree in the same relation of what was said and done…’ Nobody meant what he said, or said what he meant. The treaty was merely a paper peace and within six months the antagonists were preparing for a later and greater conflict. The first Bishops’ War, a war without a set battle, had come to an end.

Charles I had hoped to lead a glittering army to victory but had instead been forced to come to terms with a people that had, to all intents and purposes, become a separate nation beyond his power to command. The Scots gained the reputation that he himself had forfeited. It was more painful for him to lose authority than to part with his lifeblood. He had come to realize the reluctance of many of the peers and gentry to join him in his quarrel. So he disbanded the army without thanking any of its commanders, who had undergone the sacrifice of bringing up their men, and without giving honours to his faithful followers. The earl of Essex, one of the great nobles whom the king distrusted, was dismissed without a word. Soon enough he would become a principal opponent of the king.

Charles was anxious and dissatisfied. When the Scots published a document that purported to contain the matter of the treaty it was burned in London by the common hangman. The covenanters proclaimed, however, that in maintaining their own rights they were also fighting for English liberties; they insinuated that the proscription or exclusion of their religion would infallibly lead to the destruction of the cause of puritanism in England.

There were many of that nation who agreed with them, Pym and Hampden among them; for these Englishmen, the Scottish defiance of a stubborn and authoritarian king was an inspiration. Letters passed between the ‘malcontents’ or ‘malignants’ of both nations, as the king called them, in the hope of planning a common strategy to preserve their religion. The earl of Northumberland wrote that ‘the north is now the scene of all our news’; the theatre of the three kingdoms was now situated in Edinburgh. English politics now became thoroughly mingled with Scottish affairs.

The king had also lost authority on the high seas. In the autumn of 1639 a Spanish fleet had been discovered in the Channel by a Dutch squadron and, after a hot pursuit, took refuge in the Downs off the coast of east Kent; Charles offered, for a large sum, to take the Spaniards under his protection and convey them to the coast of Flanders. Yet the Dutch were unwilling to lose their prey and, with reinforcements, they attacked the Spanish vessels and sank many of them. The English fleet, under the command of Vice-Admiral Pennington, merely looked on as the security of their home waters was violated. The sea road to Dover was known as ‘the king of England’s imperial chamber’, but that king had failed in his first duty of protecting it.

The paralysis of Charles was part of a much wider problem of foreign policy where, in want of money and preoccupied by the problem of Scotland, he was obliged to play off one party against another in the hope of something ‘turning up’. France, Holland and Spain had to be appeased equally.

*

On 27 July, just before he left Berwick, Charles had summoned an emissary sent by Thomas Wentworth from Ireland; they held a long and secret conversation on matters that the king would not confide to paper. Wentworth had already told the king that he should conclude an armistice, and postpone any attack upon the Scots until he was quite certain that he could defeat them. Charles now merely sent a message to the lord deputy, saying, ‘Come when you will, you shall be welcome.’ The king was already scheming.

Wentworth returned from Dublin in the autumn of the year, and at once became the king’s most trusted councillor. He possessed all the self-confidence and energy that the king himself lacked. One courtier, Sir Philip Warwick, recorded that ‘his countenance was cloudy, while he moved or sat thinking; but when he spoke, either seriously or facetiously, he had a lightsome and very pleasant air’.

Wentworth urged Charles to take the affairs of Scotland into his own hands, and in addition to call parliament in order to be supplied with funds. The king of course distrusted and even despised the members at Westminster, but Wentworth believed that he could organize a court party which would be able to outmanoeuvre any opposition from such familiar suspected persons as Pym and Hampden. The king would also be absolved of the charge of absolutism, of wishing to rule without parliament, and might once again earn the approval of the nation. If the members of the Commons did not cheerfully grant his demands, in the face of evident danger from the Scots, then the world would know who to blame. Within a few months Wentworth received the earldom of Strafford.

At the end of 1639, therefore, parliament was summoned. The news was greeted with relief by those who had feared the complete abandonment of conventional government. Others were not so sanguine, however, and the Venetian ambassador reported that ‘the long rusted gates of parliament cannot be opened without difficulty’. The king’s councillors professed to believe that the newly elected parliament, shocked by the insolence of the Scots, would rally around the king.

The general election proceeded apace, with all sides and factions trying to organize support in an informal way. Only sixty-two of the elections were contested, with the other candidates selected by the principal landowners in the country and by the municipal corporations of the towns and cities. Other members of parliament were chosen by individual patrons who owned the right of nomination. A contested election was considered to be a mark of failure by the local elite to resolve matters satisfactorily.

The contested seats were indeed scenes of great division; there had been no such competition for eleven years. The court sent out lists of its favoured candidates as soon as the writs were issued. The local ministers preached to their congregations largely in favour of puritan candidates, while the peers supporting the court often tried to bribe or intimidate the electors of their regions. Newsletters and speeches abounded, as did the more nebulous reports of rumour and gossip. Violence, and threats of violence, were commonplace. A verse was circulated in opposition to the court party:

Choose no ship sheriff, nor court atheist,

No fen drainer, nor church papist.

There were no ‘parties’ in the modern sense, of course, merely individuals with various interests or principles who might or might not form an association with those who largely agreed with them. Some of them described themselves as ‘good commonwealthmen’ or ‘patriots’ who played upon the people’s fears of taxation and popery. Other candidates tried to rally the electors to the cause of king and country. The tide was against them. It was said by a Kentish gentleman, Sir Roger Twysden, that ‘the common people had been so bitten with ship-money that they were very averse from a courtier’; in Leicestershire the freeholders, who made up the constituency, were opposed to one candidate because ‘he is a courtier and has been sheriff and collected the ship-money’.

It has been estimated that, of the sixty or so candidates nominated or supported by the court, only fourteen were successful. It would be fair to say, however, that the majority of those elected were not partisan in any obvious sense; they were individuals who came to Westminster with a lively sense of local complaints and who, when congregated together, might find that they had grievances in common.

Preparations for another war against Scotland were even then being made. It was intended to press into service 30,000 foot-soldiers from the counties south of the Humber, the northern counties having given service in the last war. The covenanters were equally active in Scotland, where a call to arms was about to be issued. It did not seem possible that war could be avoided. A group of covenanters came to London, where it was reported that they held secret consultations with their English allies.

The newly elected parliament opened on 13 April 1640, in great excitement. The wife of the earl of Bridgewater was advised to procure a place at a window by six o’clock in the morning, in order to watch the passing scenes at Westminster; after that time the press of the people in the street would make it impossible for her to reach the house. John Finch, newly appointed as lord keeper of the great seal, made an opening speech on behalf of the king in which he dilated upon the threat that the Scots posed to the country; the king had been obliged to raise an army in its defence and, for the payment of that army, he needed funds. Finch revealed that a bill had already been prepared with all the relevant measures in place; it was only necessary for parliament to pass it. Then, and only then, would the grievances of individual members be discussed. He stated that ‘the king did not require their advice but an immediate vote of supplies’. It was noted that Finch had at no stage mentioned the primary source of discontent, the ship-money which was once again being exacted.

The members soon made their reply to the lord keeper’s speech. On the first day of the session the earl of Northumberland wrote that ‘their jealousies and suspicions appear upon every occasion and I fear they will not readily be persuaded to believe the fair and gracious promises that are made to them by the king’. In this opinion he was correct. The member for Colchester, Harbottle Grimstone, delivered a speech in which he stated that the invasion of individual liberties at home was more threatening than the ambitions of any enemy abroad. On the following day petitions from the various counties, complaining about unjust exactions, were presented to the Commons.

On 17 April John Pym rose to speak on the nature of parliamentary authority. He declared that ‘the powers of parliament are to the body politic as the rational faculties of the soul to man’. He was asserting more than the usual claims of parliamentary privilege; he was outlining what amounted to a new theory of government without any mention of the divine right of kings. He then turned to the matter of religion, and condemned the innovations introduced by Laud and others; they had managed only to raise ‘new occasions of further division’ and to dismay ‘the faithful professors of the truth’. The grievances of his eleven years’ silence now poured forth in an attack upon ship-money, monopolies, forest law and the other measures that the king had imposed. When he sat down he was greeted with cries of ‘A good oration!’

There was one group or faction in this parliament that helped to shape the session. The Providence Island Company had first been established to assist the emigration of ‘godly’ settlers to an island off the coast of what is now Nicaragua; it was hoped that a little republican commonwealth would then emerge that would finance itself with tobacco and cotton. Among the begetters of this scheme were the most prominent puritans in the country, among them Oliver St John, John Pym, John Hampden, Viscount Saye and Lord Brooke; the most eminent of them, however, was the earl of Warwick. All of these men now took their seats in parliament, both in the Commons and in the Lords, where they could plan their strategy in concert. They had familial as well as religious connections, lending them a unity and strength of purpose that were almost without precedent. The court party, in contrast, was riven with conflicts over personality and policy.

On 21 April the king summoned both houses to Whitehall, and demanded that the financial subsidies be granted to him. Two days later the Commons went into committee and requested a conference with the Lords on the grounds that ‘until the liberties of the House and kingdom were cleared, they knew not whether they had anything to give or no’. At this act of defiance Charles was extremely angry. On 1 May the Commons decided by a large majority to call before them a cleric who had stated that the king had the authority to make laws without parliament; this was considered by the court to be another act of insubordination. On the following day the king demanded an immediate answer to his request for money; he was met with prevarication. On 4 May Charles sent another message in which he agreed to give up the collection of ship-money in return for twelve subsidies amounting to approximately £850,000. The committee of the Commons again broke up without reaching any definite conclusions. One of the royal councillors, Sir Henry Vane, told the king that there was now no hope that they ‘would give one penny’.

It had become apparent, at least to the court party, that the Commons had no real desire to support the king’s war against Scotland; it might even be supposed that they were leaning towards the Scottish covenanters. The king had asked for supplies five times, and five times he had been rebuffed. He had twice appeared in person, to no palpable effect. He had tried to negotiate but his offers had been rejected with silence. He had pressed for speed in their decisions, with the possibility of an imminent invasion from the north, but parliament had been dilatory and evasive.

Rumours now reached the king that, under the influence of Pym, a petition was even then being drawn up asking him to come to terms with the Scots. He summoned the Speaker and forbade him take his place on the following day, thus avoiding the possibility of any debate. He then hurried to the Lords and on 5 May summarily dissolved the parliament. Since it had endured for only three weeks, it became commonly known as the ‘stillborn parliament’; posterity christened it the ‘Short Parliament’. It had achieved nothing, but it had changed everything. It had given voice to the frustration and anger of the country at the behaviour of the king; it had become a national forum where none had existed before.

One newly elected MP, Edward Hyde, who would later become better known as Lord Clarendon, was disconsolate. He supported the king but did not know what the future might hold for him. He wrote later that one of the leaders of the parliamentary revolt, Oliver St John, ‘observing a cloudiness in me, bade me “be of good comfort; all would go well; for things must be worse before they could be better”’. St John added that ‘we must not only sweep the house clean below, but must pull down all the cobwebs which hang in the top and corners’. He was hoping for a crisis or disaster, in other words, that would overturn the familiar order.

Another member may be introduced here. Sir Philip Warwick came into the house later in the same year,

and perceived a gentleman whom I knew not, very ordinarily apparelled; for it was a plain cloth suit that seemed to have been made by an ill country tailor; his linen was plain and not very clean and I remember a speck or two of blood upon his little band which was not much larger than his collar; his hat was without a hatband; his stature was of a good size; his sword stuck close to his side; his countenance swollen and reddish; his voice sharp and untunable and his eloquence full of fervour.

Such was the young Oliver Cromwell, who had sat unnoticed in the parliamentary sessions of 1628 and 1629. Now he had found his voice.

On the afternoon of the dissolution the king’s council met in which the newly ennobled earl of Strafford, according to notes taken at the time, advised the king to ‘go on with a vigorous war as you first designed, loosed and absolved from all rules of government, being reduced to extreme necessities. Everything is to be done that power must admit.’ He added that ‘you have an army in Ireland you may employ here to reduce this kingdom’. It was, perhaps, not clear which ‘kingdom’ needed to be reduced; this was an ambiguity that would cost him dear.

The dissolution aroused much discontent. The calling of the first parliament for eleven years had been hailed as a victory and as a deliverance from bondage; yet it had ended in defeat. Clarendon recalled that ‘there could not a greater damp have seized upon the spirits of the whole nation’. The king blamed ‘the cunning of some few seditiously affected men’; he genuinely believed, for example, that the members of the Providence Island Company were in direct contact with his Scottish enemies in an effort to defeat him.

Many in London and elsewhere, however, were ready to condemn the king and his councillors, principal among them the earl of Strafford and Archbishop Laud. Strafford now became known as ‘black Tom Tyrant’, the hatred for him compounded by the suspicion that he was indeed planning to bring over an Irish army to subdue English dissent. Yet William Laud was still the principal target. He was, in the judgement of many, the secret power behind the throne.

On 7 May, two days after the dissolution, the lord mayor and his aldermen were summoned before the council and ordered to provide the king with a loan of £200,000. If they refused they were to return three days later with a list of the wealthiest Londoners who could furnish the necessary funds. On 10 May they returned, bearing no list. ‘Sir,’ Strafford said to the king, ‘you will never do good to these citizens of London till you have made examples of some of these aldermen. Unless you hang up some of them, you will do no good upon them.’ The king did not execute them, but he did commit four of them to prison. This added more fuel to the fire that was about to break out in the streets.

Placards had been posted at the Royal Exchange, and elsewhere, calling upon the apprentices to meet at St George’s Fields in Southwark and ‘hunt William the fox, the breaker of the parliament’. A force of 500 attempted, on the night of 11 May, to storm the archbishop’s palace at Lambeth; the protestors were driven off by gunfire from the trained bands. Three days later the prisons that held some of the rioters were broken open, and the men released. The trained bands of Essex, Kent and Hertfordshire were summoned to the capital where they successfully restored a semblance of peace. Yet there were still victims. One captured apprentice was, on the orders of the king, tortured on the rack in the vain hope that he would name his accomplices; his crime had been to beat the drum in the vanguard of the rioters. It was the last example of judicial torture in English history. A sailor was convicted of high treason for attempting to open the gates of Lambeth Palace with a crowbar; he was hanged, drawn and quartered as punishment for his mighty offence.

The anger against the archbishop was augmented by the deliberations of the convocation. This body of the higher clergy always met at the time of parliament but, on this occasion, it was not dissolved after the abrupt conclusion of the recent short session. It continued to meet, granted a subsidy to the king, and announced seventeen new canons that exalted the sovereign’s power. It was ordered that, four times in each year, the clergy should preach to their congregations on the theme of divine right. It was further decreed that all of the clergy must take an oath to maintain both the doctrine and the discipline of the Church and not to allow any alteration in its government by ‘archbishops, bishops, deans and archdeacons etc.’. This became known derisively as ‘the etcetera oath’. How could clerics obey a ruling of which the contents were so uncertain? Without the assent of parliament, in any case, the decree was illegal. When the chancellor of the bishop of London entered one church to exact the oath, with a great mace carried before him, the verger stopped him with the words: ‘I care nothing for you, nor for your artichoke.’ The new canons were similarly derided. A drawing by Wenceslaus Hollar depicted some clergymen standing about a faulty cannon as Laud lights it. A verse beneath it read:

This cannon’s sealed, well forg’d, not made of lead

Give fire. Oh no, ’twill break and strike us dead.

The Scots were greatly heartened by events in England. A parliament met in Edinburgh at the beginning of June, despite an effort by Charles to prorogue it. Its members now believed that the people of England were no longer inclined to support their king; they passed into law, without royal assent, various Acts that removed the bishops from the Kirk and materially diminished the king’s authority. It was a tacit declaration of war.

Yet what could the king do? He had formed no fresh army, and the troops still quartered at Newcastle after the last conflict were untrained and impoverished. Once more the king demanded ship-money from London. The sheriffs went from house to house to exact the tax but only one man, in the entire City of London, agreed to pay it. Schemes for loans from France, and from Genoa, came to nothing.

The labourers and craftsmen of England were again pressed into service, in the king’s army, for a cause about which they knew or cared little. News of disorder came from most of the southern counties, and one of the first open mutinies broke out in Warwickshire. Some men of Devon, stopping at Wellington in Somerset, murdered a Roman Catholic lieutenant who refused to accompany them to church. When all of these unlikely and unwilling recruits arrived at Selby, in North Yorkshire, their commander described them as ‘the arch-knaves of the country’. Thus began the Second Bishops’ War.

19

A great and dangerous treason

In July 1640, the lord general of the Scottish forces, Alexander Leslie, began to create the nucleus of an army to take the fight once more into England. His intention was first to seize Newcastle; with its mineral wealth in his hands, he knew that he could exert pressure upon London that depended upon ‘sea-coal’ for its fuel. He believed that he would meet no resistance from the northern counties; the dissolution of parliament, and the general belief in a ‘popish plot’ led by Laud, had put an end to any appetite for a struggle against Scotland. Leslie’s contacts in England had in fact assured him that the next parliament, when summoned, would demand peace; otherwise, it would give no financial assistance to the king. There may have been a closer connection. It seems probable that the leaders of the ‘godly’ cause in England had effectively invited the Scots to invade as a way of curbing or destroying the power of an authoritarian king. Leslie’s march would be welcomed by some, therefore, and treated with indifference by the rest.

On the morning of 20 August the king set out from London to meet his forces in the north. On that night a Scottish army of 25,000 men crossed the Tweed. As soon as they entered English territory, their ministers formed the vanguard with Bibles in their hands. A declaration was issued to the effect that they were not marching against the English but against the papists, the Arminians and the prelates. They would remain in England until their grievances were heard by a new parliament.

They informed the people of Northumberland, too, that they would not take any food or drink without paying for it; they were well disciplined and respectful. Thomas Wentworth, the earl of Strafford, had hoped that the mere sight of an invading army would enrage all good Englishmen, but that proved not to be the case. The English commander in the north, Viscount Conway, noted that ‘the country doth give them all the assistance they can. Many of the country gentlemen do come to them, entertain and feast them.’ In London, after the king’s departure, all was in confusion. A courtier, Sir Nicholas Byron, wrote that ‘we are here, and in every place, in such distraction as if the day of judgment were hourly expected’. The constable of the Tower was ordered to prepare his fortress for a possible siege. Meanwhile the Scots were still marching southward.

Viscount Conway had been ordered to fortify the banks of the Tyne, and to defend Newcastle; he left two-thirds of his troops to protect the city, and took the remainder some 4 miles above Newcastle to a ford in the river at Newburn. The Scots took up a commanding position on the north bank, from where they fired on the enemy; the English soldiers, unaccustomed to gunshot, fled after some of their number were killed. The cavalry also retired in disarray. It was the first major victory of the Scots over the English for 300 years. Charles I had failed in battle, the single most important disgrace that stained the honour of a king. The battle of Newburn might also be considered the first of the civil war, since two rival parties had fought on English soil.

After their egregious defeat the English army retired to the borders of Yorkshire, leaving Durham and Northumberland in the hands of the enemy. The vital city of Newcastle had already surrendered. The earl of Strafford wrote to his friend, Sir George Radcliffe, from Northallerton in North Yorkshire where he had gone to meet the fleeing army:

Pity me, for never came any man to so lost a business. The army altogether necessitous and unprovided of all necessaries … Our horse all cowardly; the country from Berwick to York in the power of the Scots; an universal affright in all; a general disaffection to the king’s service, none sensible of his dishonor. In one word, here alone to fight with all these evils, without anyone to help. God of his goodness deliver me out of this, the greatest evil of my life.

The news of the royal defeat at Newburn was greeted with celebrations in London. Twelve peers of puritan persuasion, among them the earls of Warwick and Bedford, now issued in the traditional manner a ‘petition’ to the monarch in which they called for a parliament to resolve the grievances and evils of the nation; they stated that ‘your whole kingdom [has] become full of fears and discontents’. They were following a carefully prepared strategy. If the king declined to act on their advice, they themselves were prepared to summon parliament, just as the barons of Henry III had threatened almost 400 years before.

The king reacted in a thoroughly medieval way. He received the petition while at York, and summoned a great council of the peers. He may have hoped that they might raise large sums of money, without the assistance of parliament, but in this hope he was destined to be disappointed. Archbishop Laud was more realistic, and believed that the great council would lead inevitably to the calling of another parliament that might bode no good.

So the peers of England met in the hall of the deanery at York on 24 September. They represented a vast social power; they exercised local authority over tenants and dependants but they also wielded political power by means of their influence in county and borough elections. In his opening speech to them the king announced that he would indeed summon parliament to meet at the beginning of November; it was hoped that, on the basis of this undertaking, the City would be ready to lend him money. He said further that an ‘army of rebels’ was lodged within the kingdom and he wished for the peers’ advice so that ‘we might justly proceed to the chastisement of these insolencies’.

In the debate that followed it was eventually decided that commissioners should be sent to negotiate with the invaders. The Scots had already demanded money from the northern counties where they were lodged; they now insisted that the payments be maintained by the leading gentry, and that Charles should call parliament, where a peace treaty could be agreed. They trusted parliament, in other words, rather than the king. On these conditions they would remain where they were, and not proceed any further into an unhappy and divided kingdom.

Negotiators from both sides met at Ripon, where it was concluded that the king would pay the Scots £25,000 a month until a peace treaty had been reached. It seemed likely that only parliament could supply such a sum. The peers at York were asked to advise the acceptance or rejection of the agreement. It was of course no contest. The king had no choice but to submit to the claims of the invaders and to call parliament. The experiment of absolute monarchy had come to an end.

In his diary entry for 30 October John Evelyn noted that ‘I saw his majesty (coming from his northern expedition) ride in pomp and a kind of ovation, with all the marks of a happy peace, restored to the affections of his people, being conducted through London with a most splendid cavalcade’. Edward Rossingham wrote to Viscount Conway that ‘we are all mad with joy here that his majesty does call his parliament, and that he puts his Scotch business into the hands of his peers who, the hope is here, will make peace upon any conditions’. The earl of Northampton considered ‘one word of four syllables’, namely parliament, was ‘like the dew of heaven’.

Others were not so sanguine. A few days before the king’s arrival into the city Archbishop Laud had entered his study, in search of certain manuscripts, only to find his portrait by Van Dyck lying face down upon the floor. He was a superstitious man. ‘I am almost every day threated with my ruin in Parliament,’ he confided to his diary. ‘God grant this be no omen.’

The ‘godly’ parliamentarians were well prepared. They met at the house of John Pym, close to Gray’s Inn, where their plans were discussed in detail. They became known as ‘the Junto’, with Pym their leader in the Commons and the earl of Bedford their representative in the Lords. They knew the disposition of the Scots and in turn the covenanters relied upon the help of their English friends in parliament to engineer the necessary changes in religion. This was the ‘Protestant Cause’.

The voting in the parliamentary elections was unusually combative, with eighty-six contests outside the charmed circle of seats where only one uncontested member stood. The king’s party was again at a disadvantage, with local as well as religious interests matched against the courtiers and their acolytes. Of twelve lawyers chosen by the king to be selected, for example, only three were appointed. On 3 November the king travelled to the new parliament by water in order to avoid the public gaze. The Venetian ambassador noted that the lack of ceremony ‘shows more clearly than ever to his people that he consents to the summons merely from compulsion … and not of his own free will to please the people’. Who could have guessed that this parliament would last, with intervals, for almost twenty years?

As soon as they were assembled in debate, the members of the Commons issued a catalogue of grievances against the conduct of the king’s councillors, Strafford and Laud chief among them. The dissolution of the ‘Short Parliament’, before any measures of reform could be agreed, had not improved the temper of the members; 60 per cent of them had sat in the previous assembly and they were now more belligerent than ever. Yet the largest group in the Commons was still that of the landed gentry, who were essentially conservative and not inclined to innovation. They did not want to destroy the king or the orthodox constitution. They wanted government to be restored upon the old model. Yet they, too, had been grievously disappointed. They had watched the king lose a war. They had seen him alienate his natural supporters. They had observed him in the company of the popish courtiers around his wife. They had witnessed the disruption of law and order in their regions.

All of the parliamentarians now understood their strength. They knew that the king relied upon them to salvage him from his distress; if parliament did not supply him with funds, he would not be able to pay the Scottish army as he had agreed to do. Alexander Leslie might then order a march upon Whitehall, with no English army to prevent his progress. As long as the Scots remained in England, therefore, parliament was supreme.

In the debate that followed the opening, one member remarked that it was common knowledge that the judges had overthrown the law and that the bishops had overthrown the gospel. Another intimated that a popish plot was being hatched by some about the king. Yet another rose to complain that the government was the weakest for generations and had produced nothing but national disgrace; it was surmised that those who had most loudly proclaimed the king’s authority had also been those who had wasted the king’s money.

When John Pym rose to speak the members were already much agitated. Pym began by saying that ‘the distempers of the time are well known’. Much of his bitterness was reserved for Strafford himself, whom he believed to be the author of ‘a design to alter law and religion’. Many contemporaries and colleagues were taking Pym’s side. The Scots believed that Strafford was the cause of the war between the two nations. The puritans hated him. The City, now more powerful than ever, remembered how he had threatened its aldermen with hanging. He had created an absolute rule during his period of government in Ireland, and it was believed that he wished to repeat the experiment in England.

Strafford was aware of the perils of his position. He could have stayed in York, safe from the depredations of parliament, but the king urged him to join him in Whitehall; he assured him that ‘he should not suffer in his person, honour or fortune’. The king’s promises were, in the event, worth nothing at all. Strafford wrote that ‘I am tomorrow in London with more dangers beset, I believe, than ever any man went with out of Yorkshire…’.

John Pym in turn had some reason to fear Strafford. When the earl arrived in London on 9 November he advised the king to provide the evidence that would implicate Pym and his colleagues in a treasonable association with the Scots. That evidence, perhaps of intercepted letters, has never since emerged. News reached Westminster that Strafford was ready to ‘prefer an accusation of high treason against diverse members of both houses of parliament’; they would no doubt include Warwick, Saye and Brooke from the Lords with Pym, Hampden and others from the Commons.

It was agreed by the king and his councillors that the defences of the Tower should immediately be strengthened; the fortification was meant as a warning to the City. The Tower was also the likely destination for those about to be arrested. Strafford was quoted as saying that ‘he hoped the City would be subdued in a short time’. On 11 November the king was expected to travel to the Tower and inspect its garrison.

On that day rumours of an attempted coup reached Westminster. The Commons ordered that all strangers should be cleared from the lobby. Strafford took his seat in the House of Lords, but said nothing; he was biding his time. Yet Pym knew of the accusations against himself and his colleagues. He had to remove Strafford before Strafford could destroy him. In a phrase of the time, ‘my head or thy head’.

In a speech delivered to the Commons Pym attacked one of Strafford’s most notable allies, Sir Francis Windebank, for concealing a popish plot. It might or might not be interpreted as an attack upon Strafford himself, but it was a method by which Pym could test the readiness of his colleagues to take action against his enemies. Another member, John Clotworthy, now suggested or insinuated that Strafford planned to use the Irish army ‘ready to march where I know not’ in order to curb dissent in England.

It was moved that a committee be established to consult with the Lords on the accusations; this committee was packed with Strafford’s enemies, and a ‘charge’ against the earl was swiftly prepared and presented to the Commons. Some members urged caution and delay in the assault upon Strafford, but Pym replied that any procrastination ‘might probably blast all their hopes’.

With a throng of members around him Pym then went to the Lords in order to accuse Strafford of high treason, and to recommend that he be ‘sequestered from Parliament’. If the Lords wished to know the grounds of this serious charge, ‘particular articles and accusations’ against him would be delivered to them shortly. Strafford had been told of the events then unfolding. ‘I will go,’ he said, ‘and look my accusers in the face.’ It must be said that the Lords themselves had many grievances against the king’s arrogant and difficult adviser and, on his entry, he was commanded by them to withdraw. An order was then passed committing Strafford to the custody of the gentleman usher. He was directed to enter the chamber and to kneel while the order was read to him. He asked permission to speak, but was refused; his sword was taken from him before he was led away.

In his History of the Rebellion Clarendon wrote that the crowd looked upon the earl without pity, ‘no man capping to him, before whom that morning the greatest in England would have stood discovered’. No man had taken off his hat in respect.

‘What is the matter?’ someone asked him.

‘A small matter, I warrant you,’ he replied.

Another called out, ‘Yes indeed, high treason is a small matter.’

Strafford was effectively removed from public life. Charles had lost his principal councillor. It was widely assumed that a great work had been accomplished. The king was obliged to disperse the garrison he had established within the Tower and to dismantle the guns that had recently been mounted. His attempt to coerce or overawe his opponents had failed, in another of those humiliating reversals that had become associated with his rule.

With the threat of dissolution or a coup now removed, parliament could begin its work on what it believed to be wholesale renovation. A public fast was observed on 17 November as a way of enlisting divine assistance in this task. Some sixty-five committees were established to investigate all cases of abuse and corruption. One of them was devoted to seeking out and removing ‘persecuting, innovating or scandalous’ ministers, justices of the peace and other royal officers; when its members requested ‘informations from all parties’ to assist them, hundreds of individuals descended upon Westminster with their own particular grievances.

A committee for petitions was then established to deal with their complaints. Warwick, Brooke, Essex, Bedford and Saye and their colleagues were in command of its actions. It sat in the Painted Chamber at Westminster and became an alternative court of law, investigating all aspects of the government’s work. Parliament had in the past been summoned simply to transact the king’s business; now it busied itself about national affairs without any reference to the king.

The evidence against Strafford was presented on 24 November 1640, and was formulated in the first article of the indictment against him. The Commons was asked to declare that ‘Thomas, earl of Strafford hath traitorously endeavoured to subvert the fundamental laws and government of the realms of England and Ireland, and instead thereof to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government against law’. In his speech to the Commons Pym argued that the accusations amounted to a great and dangerous treason, animated by malice and guided by evil mischief. He accused the earl of attempting to spread discord between the king and the people. It had become clear that Strafford could not be allowed to survive; if he evaded the charge of treason he might become the focus of royalist hopes, and might even herald the resumption of non-parliamentary government.

At the end of November the three dissenters who had been mutilated and imprisoned at the behest of Archbishop Laud – Prynne, Burton and Bastwick – returned in triumph to the capital; they wore rosemary and bay in their hats, and flowers were strewn before them. Rosemary was the herb of remembrance and bay of victory. It was for Henry Burton, a puritan divine, ‘a sweet and glorious day, or time, which the sun of righteousness, arising over England, was now about to procure for us’. That bright dawn still depended on the presence of the covenanters in the north, and in the early days of December parliament voted subsidies for the Scottish army.

Arguments over religion were the soul of this first session of what became known as the ‘Long Parliament’, outweighing any concerns over secular misgovernment. Already the devout were in full pursuit of the Arminians. A London crowd had burst into St Paul’s Cathedral where it destroyed the altar and tore up the book of the new liturgy. At Stourbridge Fair a preacher stirred up a crowd by calling out ‘Pardon! Pardon! Pardon!’ for the superstition and idolatry imposed by those in authority. In Brislington, Somerset, a dissenting minister who had been suspended from office preached to his flock beneath the shade of a tree in the street, whereupon the congregation led him back to the church and gave him the key.

On 11 December the citizens of London presented a petition to parliament for ‘reformation in church government’. It declared that ‘the government of archbishops and lord bishops, deacons and archdeacons etc.… has proved prejudicial and very dangerous both to the church and commonwealth’; it urged that this ecclesiastical government should be destroyed ‘with all its dependencies, roots and branches’. Fifteen hundred supporters gathered in Westminster Yard, well-dressed, well-organized and good-tempered, and after delivering their petition they returned quietly to their homes. The ‘root and branch’ petition, as it came to be known, was passed by Pym to a committee where it remained for some months.

More immediate remedies were at hand. On 16 December the canons passed by convocation in the spring of the year, among them ‘the etcetera oath’, were voted by parliament to be illegal. It was now time to attack the archbishop himself. On 18 December Laud was impeached and taken into custody. He was accused of fostering doctrines that lent support to the king’s arbitrary measures, and of using the courts both to impose innovations in worship and to silence the true professors of religion. One member of parliament, Harbottle Grimstone, described him as ‘the root and ground of all our miseries and calamities’. Other bishops soon joined him in the Tower. The bishop of Ely, Matthew Wren, was to spend seventeen years in confinement. Parliament could be as vindictive and as authoritarian as the king, perhaps because both parties believed that they were fulfilling the divine will.

Someone had scribbled, on the door of St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster, an appeal to ‘remember the judges’. Their time was not long in coming. All those who had supported the king in their judgments were questioned or arrested. Many of the king’s courtiers now fled the approaching storm. Sir Francis Windebank, whom Pym had accused of concealing a Catholic conspiracy, was rowed at night across the Channel. Lord Keeper Finch fled the country for Holland on the day he was impeached.

The members of parliament now determined to consolidate their strength. On 24 December it was recommended that ‘the English lord commissioners’, which in effect meant the puritan lords who had launched the petition for parliament in the summer, should be responsible for the disbursement of money to the Scots. Five days later Pym advised that the customs officials, who were the king’s principal financial agents, should ‘forbear to pay anything’ to the exchequer until authorization was ‘settled by Parliament’; his proposal was carried without any division. The king now lacked the resources even to pay his own household expenses.

In this last week of December it was further agreed that parliament should meet at fixed times with or without the cooperation of the king. The ‘Triennial Act’ was passed to compel parliaments to meet every three years. The Venetian ambassador reported that ‘if this innovation is introduced, it will hand over the reins of government completely to Parliament, and nothing will be left to the king but mere show and a simulacrum of reality, stripped of credit and destitute of all authority’. It remained to be seen whether Charles would willingly relinquish his powers. The contest had only just begun.

20

Madness and fury

The new year, 1641, was for the godly a time of jubilation. It was the year in which, according to cant phrases of the time, a period of ‘great affliction’ was succeeded by an age of ‘seasonable mercies’. Some writers were dating their letters ‘annus mirabilis’ or ‘anno renovationis’. It was a golden year in which God’s goodness and mercy to the nation were vouchsafed. A pamphleteer, John Bond, exulted in ‘England’s Rejoicing for the Parliament’s Return’ that ‘papists tremble … Arminians tumble … the priests of Baal lament their fortunes’. For those of a royalist persuasion, however, the year marked the culmination of all their woes that had begun at the battle of Newburn.

The king was in desperate straits with his authority and revenue threatened, and with his principal counsellors languishing in the Tower. Henrietta Maria was enraged at the situation of the royal household, and continued to argue for more determined measures against her husband’s opponents. She even wrote to the Vatican asking for a large loan, perhaps with the intention of raising troops.

Charles himself did not surrender to the calamity that faced him. His health was good, and he was not inclined to anxiety; he maintained a daily regimen of prayer and exercise; he enjoyed an excellent appetite. He believed implicitly that the enemies of the Lord’s anointed would of necessity fail, and that all traitors would eventually be brought to the bar of justice.

On 23 January Charles summoned both houses of parliament to the Banqueting House at Whitehall, and delivered a speech in which he complained about the obstructions placed in his path by men who ‘put no difference betwixt reformation and alteration of government’. Yet he seemed willing to compromise, and promised to return the laws of religious polity to the ‘purest times of Queen Elizabeth’s days’. He stated further that ‘whatsoever part of my revenue shall be found illegal, or heavy to my subjects, I shall be willing to lay it down’. He had in effect cancelled the exaction of ship-money, and curbed all other questionable ways of raising revenue.

The status of his most faithful servant was still in doubt. It was already whispered at court that Strafford must rely upon his own protestations of innocence and, if they should fail, upon the mercy of parliament. Charles was unwilling to fight for his quondam counsellor; he seems to have realized that only Strafford’s death could preface the reconciliation he desired with his people. At the end of the month the charges were drawn up against the earl; twenty-eight separate articles, covering the last fourteen years of his career, were outlined over two hundred sheets of paper.

At the beginning of February the Commons voted £300,000 to the Scots under the name of ‘brotherly assistance’; the two nations were not to be divided. They needed one another, for the moment, in their confrontation with the king. They also needed the ‘Triennial Bill’ that guaranteed the meeting of parliament on a regular basis. The bill was a grievous blow to the royal prerogative, and Charles had been most reluctant to give his assent; his power would be limited, and his authority compromised. Yet on 16 February he was persuaded to concede the issue, partly from advice that he would receive no money after any refusal. So he declared in the old Norman fashion that ‘le roi le veut’, ‘the king wishes it’. In private the king raged. In effect the Act made him reliant upon parliament and gave that assembly the permanent existence that it had never known before. The bells of London rang out. The earl of Leicester wrote in his commonplace book that now ‘the parliament which is a corporation never dies, nor ceases at the death of the king, that is, the death of the king is no determination of it, and it is not likely that they will be weary of their immortality’.

It had already been rumoured that a new privy council was about to emerge that would reflect the wishes of the Commons as well as of the king. The earl of Bedford was to become lord treasurer while his lieutenant in the Commons, John Pym, would be chancellor of the exchequer; the earl of Bristol would be made lord privy seal. On 19 February seven other members of the puritan Junto were nominated to be privy councillors, among them Viscount Saye and the earls of Essex and Bedford. Clarendon wrote in his History that they were ‘all persons at that time very gracious to the people or the Scots … had all been in some umbrage at court and most in visible disfavour’.

The king had declared himself indirectly to be a moderate, therefore, equally ready to forgive his erstwhile enemies and to trim or turn his policies in the light of complaints directed against them. Yet at the same time he had also managed to divide the opposition against him. Many in parliament did not share the religious enthusiasm of the Scottish covenanters and had no wish to see the English Church remodelled to satisfy their demands; others were already beginning to resent the amount of money being spent for the maintenance of the Scottish army in the north. If Charles could gain the support of such men, parliamentary assistance would be at hand in his fight against the Junto.

The compromise with the puritans of parliament did not in the end succeed. The king had insisted that, in order to take up the offices of state he had promised to them, they must agree to retain the bishops in the Lords and to save Strafford’s life. They in turn demanded to be granted the offices before doing anything at all. No grand reconciliation was possible.

On 24 February Strafford was brought from the Tower to the chamber of the House of Lords in order to answer the charges laid against him. It was noticed with surprise that the king had taken his place upon the throne, by which he indicated his support for the earl. When the king eventually departed, however, it was resolved that the proceedings would have to begin all over again. Strafford defended himself with eloquence and wit, throwing into serious doubt the result of any trial. Within days it was reported that the parliamentary leaders were unsure how to proceed with their case. It was easy to proclaim Strafford to be a traitor, but a more difficult matter to prove it in open court.

His trial opened on 22 March, when he was taken by barge from the Tower to Westminster Hall. He was dressed entirely in black, as a dramatic token of sorrow, and the hall itself became known to the participants as ‘the theatre’. This was the spectacle that might determine the fate of the nation, as the prisoner fought for his life and for the cause of the king. Negotiations of course continued behind the scene. The puritan grandees were ready to spare Strafford’s life, for example, if the king agreed to grant them the great offices of state.

On the first day the peers of the realm filed into their places on both sides of the hall; tiers of seats had been placed, on either side of the peers, for the Commons. A committee of the Lords had already decided that it was not proper for the king himself to be present; so an empty throne stood at the northern end of the improvised courtroom while the king and queen were in fact sitting in seats behind, like a box in a theatre. Strafford himself was to stand on a dais at the southern end, facing both houses of parliament. The visual impression, in fact devised by Inigo Jones, was of one man against all the representatives of the nation. The hall was packed with spectators who made much clamour and ‘clattering’; it was remarked by one observer, Robert Baillie, that there was ‘much public eating, not only of confections but of flesh and bread, bottles of beer and wine going thick from mouth to mouth without cups’.

When the twenty-eight articles of impeachment were read out to him, Strafford was seen to smile; he could already see the legal difficulties that beset his accusers. They were attempting to prove treason on the basis of an accumulation of several separate charges. A remark passed around at the time was: you know at first sight whether a man is short or tall, you do not need to measure the inches. With Strafford’s supposed treachery, you would need to count the inches carefully. At one point Strafford said that ‘opinions may make a heretic, but that they make a traitor I never heard till now’. The days passed, with witnesses and questions and arguments, in the course of which Strafford seemed to delight in outwitting the counsels for the prosecution; they in turn were considered to be bombastic and hectoring.

It soon became clear to the members of the Junto that their cause could be lost, and they began to suspect that a majority of the peers was in fact secretly or openly supporting the cause of Strafford. When on 10 April the Lords allowed an adjournment for the prisoner to consult his notes before making a closing speech, the Commons protested in fury. They rose in consternation. Some of them, according to the parliamentary notes of Simonds D’Ewes, called out, ‘Withdraw! Withdraw!’, which was misheard by others as ‘Draw! Draw!’; their hands went to the hilts of their swords in anticipation of battle. The confusion delighted Strafford to the extent that ‘he could not hide his joy’; the king, in his box behind the throne, was seen to laugh. The two houses of parliament were in dispute.

The members of the Commons returned to their chamber in the afternoon, and at this opportune moment certain notes taken at a previous meeting of the privy council were conveniently revealed. This was the council during which Strafford had told the king that ‘you have an army in Ireland you may employ here to reduce this kingdom’. The earl’s accusers interpreted this ‘kingdom’ to be England rather than Scotland. This of course was treason. The Commons readily agreed. A Bill of Attainder was drawn up, a medieval device whereby both houses of parliament could try and condemn an enemy of the kingdom without the formality of a trial. It was also a way of persuading the Lords to vote for Strafford’s death without the burden of legal proof.

On 19 April the king ordered all military officers immediately to return to their regiments. When a negotiator from Scotland had an audience with the king two days later, he reported that ‘his mind seems to be on some project here shortly to break out’. It was also rumoured that the French, exhorted by the queen, were about to invade. What the leaders of the Junto most feared was a dissolution of parliament, a device that would result in the immediate cancellation of both the trial and the proposed attainder. They called out their supporters, and a crowd of many thousands gathered at Westminster in the belief that dangerous measures were about to be introduced. On 19 April, too, the Commons passed the Bill of Attainder against the earl of Strafford. Those of the Commons who had not supported the decision were derided as ‘Straffordians or enemies to their country’; their names were listed and placed on posts and other visible locations in the city. The members of the godly party were not above intimidation and violation of parliamentary privilege.

When the Commons passed the attainder the king wrote to Strafford to reassure him once again he had his word that his life, honour, or fortune would not be touched. On the last day of the proceedings in Westminster Hall, 29 April, Strafford seemed merry. Oliver St John then rose to deliver a three-hour tirade against the prisoner which was of such eloquence that it profoundly influenced the intentions of the peers; when he finished, the spectators in the hall broke into applause. Two days later the king addressed both houses of parliament from the throne. In his speech he emphasized that he would never act against his conscience; this was taken to mean that he would veto any attainder against his counsellor. Let them find Strafford guilty only of a misdemeanour, and he would act. The king also refused to disband his Irish army, which in turn raised fears of military action.

He stayed for a while after his oration, looking for supporters, but Simonds D’Ewes reported ‘there was not one man gave him the least hum or colour of plaudit to his speech, which made him, after some time of expectation, depart suddenly’. It was widely believed that he had intruded in a matter still under parliamentary debate, which was considered by the Commons to be ‘the most unparalleled breach of privilege that had ever happened’. It seemed that a confrontation between king and parliament was inevitable.

Rumours of plots and counter-plots were soon everywhere. For some weeks a vessel, chartered by Strafford’s secretary, had been moored in the Thames. The boat could easily take an escaped prisoner to France. Some of the reports proved to be true. On Sunday 2 May, Sir John Suckling, courtier and army commander, poet and gambler, called sixty men to the White Horse Tavern in Bread Street; they wore battledress of buff cloth and carried swords as well as pistols. They were supposed to gain entrance to the Tower of London, in the guise of reinforcements, where they would at once overwhelm the guard and secure Strafford’s liberty. It was a wild scheme, made all the more improbable by the sight of sixty armed men milling about in the middle of London. Their presence was quickly known and interpreted, the news passed immediately to the leaders of parliament. A tumultuous crowd of Londoners gathered about the Tower to defend it against any invasion.

The rumours of a military rebellion, and plans for the flight of Strafford, had thoroughly alarmed the people of London. A fresh crowd gathered on Monday outside the doors of the Lords, bellowing for the execution of Strafford; some of them cried that if they could not have his life, they would take that of the king. The parliamentary journal for that day wrote of the members of the Junto that ‘they caused a multitude of tumultuous persons to come down to Westminster armed with swords and staves, to fill both the palace-yards and all the approaches to both houses with fury and clamour and to require justice, speedy justice, against the earl’. It was clear that Strafford would die. Oliver St John, one of the parliamentary leaders, had said that it was right and proper to knock wolves and foxes on the head. It was also remarked that ‘stone dead hath no fellow’.

When the Commons assembled, Sir John Pennington spoke of Suckling’s unsuccessful gathering. Thomas Tomkins added that ‘many Papists were newly come to London’. The king had been misled by false counsellors and, as John Pym put it, ‘he that hath been most abused doth not yet perceive it’. The parliament must open the eyes of the king.

It was now proposed that a religious manifesto should be published. The ‘Grand Remonstrance’ devised by the Commons was in a sense an English version of the Scottish covenant, binding those who signed it to an oath that they would remain loyal to ‘the true reformed Protestant religion’ against ‘popery and popish innovation’. The remonstrance claimed that during the present session of the parliament its members had ‘wrestled with great dangers and fears, the pressing miseries and calamities, the various distempers and disorders which had not only assaulted, but even overwhelmed and extinguished the liberty, peace and prosperity of this kingdom’. It was printed and circulated throughout the country, addressing and inspiring what might now be called a parliamentary party.

On 5 May the Commons, fearful of a papist uprising, ordered the towns, cities and counties of England to ensure that their arms and ammunition were well prepared. A papist plot amounted, in this context, to a royal plot. On that day a new bill was passed allowing parliament to remain in session until it voted for its own dissolution. It has been said that this was the moment that reform turned into revolution; it deprived the monarch of his right to govern.

The Lords themselves had directed that an armed force should take command of the Tower, thus divesting the king of responsibility for military affairs. It was another blow to his authority. The earl of Stamford proposed a motion ‘to give God thanks for our great deliverance, which is greater than that from the Gunpowder Treason [of 5 November 1605]. For by this time, had not this plot been discovered, the powder had been about our ears here in the parliament house, and we had all been made slaves.’ The threat of military force had alarmed the Lords as much as the Commons; on 8 May, the Bill of Attainder against Strafford was passed by the upper house.

A delegation from both houses of parliament now carried the document of attainder to the Banqueting House for the king’s signature; the members were accompanied by a crowd of approximately 12,000 calling out, ‘Justice! Justice!’ The king, understandably cast down and demoralized, said that he would give his response on Monday morning; this delay did not please the crowd, who had promptly gathered again outside Palace Gate. If the king refused to sign the attainder it was predicted that the palace would be attacked, and that the king and queen would be captured.

Charles conferred with his bishops and his privy councillors, most of whom urged him to sign the bill condemning Strafford to death. The archbishop of York told him that ‘there was a private and a public conscience; that his public conscience as a king might not only dispense with, but oblige him to do, that which was against his private conscience as a man’. Slowly and reluctantly he assented; he had promised to protect the earl’s life and fortune, but now for reasons of state he was obliged to break his word. In the process he had been humiliated and weakened almost beyond repair. Pym, on hearing the news of the king’s capitulation, raised his hands in exaltation and declared, ‘Has he given us the head of Strafford? Then he will refuse us nothing!’

On 12 May Strafford went to his death on Tower Hill in front of what was said to be the largest multitude ever gathered in England. Crowds of 200,000 people watched his progress in an atmosphere of carnival and rejoicing. The lieutenant of the Tower asked him to make the short journey from the prison to the scaffold by coach, thus avoiding public fury; Strafford is supposed to have replied that ‘I dare look death in the face and, I hope, the people too. Have you a care that I do not escape, and I care not how I die, whether by the hand of the executioner or the madness and fury of the people.’ As he walked to his death he looked up at the window of the chamber in which Laud was confined, and saw the archbishop waiting for him there. He asked for ‘your prayers and your blessings’, but the cleric fell into a dead faint.

In his speech from the scaffold the earl declared that ‘I wish that every man would lay his hand on his heart, and consider seriously whether the beginning of the people’s happiness should be written in letters of blood’. He knelt in prayer for half an hour, and then laid himself down on the block. It took one stroke. The spectators rushed through the streets of London waving their hats and shouting, ‘His head is off! His head is off!’ In his prison Archbishop Laud observed, a few days later, that Strafford had served ‘a mild and gracious prince who knew not how to be, or to be made, great’.

21

A world of change

While the trial of Strafford continued, the Commons seemed uncertain about the direction of other public business. Parliament did nothing but, in the phrase of the time, beat the air. On one occasion, after prayers had been said, the members of the Commons lapsed into silence and simply looked at one other; they did not know where to begin. On another occasion, according to a contemporary account, the Speaker stood up and asked what question he should put to them; answer came there none. A loss of initiative in the cause of reform was one of the reasons for a public fast in April.

Yet the death of the earl seems finally to have lent stimulus to the proceedings. The sight of blood quickened the appetite, and in July a series of fresh initiatives was debated and agreed. It seemed that the king himself had become almost an irrelevance in the business of renovating the kingdom. The familiar grant of tonnage and poundage was made to him but on the understanding that his previous exactions had been illegal; no new money was to be given to the royal household without permission of parliament. Of course parliament itself needed revenues both for work at home and for payment to the Scots. A new subsidy was imposed upon the counties and a poll tax introduced to raise additional income. This did not endear parliament to many of the people.

The old centres of royal authority were abolished. The council of the north, the religious court of high commission and the Star Chamber were all swept away. Ship-money was condemned as contrary to the law. The limits of the royal forests were declared to be those that had obtained in the twentieth year of James I. The dissolution of the Star Chamber, in particular, lifted the final impediment to public expression. That body had decreed, four years before, that no book could be published without a licence; the order was now dead. Even before the chamber had been dissolved the appetite for news was fed by pamphlets and tracts eagerly passed from hand to hand, most of them predicting great innovations in Church and state. There were 900 of these publications issued in 1640, 2,000 in 1641 and 4,000 in 1642.

The number of print shops doubled in this decade, but they were joined by what were described in one satirical pamphlet as ‘upstart booksellers, trotting mercuries and bawling hawkers’. Wandering stationers and balladmongers would call out, ‘Come buy a new book, a new book, newly come forth’. Pamphlets with titles such as ‘Appeal to Parliament’, ‘A Dream, or News from Hell’ and ‘Downfall of Temporising Poets’ abounded. It was no longer necessary to go to the bookstalls about St Paul’s or the Exchange to find newssheets. They were sold on the streets of London. Broadsheets cost a penny, eight-page pamphlets a penny or twopence. One commentator derided Pym’s ‘twopenny speeches’. A member of the congregation in Radwinter, Essex, threw a religious pamphlet to his curate, saying, ‘There is reading work for you, read that.’ The mixture of information and opinion was compounded by plays, processions, ballads, playing cards, graffiti, petitions and prints.

The leading members of the Commons published their speeches which, according to the puritan Richard Baxter in his autobiography, were ‘greedily brought up throughout the land, which greatly increased the people’s apprehension of their danger’. The king himself was moved to write against these ‘poisoners of the minds of his weak subjects; amazed by what eyes these things are seen, and by what ears they are heard’. Yet pamphleteering was not confined to the godly men of the parliament. The sermons of the principal preachers were also distributed. From the pulpit came a multitude of declarations and denunciations; but the pulpit also acted as a distributor of news. The cleric might explain the events of the day, or the week, and comment upon them to his excited congregation. The Presbyterian minister Robert Baillie said that ‘many a sore thrust got both men and women thronging into our sermons’. The words from the church were then taken up in discussions at the taverns and the shops, the streets and the markets.

Yet the pamphlets were not simply directed against one or other of the factions then gaining ground. They were part of a vigorous debate on the ideas and ideals of political and religious life. What were the grounds of a just monarchy? Was there in truth an ancient constitution? Were king, parliament and people uniquely joined? The publication and dissemination of these concepts materially helped to extend and to inform the political nation. The radicals used the printing presses to disseminate their own opinions of Church and state, leading John Milton to proclaim that London had become ‘the mansion house of liberty’ with its citizens ‘sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty the approaching reformation’.

Yet the royalists fought back with their own pamphlets. Richard Carter, in ‘The Schismatic Stigmatised’, attacked the dissenting preachers who were even then crowding Westminster and its environs. ‘And instead of orthodox divines, they set up all kinds of mechanics, as shoemakers, cobblers, tailors and glovers … these predicant mechanics and lawless lads do affect an odd kind of gesture in their pulpits, vapouring and throwing heads, hands and shoulders this way, and that way, puffing and blowing, grinning and gurning.’ A doggerel verse circulated through the streets:

When women preach, and cobblers pray,

The fiends in hell make holiday.

The parishes of London were indeed filled with dissenters of any and every kind. A separatist congregation met at a house in Goat Alley, off Whitecross Street; they arrived in twos or threes, and one man stood at the door to warn of any approaching strangers. The man appointed to preach stood in the middle of the room while the others gathered in a circle about him. Among these lay preachers were, according to a political satire sold in the streets, ‘Greene the feltmaker, Spencer the horse-rubber, Quartermine the brewer’s clerk, with some few others, that are mighty sticklers in this new kind of talking trade, which many ignorant coxcombs call preaching’.

The conventional clergy of the Church were derided in the streets and sometimes their surplices were stripped from their backs. The cry went up, ‘There goes a Jesuit, a Baal-priest, an Abbey-lubber, one of Canterbury’s whelps…’ When a bishop went up to the pulpit in St Olave’s, in Old Jewry, some hundred ‘rude rascals’ called out, ‘A Pope! A Pope! A Pope!’

In this fevered atmosphere rumours of every kind circulated like hurricanes. It was said that a papist cavalry was concealed in caves in Surrey; it was reported that a plot had been hatched to blow up the Thames with gunpowder and thus drown the city. One of Pym’s colleagues, Sir Walter Earle, told the Commons that a conspiracy had been discovered to demolish parliament; in their excitement the members leaned forward in their seats better to hear him, and part of the floor of the gallery gave way. One member exclaimed that he smelled gunpowder and another, leaving his seat, shouted that ‘there was hot work and a great fire within’. The news soon spread, and a mob flew to Westminster. It was of course a false alarm, but the sudden panic testifies to the agitated state of the capital.

It was a world of change; as the king had said to parliament earlier in the year, ‘You have taken the government all in pieces.’ ‘The Brothers of the Blade’, a dialogue issued in 1641, considered ‘the vicissitudes and revolutions of the states and conditions of men in these last days of the world’. ‘Revolution’ meant in conventional terms recurrence or periodic return; in these years it became associated with more earthly disorder. It was widely believed that the times were awry; anxiety and even despair were experienced by many. Brilliana Harley, a royalist letter-writer, expressed her belief that ‘things are now in such a condition that if the Lord does not put forth his helping hand his poor children will be brought low’.

In the weeks after Strafford’s death the king seems to have become resigned to his loss of power. He signed the bill for abolishing tonnage and poundage, telling both houses of parliament that ‘I never had other design but to win the affections of my people’. He made a leading puritan, the earl of Essex, his lord chamberlain. Yet he was in fact playing for time.

There were already the makings of a king’s party from those outraged at the pretensions of parliament in assuming executive powers; others were displeased at the idea of a puritan state Church controlled by parliamentary lay commissioners in place of bishops. The ‘root and branch’ party, which favoured such a change, was still in a minority. In this year many petitions reached Westminster from those who wished to preserve the Church and protect the Book of Common Prayer from more change. Some supported the maintenance of the episcopacy on the basis that the office was good even if the man was indifferent. From Oliver Cromwell’s own county of Huntingdon, for example, it was pleaded that ‘the form of divine service expressed and contained in the book of common prayer’ was the best. These petitioners wished to extirpate those immoderate and bitter reformers who fomented nothing but trouble and disorder in the churches of the country.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that those who were moderate or orthodox in their religion were beginning to take the side of the king and to believe that the political settlement imposed by parliament had gone far enough. Instead of relief and liberty, it had brought anxiety and division. The imposition of taxes had not improved the temper of the nation. One gentlewoman from Yorkshire, Margaret Eure, wrote: ‘I am in such a great rage with parliament as nothing will pacify me, for they promised us all should be well, if my lord Strafford’s head were off, and since then there is nothing better, but I think we shall be undone with taxes.’ It was agreed by many that the king should take wise counsel but few accepted that parliament had the power to choose who those counsellors should be. It was also possible that the king could still divide the Lords from the Commons; in June 1641, the peers threw out a bill excluding the bishops from their number. They were not prepared to consider any ‘further reformation’.

In the same month of June John Pym introduced what were known as the ‘ten propositions’, measures that were designed to increase parliamentary control of the king’s court and council. All priests and Jesuits were to be banished from the court and, in particular, from the queen’s entourage. Henrietta was defiant; she would obey her husband, she said, but not 400 of his subjects. Another proposition demanded that the king remove his ‘evil’ counsellors, and insisted that none in future were to be appointed unless they were such ‘as his people and Parliament may have just cause to confide in’. The armies of Scotland and of England were to be disbanded as quickly as possible. There was no reference to the king. This might be seen as a step towards a republican government, however carefully obscured by the rhetoric of loyalty.

The ‘ten propositions’ had been in part prompted by the king’s recent and carefully resolved decision to travel to Scotland. It was feared that in fact his destination would be York, rather than Edinburgh, where he might take control of his English army garrisoned there; hence the call that the English and Scottish armies should stand down. But if he did indeed journey to Edinburgh, what then? He might, for example, enlist his native subjects in some attack upon Westminster. If he agreed to grant the Scots the ‘pure’ religion they demanded, and allowed them to resume their just liberties, they might return to their old allegiance to the Stuarts; Charles had already written to the earl of Argyll, chief of Clan Campbell, with the pledge to ‘establish the affections of my people fully to me’. If the Scottish and English armies were joined together, under the command of the king, they would represent an almost irresistible force.

John Pym and his supporters were now seized with anxiety and alarm. They even convened parliament on Sunday morning, at the beginning of August, to debate the nature of the threat. They begged for a delay to the king’s journey, and he consented to a pause of one day. He had in the interim been engaged in talks with the Scottish commissioners and, according to the Venetian ambassador, the Scots were boasting that ‘they would do all in their power to place the king in his authority once again. When he appeared in Scotland, all political differences would be at an end, and they would serve their natural prince as one man in such a cause.’

As the king prepared to go on his journey a crowd gathered in Westminster entreating him not to leave. It may be that his presence in London acted as a form of reassurance, at a time of great disorder, or it may be that some in the crowd suspected his intentions. He went to parliament on the morning of his departure in a mood of ill-concealed hostility and impatience. He named a commission of twenty-two men who would administer affairs in his absence; among them was the earl of Newcastle, a notable enemy to the parliamentary cause.

The Commons immediately retired to their chamber and debated the means ‘of putting the kingdom into a posture of defence’. An ‘ordinance’ was passed, the first of its kind, appointing several key parliamentarians to attend the king in Scotland; they were of course to be spies rather than companions, hoping to supervise his actions. An ordinance had in the medieval period been a device by means of which the king could make a declaration without the consent of parliament; now the two houses were issuing ordinances without the consent of the king. Another confrontation seemed to be inevitable.

Charles was greeted in Edinburgh with every sign of acclamation. He at once proceeded to gain the approval of the Scots. He attended the services of the Scottish Church with an outward display of piety, and agreed to the demand of the covenanters that bishops be excluded from the reformed Church. He attended the sessions of the Scottish parliament, and agreed to the terms of an Anglo-Scottish union whereby his powers over parliament and the army were severely circumscribed. Some at Westminster believed that they might obtain similar benefits, but it occurred to others that Charles had simply managed to neutralize the Scots in any future conflict.

In these months parliament had begun to govern; it paid the army, and it issued orders to royal officials such as the lieutenant of the Tower. It had made decrees about the liturgy and the forms of religious worship. Laud had been impeached and imprisoned, while Strafford had been executed; various of the supposed ‘evil counsellors’, among them Lord Keeper Finch, had fled. The judges and sheriffs who had supported the king’s exactions had been summoned to parliament and asked to explain their conduct. The Star Chamber, the northern council and the high commission, the seats of Charles’s rule, had been abolished. Laud’s judicial victims, such as Prynne and Bastwick, had been liberated and brought back to London in triumph. Most importantly, perhaps, it had been decreed that the present parliament could not be prorogued without its own consent.

It is possible, however, to see these developments in another light. Parliament had acted in an arbitrary and imperious manner. It had misinterpreted the polity or unwritten constitution of the country, and arrogated powers to itself that it had never before possessed. It had illegally hounded Strafford to death. It had colluded with the king’s enemies and an alien army. It had organized mobs to intimidate its opponents. It had proposed a new system of religion to be enforced upon an unwilling people. It had passed a bill ensuring its permanence. In the process the king had been stripped of his royal prerogative and had suffered a severe defeat in all the matters that touched him most closely. He had always said that his enemies wished to relegate him to the status of the doge of Venice. He was not mistaken.

22

Worse and worse news

Parliament reassembled on 20 October 1641, determined to wring from the king the same concessions that the Scottish parliament had already obtained from him. This was the period when the title of ‘King Pym’ came into general use. John Pym had started his career, perhaps surprisingly, as a receiver of Crown lands, and he was in general a good man of business. He was the great orchestrator of parliamentary affairs and had the ability to direct various men and factions towards one end; he was an effective, if not eloquent, debater but his real energy and power lay in his handling of parliamentary committees. By his use of such committees, in fact, he proved that parliament could govern as ably as the king. He sat close to the Speaker in the Commons, together with the other parliamentary leaders, and it was reported that ‘the Speaker diligently watches the Eye of Pym’.

He was shrewd, and tireless, with a fierce hatred of popery and a genuine commitment to what he considered to be the true religion; his maiden speech was an attack upon one of his colleagues who had branded a Sabbath bill as a ‘puritan’ bill, and in another speech he declared that ‘no impositions are so grievous as those that are laid upon the soul’. He possessed a round face, full lips and heavy jowls; he also sported a curling moustache and short pointed beard. Yet he was not necessarily of a severe disposition; he was known for his cheerfulness and conviviality.

At the beginning of this session a letter was delivered to him as he sat in his place in the Commons. A gentleman had hired a messenger on Fish Street Hill, and given him a shilling to deliver the missive. When Pym opened it a rag dropped out that was, in the words of Clarendon, ‘foul with the foulness of a plague sore’; it was a rag that had covered a plague wound. It was accompanied by a letter that denounced Pym for treason and threatened that, if the plague did not kill him, a dagger surely would. It ended with ‘repent, traitor’.

Pym and his colleagues were now intent upon stripping Charles of his prerogative power, namely his ability to appoint his officers and councillors without reference to parliament. Yet they had first to deprive the upper house of its majority in favour of the king, and so they moved to expel the thirteen bishops who sat there. A bill was passed by the Commons to disqualify any cleric from accepting secular office, but naturally enough it was delayed by the Lords themselves.

Pym tried to raise the temperature of the debate with news of fresh army plots and of a furore in Edinburgh, where three covenanter lords had fled the king’s court in fear of their lives; this became known as ‘the incident’. The king then fervently declared before the Scottish parliament that he had played no part in any such plot to assassinate them and asked for ‘fair play’. The fact that the principal conspirator had been Will Murray, the groom of the king’s bedchamber, served to throw doubt upon the king’s protestations of innocence. Whether true or not, the rumours only deepened parliamentary alarm about the king’s intentions; it simply confirmed the fact, known by all, that he could not be trusted. Yet, in turn, why should he trust those who conspired against his throne? It still seemed very likely, in the early days of the parliament, that any attempt at more radical reform would come to nothing. Many members were now of the opinion that the changes in religion, in particular, were coming on too fast. Here were the makings of the king’s party.

Just at that moment, at the very beginning of November, news reached parliament that a rebellion had broken out in Ireland. The information was brought to the Commons by seventeen privy councillors, and Clarendon reported that ‘there was a deep silence … and a kind of consternation’. It aroused all the fears of the Protestants of England, and one courtier who had been asked to remain at Westminster and report on parliament, Edward Nicholas, wrote to the king in Edinburgh that ‘the alarm of popish plots amaze and fright the people here more than anything’. It was reported that papists were storing weapons and stocking gunpowder. A pamphlet circulated with the question ‘Oh ye bloodthirsty papists, what are your intents?’ The rebellion came as a cataclysmic shock, but the conditions for it had been slowly gathering.

There were three defined elements in Irish society. The New English were the Protestant settlers who had established themselves after the Reformation; they controlled the Dublin parliament and were intent upon imposing English ‘standards’ upon the natives. The Old English had arrived before the Reformation, some as early as the twelfth century, and had become so acclimatized that they identified themselves with Ireland rather than with England; many of them were Catholic while some merely conformed in public to the Protestant Church of Ireland. They owned about one third of the best land. The third group, known by their masters as the ‘mere Irish’ or ‘natives’, made up the largest part of the population but, like most of the downtrodden of the earth, have left little record of their loyalties or beliefs.

But the Irish and the Old English had much cause for grievance. The Crown had in previous years confiscated one quarter of the land that had been held by the Anglo-Irish gentry and by the native Irish; it had already been decided, in the reign of James I, that no landowner could have the title to his land unless he could prove that he held proper feudal tenure. If he could not provide these credentials, his lands might be confiscated and planted with new English or Scottish settlers. Thus James had presented the citizens of London with 40,000 acres in County Derry, the territory therefore becoming known as Londonderry. The six counties of Ulster had also largely fallen into the hands of Scottish Presbyterians. The dismal state of the Church of Ireland, and the zealous work of Jesuit missionaries, had in any case emboldened the Catholic cause. The Catholics had good reason for resentment; they were unable to educate their children, and their priests, given no benefices, were forced to rely upon the charity of their parishioners. Fines could also be imposed upon those who did not attend Protestant services.

Many forces were therefore at work in the revolt. The Irish Catholic leaders, who included the Old English, drew up a remonstrance in which they claimed to be rising up for the safety of their religion and for the defence of their lives and estates. They were aware of the proceedings of the English parliament, and of the concessions made by the king to the Scottish Presbyterians, and so felt all the more keenly the injustice to their native religion; they feared also that the reformers or ‘puritan faction of England’ had so deep a detestation of Catholicism that they would impose more restraints upon, and exact new duties from, them. They might even go further and in a statement of Irish grievances it was suggested that the Scots and English, combined, might ‘come into Ireland, with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other, for to plant their puritan, anarchical religion among us, otherwise utterly to destroy us’. Why should Irishmen not rise up in their own defence before it was too late? This was a grand irony of the period. The negotiations between England and Scotland had the result of forcing Ireland into revolt. Charles had found it impossible in practice to administer three kingdoms, when each one had pledged its loyalty to a separate religion.

On 23 October 1641, they rose up against their English masters. A rebellion in Dublin on the previous day had been partly discovered and quelled, but insurrection spread through the land. Parties of armed men would ravage an English-owned plantation, and then retire to their own territory; others would actively supplant the English owners and replace them with the former proprietors. The English fugitives sought refuge in the nearest army garrison, where they remained in fear and consternation.

The more radical members of the Commons were already preparing a remonstrance to the king with the purpose of appealing for renewed public support, when news of what was called an Irish ‘massacre’ invested their efforts with fresh urgency. The most frightful reports had reached them. It was stated that many thousands of Protestants had been killed, that women had been raped and mutilated, that babies had been burned. A pamphlet, ‘Worse and Worse News from Ireland’, revealed the list of war crimes. A letter read out to the House of Commons alleged that the Irish rebels in Munster were engaged in

exercising all manner of cruelties, and striving who can be most barbarously exquisite in tormenting the poor Protestants, wheresoever they come, cutting off the privy members, ears, fingers and hands, plucking out their eyes, boiling the heads of little children before their mothers’ faces, and then ripping out their mothers’ bowels, stripping women naked, and standing by them being naked, whilst they are in travail [labour], killing the children as soon as they are born, ripping up their mothers’ bellies as they are delivered …

The more sober truth was that approximately 5,000 English Protestants had been killed, and that an equal number of Irish Catholics had fallen in the course of the English counter-attack.

On 5 November Pym rose from his seat to pledge his life and estate to the cause of suppressing the rebellion but added that ‘unless the king would remove his evil counsellors, and take such counsellors as might be approved by Parliament, we should account ourselves absolved from this engagement’. A bill was then passed that ‘supplicated’ the king to employ only men acceptable to parliament. On 8 November Pym told the Lords that, if the king rejected their supplication, he and his fellows would have to ‘resolve some such way of defending Ireland from the rebels as may concur to the securing of ourselves’. Parliament, in other words, would be in charge of organizing and directing its own Protestant army that might in turn be employed to defend its own cause. The king would become merely a figurehead or talisman.

This was the occasion for the debate on a document that later became known as the ‘Grand Remonstrance’, a lengthy tract of some 204 clauses that anatomized the history of abuses perpetrated by the ‘malignant party’ close to the king. These evil counsellors had set out ‘a malignant and pernicious design of subverting the fundamental laws and principles of government, upon which the religion and justice of this kingdom are firmly established’. It was a catalogue of errors and abuses that was designed to inflame the temper of the nation, and thus to check the resurgence of loyalty towards the king.

Violent objections were raised to what amounted to a manifesto; some believed that it was an act of treachery against the king, while others believed that the Commons had no right to produce such a remonstrance without the agreement of the Lords. Sir Edward Dering, the royalist member for Kent, said that ‘when I first heard of a remonstrance I presently imagine that like faithful councillors we should hold up a glass to his majesty … I did not dream that we should remonstrate downward, tell stories to the people and talk of the king as a third person’.

Pym sensed that a royalist party was acquiring more support. He agreed that certain clauses of the remonstrance might be amended or deleted but ‘it is time to speak plain English, lest posterity shall say that England was lost and no man durst speak the truth’. The final debate took place on 22 November and went on through that winter afternoon; it continued in candlelight until one o’clock in the morning. When the house finally divided Pym had gained the victory by eleven votes. It was said that the decision was like that of a ‘starved jury’, alluding to the custom of depriving jurors of meat and drink until they had reached a verdict. But the narrowness of the result meant that the king had created a sizeable party.

As soon as the division was announced some of the royalists entered their protestations. One member, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, accused the majority of being ‘a rabble of inconsiderable persons, set on by a juggling Junto’. When a motion was introduced that the remonstrance should be published at once, the tempers of the opposing sides erupted. Some waved their hats in the air while others, according to Simonds D’Ewes, ‘took their swords in their scabbards out of their belts and held them by their pommels in their hands, setting the lower part on the ground’. Sir Philip Warwick wrote that ‘I thought we had all sat in the valley of the shadow of death; for we, like Joab’s and Abner’s young men, had catched at each other’s locks and sheathed our swords in each other’s bowels’. The significance of the occasion is marked by Oliver Cromwell, who said on leaving the chamber that ‘if the remonstrance had been rejected, I would have sold all I had the next morning, and never have seen England more’.

*

Edward Nicholas wrote to the king on the first day of the debate on 8 November, that ‘it relates all the misgovernment and unpleasing things that have been done by ill counsels (as they call it) … if your majesty come not instantly away [from Edinburgh to London] I trouble to think what will be the issue of it’. So Charles returned to London from Edinburgh seventeen days later and, on his entrance into the City, he was met by a cavalcade. He told those assembled to greet him that he would maintain the good old laws and the Protestant religion. He would do this ‘if need be, to the hazard of my life and all that is dear unto me’.

It is likely that the welcome from the City was a genuine one. The ‘former tumults and disorders’, as Charles called them, were no better for commerce than the new taxes that were being imposed by parliament upon the merchants and men of business. A fund of loyalty for the king also existed among the prosperous sort who were averse to the radicalism of his opponents; they disliked the spectacle of apprentices and minor tradesmen quoting Scripture at them, and they feared any uprising of the multitude. The Venetian ambassador had already reported that anonymous placards had been posted in the streets of the city, naming the lords of the puritan Junto as traitors and the authors of sedition.

Charles knighted the lord mayor amid cries of ‘God bless and long live King Charles and Queen Mary’, the name by which Henrietta Maria was often known, after which he rode in procession, accompanied by 1,000 armed men, to the Guildhall for a great banquet. The conduits at Cornhill and Cheapside ran with claret as the bells rang and the bonfires blazed. It was a ceremony of ancient provenance and it emphasized the virtues of the traditional order. No guests from the Commons were invited to the feast at the Guildhall.

The king was encouraged, however, by his greeting in the City and by the fact that the remonstrance had been strongly resisted by so many members of the Commons. Determined to surrender nothing more, the king was resolved to extirpate his enemies under the forms of law. The parliament had destroyed Strafford by ingenious means of attainder, and it was open to him to use the same or similar methods.

Just before the king had left Scotland he, too, had received the news that his Irish subjects had erupted in rebellion. He had appeased one of his kingdoms only to find another in arms. His first reaction was simply the hope that the revolt ‘may hinder some of these follies in England’, by which he may have meant that the desperate news might bring parliament to its senses. Yet it could be lent a more sinister meaning. Could the Irish not be treated as a threat to the puritans?

Pym and his colleagues were inclined to blame Charles for the rebellion in a more direct sense. Some of the Irish rebels claimed that they had a commission from the king under the great seal ‘to arrest and seize the goods, estates and persons of all the English Protestants’. It was a false claim, but at the time it persuaded Pym that the king had deliberately fomented the revolt in order to raise a force against the parliament; that Charles was willing to tolerate Catholicism in Ireland in return for the support of the ‘Old English’ in his fight against parliament. It was said of the Irish rebels that England ‘is that fine sweet bit which they so long for and their cruel teeth so much water at’.

There was bitter controversy over the size and direction of the military campaign in Ireland. The king said that one man, rather than 400 men, was best able to direct a campaign; the Junto naturally disagreed, claiming that Charles could not raise an army without the express approval of parliament. In the last two months of the year the earl of Warwick set about creating what was essentially a parliamentary force. Charles wanted a wholly volunteer force composed of his supporters, while the Junto insisted upon pressing men into service. At every stage in the process the Commons, with a small majority against the king, was opposed by the Lords.

In the event only one regiment was sent to Ireland, at the end of the year, and a further force of 5,000 men arrived five months later. The English garrisons in Ireland were essentially left to fight their own battles. It might be fair to assume that Pym and his fellows wished to muster their resources for a conflict closer to home.

23

A world of mischief

At the end of 1641 a royalist member of parliament, Sir Henry Slingsby, wrote that ‘I cannot say we have had a merry Christmas, but the maddest one that ever I saw’. He added that ‘I never saw the court so full of gentlemen, every one comes thither with his sword … Both factions talk very big and it is a wonder there is no more blood yet spilt, seeing how earnest both sides are.’ The citizens had come to Westminster, their swords by their sides, ready to protect the puritan members. John Venn, one of the London members of parliament, said in a shop off Cheapside that ‘you must go to the parliament with your swords, for that party which is best for the commonwealth is like to be over-voted’. The parliament itself had been warned many times of threats against its activities and even its life.

On 21 December elections were held in London for the common council and the results favoured the puritan cause. On that day the king dismissed the lieutenant of the Tower, Sir William Balfour, and appointed Thomas Lunsford in his place; Lunsford was known to be a zealous and sometimes violent partisan of the king, and was therefore deeply distrusted. If any of the parliamentary or civic leaders were arrested, he would be sure to hold them fast. Simonds D’Ewes wrote that ‘all things hastened apace to confusion and calamity, from which I scarce saw any possibility in human reason for this poor Church and kingdom to be delivered’.

The lightning flash was reserved for the thirteen bishops who sat in the Lords; they provided the majority for the king which was able to override all the bills and declarations of the Commons. When the Lords gathered in Westminster at the end of December a crowd of apprentices and others began to call out, ‘No bishops! No popish lords!’ The archbishop of York lunged at one of the noisiest of the participants, but he himself was hustled and his gown torn. The Lords then asked the Commons to join with them in a declaration against riotous assemblies, to which Pym answered, ‘God forbid the House of Commons should proceed in any way to dishearten people to obtain their just desires in such a way.’ He was on the side of the mob who had threatened the bishops.

An opposing force, made up of military volunteers and soldiers of fortune, had also gathered in the city; they had come to serve the king in Ireland and elsewhere, but they could also be guaranteed to turn upon the crowds who supported parliament. They might prove useful if the king should ever attempt to mount a coup d’état. One London news-writer, John Dillingham, reported that these soldiers ‘offered their majesties to untie the knot’ before adding ‘what was meant you may judge’.

This was the period in which the terms of ‘roundhead’ and ‘cavalier’ became common currency, deriving from the short hair of the citizens and the long locks of the royalist soldiers. The latter term, deriving from caballeros or Spanish troops, was meant to be one of abuse but it soon became associated with honour and gallantry. It should be remembered that the leaders of the parliamentary cause, in the Commons and in the Lords, also wore their hair long as befitted the members of their social rank.

With the steady formation of two antagonistic powers, there was already talk of a civil war. Argument and dissension sprang up everywhere. Two days after Christmas the crowds once more gathered around Westminster to demand a response from the Lords to another petition against the bishops; a group of soldiers fell upon them but the citizens fought back with ferocity inspired by fear. They attacked the troops with sticks and stones and cudgels; some sailors joined them with truncheons until the soldiers were beaten down or had run away. A number of apprentices had been arrested and detained in the Mermaid Tavern; a group of their fellows stormed the tavern and released them. On the following morning soldiers charged out of Westminster Abbey and fell upon the citizens with their swords and pistols; that afternoon, they hacked at a group of apprentices. In retaliation the citizens threatened to shut up their shops and refrain from trade.

In the Lords the bishops sat huddled in the torchlight, listening to the rage and menace of the crowds. They were forced to leave the chamber by means of subterfuge, some of them under the protection of the great lords and others directed to secret passages out of the building. The earl of Huntingdon reported that ‘ten thousand prentices were betwixt York House and Charing Cross with halberds, staves and some with swords. They stood so thick that we had much ado to pass with our coaches, and though it were a dark night their innumerable number of links [lights] made it as light as day. They cried “no bishops, no papist lords”, looked in our coaches whether there were any bishops therein, that we went in great danger.’

On the following morning the citizens and apprentices returned to Westminster with the stated intention of murdering any bishops who dared to venture forth. Whenever they spied a bishop’s boat coming across the Thames they called out, ‘A bishop! A bishop!’ and prevented him from landing. It is likely, but not proven, that these angry assemblies were in fact planned and organized by the parliamentary party to bring additional pressure upon the king.

On 29 December a group of twelve bishops laid the complaint that they had been ‘violently menaced, affronted, and assaulted, by multitudes of people’ and that in their enforced absence the proceedings of the Lords were void. This was tantamount to asserting that, without the bishops, any parliament was illegal. The members of the Commons were incensed at what they considered to be the arrogance of the claim, and on the following day the bishops were impeached for high treason and sent to the Tower on a bitter night of snow and frost. The senior dignitaries of the Church, including both archbishops, were now behind locked doors. It was possible that, in their absence, the puritan Junto would at last be able to pass its radical measures through the Lords. The king was by no means alone in his policy of coercion and conspiracy.

On the following day a large number of the king’s old military officers, described by Simonds D’Ewes as ‘desperate and loose persons’, were seen milling about the court and the environs of Westminster. John Pym ordered that the doors of the chamber be locked. He then declared that he had discovered a plot to destroy the Commons before nightfall. It was yet another rumour thrown upon the fire.

On the first day of the new year, 1642, matters came to a head. Committees from the Commons and the remaining Lords met at the Guildhall to consider their strategy. It was agreed that the trained bands should be summoned on the authority of parliament; at this meeting plans may also have been drawn up to impeach the queen for communing with the Catholic rebels in Ireland. The threat was, perhaps, designed to provoke the king into violent action. The trained bands were indeed raised for the cause of parliament, effectively placing London under its control; to summon armed troops without the king’s permission was an act of treason, but nobody seemed to care any more.

Charles was in any case already drawing up plans to impeach certain members of parliament; he had said previously that their correspondence with the Scots, at time of war, ‘shall not be forgotten’. On 3 January the charges against Lord Mandeville, John Pym, John Hampden, Arthur Haselrig, Denzil Holles and William Strode were read to the Lords. On the following day Pym sent a delegation to the common council of London, newly elected in the puritan interest, to plead for help; on that day the council elected a ‘committee of safety’ for the city.

It was not a moment too soon, since the king was ready to strike later that day. Pym had been alerted to the assault, perhaps by spies at the court, and prepared for a notable act of theatre. The accused men took their seats in the Commons early in the afternoon, knowing full well that the king would be informed of their presence. At three o’clock Charles left Whitehall with an armed guard of 300 men and made his way to Westminster. The news reached the Commons and the indicted members slipped from their seats and hid in the court of the king’s bench before being rowed into the City; even as they made their departure the king’s party could be heard clattering on the stairs into the lobby. The king entered the chamber of the Commons alone but the doors were left open so that the members could see the armed force waiting outside.

‘Gentlemen,’ Charles said, ‘I am sorry to have this occasion of coming unto you.’ He asked for the accused members to be surrendered to him. He then realized that his bluff had been called. He looked about him, and saw that they were gone. ‘I do not see any of them,’ he muttered, ‘I think I should know them.’ He added that ‘I am come to tell you that I must have them, wheresoever I find them. Is Mr Pym here?’ There came no answer. ‘Well, well! ’Tis no matter. I think my eyes are as good as another’s.’ He then asked the Speaker to help him find the offending members.

‘May it please your majesty,’ Speaker Lenthall replied, ‘I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place, but as this House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here; and I humbly beg your majesty’s pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this to what your majesty is pleased to demand of me.’

There followed what contemporaries described as a ‘long pause’ or a ‘dreadful silence’. ‘Well,’ the king eventually said, ‘since I see all the birds are flown, I do expect from you that you will send them unto me as soon as they return hither. If not, I will seek them myself, for their treason is foul, and such a one as you will thank me to discover. But I assure you, on the word of a king, I never did intend any force, but shall proceed against them in a legal and fair way, for I never meant any other.’ He left much discomfited as the cries of ‘Privilege! Privilege’ were raised all around him.

The members of the king’s party in the Commons realized at once that he had committed a major, and perhaps fatal, blunder; his authority was for the moment lost, and in a mood of understandable dismay they meekly submitted to the decision of parliament to adjourn itself to the hall of one of the London guilds as a place of greater safety. On the evening of the failed attempt the city had all the air of an armed camp. Barricades were set up and chains drawn across the principal thoroughfares; the people of the suburbs, as well as the city itself, offered their support to parliament in case Charles’s army should march against them. The women boiled water ready to throw upon any encroaching cavaliers. The members who had absconded were now safely concealed in a house on Coleman Street, a notable centre for radical sectarians. The call went up among some that the king was unworthy to live. Charles had effectively lost the capital.

Yet London was not the only place of disaffection. In the days immediately following, thousands of men from Kent and Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, Essex and Sussex, rode or marched to Westminster with petitions for parliament. They complained in general about the decay of trade provoked by the divisions and distempers in the state. The country was, as a result of the crisis, confronted by sudden economic decline; the loss of confidence restricted trade, and the tradesmen and merchants of London hoarded their money in the hope of better times. The majority of the people yearned for peace. It is important to note, however, that the petitioners from Kent and elsewhere had addressed parliament as the centre of authority in the nation.

On 10 January the king left London for Hampton Court, arriving so quickly and unexpectedly that the beds had not been prepared for him and his family. He told the Dutch ambassador that he had feared for the safety of his wife in the capital; he would not see London again until he returned nine years later as a prisoner. On the following day the members of parliament who had been charged by Charles with high treason came back by water to Westminster where they were greeted by triumphant crowds.

The military arsenal of the nation was placed at Hull, where 20,000 weapons and 7,000 barrels of gunpowder were secured. The king appointed the earl of Newcastle to be the governor of the port and arsenal but he was circumvented by the swift action of a young parliamentarian, John Hotham, who persuaded the mayor of Hull to admit his men. His father, Sir John Hotham, was then appointed as the town’s governor.

The Commons drew up a declaration to the officials of all the counties urging them ‘to put themselves in a position of defence’, and a day or two later asked them to nominate their own lieutenant-generals in the place of those loyal only to the king. The king then sent a letter to Westminster in which he proposed that he would preserve the privileges of its members and protect the interests of true religion in exchange for a commitment to preserve his authority and his revenues. The Lords wished to send a simple reply of thanks but the Commons responded with the demand that the fortresses and militia of the country should be placed in the hands of their supporters.

At the end of January Charles summoned all of his faithful lords to Windsor, to which castle he had now retired; fourteen of the peers joined him there, thus tipping the majority of those remaining in Westminster to the side of the puritan Junto. The lords of the puritan coalition could now rely on a majority in their own house to pass all the necessary legislation. Thus on 5 February the Commons sent up to the Lords a bill concerning the exclusion of the bishops from parliament. The pace quickened. By the middle of that month Charles and Henrietta Maria were at Canterbury, on their way to Dover where the queen would embark for Holland. She was travelling ostensibly to escort her daughter to an arranged marriage with the prince of Orange, but she also had more covert aims; she was attempting to buy men and matériel since, as she told the Venetian ambassador, ‘to settle affairs it was necessary to unsettle them first’.

The bill for the exclusion of the bishops now reached the king. He was advised that, if he did not give royal assent to the document, the queen’s journey might be prevented by parliamentary supporters; the queen herself then added her voice urging him to assent. As far as she was concerned, the bishops were dispensable. So Charles consented, even though he had promised in his coronation oath to maintain the ecclesiastics in all their privileges. He may have calculated, however, that he could rescind his decision at a later time and in more favourable circumstances.

When Charles travelled back to his palace at Greenwich, he sent for his eldest son. He was determined to keep the prince of Wales with him as a guarantee for the preservation of the royal family; father and son would remain together for the next three years through all the vicissitudes of warfare. The members of parliament now asked him to stay in the vicinity of Westminster; his presence elsewhere might provoke conflict and danger. He replied that ‘for my residence near you, I wish it might be so safe and honourable that I had no cause to absent myself from Whitehall; ask yourself whether I have not’. He did not, in other words, feel safe in proximity to parliament and the citizens of London.

On the following day he set out for royalist York rather than the capital. While en route, at Newmarket a parliamentary delegation came to him in order to present their case; they read out a declaration in which all the king’s actions, including his recent attempt to arrest the five members of the Commons, were detailed. The king was very uneasy. ‘That’s false,’ he said at one point. ‘That’s a lie!’ He gave his answer to them the next day. ‘What would you have? Have I violated your laws? Have I denied to pass any bill for the ease and security of my subjects?’ He then added, ‘I do not ask what you have done for me.’

The earl of Pembroke, a member of the puritan Junto, urged the king to return and set out his demands or wishes. ‘I would whip a boy in Westminster School’, Charles replied, ‘that could not tell that by my answer.’ Pembroke then asked him to grant power over the army to parliament. ‘By God,’ the king said, ‘not for an hour!’ He added that ‘you have asked that of me in this, which was never asked of a king’. A king would not surrender his troops to what was effectively the enemy.

On 16 March the members of the Commons issued a proclamation claiming supreme power for parliament within the nation. When Lords and Commons ‘shall declare what the law of the land is, to have this not only questioned and controverted, but contradicted, and a command that it should not be obeyed, is a high breach of the privilege of Parliament’. At the same time the members issued an ordinance requiring the leaders of the local militias to be appointed by them; these men would in turn raise forces on behalf of parliament. An Act was then passed to levy new taxes for that cause, much to the horror of the regional communities.

The members of parliament were becoming unpopular. Clarendon wrote that ‘their carriage was so notorious and terrible that spies were set upon, and inquiries were made upon, all private, light, casual discourses which fell from those that were not gracious to them’. It seemed to many that they had become despots rather than representatives, inquisitors rather than champions. As a supporter of the Crown Clarendon may have been a biased witness, but he mentioned the case of one member of the Commons who was expelled from the house and sent to prison for having said that parliament could not provide a guard for itself without the king’s consent.

There was as yet no necessity for war. The local communities of the realm were at peace; the borough sessions, the leet courts and the quarter sessions still met. Bread was weighed and the quality of ale was measured. In the wider world it still seemed possible that a political solution could be reached. Neither side appeared to have the power, or resources, to raise and command an army. No one wanted to be found guilty of having started a civil war. Nobles on both sides were eager for some form of compromise.

The king, in the company of his son, made a slow journey to York. Charles heard an oration at Cambridge as the cry of ‘Vivat rex!’ came from the scholars; the sheriff, however, did not appear to greet him. The prince of Wales reported to his sister that their father was ‘disconsolate and troubled’. The king’s reception in Yorkshire was not designed to reassure him. He had arrived at York with only thirty-nine gentlemen and seventeen guards, but the gentry did not flock to his side; the recorder of York, in his address of welcome, urged him ‘to hearken unto and condescend unto’ his parliamentary opponents. Margaret Eure, the Yorkshire gentlewoman mentioned before, expressed the wish: ‘Oh that the sweet parliament would come with the olive branch in its mouth. We are so many frighted people; for my part if I hear but a door creak I take it to be a drum. Things stand in so ill a condition here as we can make no money of our coal-pits.’ This may be said to summarize the mood of the nation, a compound of fear and dismay. No one could quite believe what was happening. Surely a solution could be found? The participants seemed to be sleepwalking towards disaster.

The king himself still professed a measure of optimism, saying that he could easily assemble an army of 16,000 men. He declared that he would raise a force in Cheshire and descend upon the rebels in Ireland. He wrote to parliament explaining that he had ‘firmly resolved to go with all convenient speed into Ireland, to chastise those wicked and detestable rebels’; he added that, for this purpose, he intended to raise a force of 2,000 foot and 200 horse which should be armed ‘from my magazine at Hull’. He may of course have had a different enemy in mind.

Here lay the problem. Hull was in the hands of parliament represented by its governor, Sir John Hotham. Hotham knew, as well as anyone, that the king may have required arms for ‘wicked and detestable rebels’ closer to home than Ireland. He also knew that the king would soon ride out and demand obedience. The members of parliament had already anticipated this action, and had told him not to open the town gates except by their authority. The members stated later that ‘the king’s supreme and royal pleasure is exercised and declared in this high court of law and counsel [themselves], after a more eminent and obligatory manner than it can be by personal act or resolution of his own’. They could not have declared in a clearer or more unambiguous manner that they were the masters now.

In the last week of April Charles approached Hull with a company of 300 horsemen, preceded by a message that he had come to dine with the governor. Sir John Hotham resolved with the municipal leaders to curtail any triumphant entry; when the king arrived he found the gates shut and the drawbridge raised with a guard upon the ramparts. He demanded entrance as their lawful sovereign, but was told by Hotham that ‘I dare not open the gates, being intrusted by the Parliament with the safety of the town’. Charles replied that ‘I believe you have no order from the Parliament to shut the gates against me or to keep me out of the town’. To which Hotham answered that the king’s force was so great that ‘if it were admitted I should not be able to give a good account of the town’. It seems that Hotham then told him that he might enter with a company of twelve men. He refused the condition as an affront to his person and, to the sound of a trumpet, proclaimed Hotham to be a traitor. His dignity, and his self-respect, had been deeply injured.

When he returned to York he sent a message to parliament acquainting the members with the insult given to him by Hotham ‘who had the impudence to aver that Parliament had directed him to deny His Majesty entrance’. The two houses stated in reply that ‘Sir John Hotham had done nothing but in obedience to the commands of both Houses of Parliament’ and that ‘the declaring of him a traitor, being a member of the House of Commons, was a high breach of the privilege of Parliament’. They also ordered the sheriff of Yorkshire to ‘suppress’ any further forces raised by the king. All parties prophesied a world of woe.

24

Neither hot nor cold

In the spring of 1642 the two houses resolved that ‘the king, seduced by wicked counsels, intends to make a war against the Parliament’. So they began to prepare men and arms. In May a levy of 16,000 soldiers was ordered. The trained bands of London were secured for service, and were mustered in Finsbury Fields; the weapons at Hull were transferred to the Tower. A forced loan, to be repaid at an interest of 8 per cent, helped to fill the coffers of the parliamentary treasury with coin or with plate. In the course of this spring parliament nominated the earl of Warwick to be lord high admiral of the English fleet. He worked quickly to gain the loyalty of his men, and ships that supported the cause of the king were promptly boarded and overpowered. Clarendon later observed that ‘this loss of the whole navy was of unspeakable ill consequence to the king’s affairs’. A king of England without sovereignty of the sea could scarcely be considered a king at all.

Men and money were also arriving for the king at York. Members of the nobility and the clergy, together with the gentry and the scholars of both universities, sent him jewellery and plate as well as ready money. Some ventures were less successful. The queen dispatched a vessel from Holland containing ammunition and sixteen pieces of cannon, but it was captured off Yarmouth. Just as parliament had sent out a ‘militia ordinance’ to recruit troops, so the king now sent out ‘commissions of array’ to raise a volunteer army. These commissions were formal documents, written in Latin and impressed with the great seal, sent to every city and county in the nation; they named certain leading men who would secure their territory for the king and at the same time gather men and money for the royal cause. Yet the soldiers on either side had not yet necessarily been raised to fight; they might be used to deter the other side from violence or to provide support in any subsequent negotiations.

The contradictory commands of the militia ordinance and the commissions of array caused much disquiet. While walking in Westminster on a May morning a notable moderate and former soldier, Sir Thomas Knyvett, was approached by two men of parliament who brought with them an order ‘to take upon me, by virtue of ordinance of Parliament, my company and command again’. He told his wife that ‘I was surprised what to do, whether to take or refuse’; he accepted it, however, since this ‘was no place to dispute’. Then a few hours later ‘I met with a declaration point blank against it by the king’. He consulted with others in the same predicament, and they agreed that they would be obliged to follow their consciences in the matter. Meanwhile, Knyvett wrote, ‘I hold it good wisdom and security to keep my company as close to me as I can in these dangerous times, and stay out of the way of my new masters till these first musterings be over.’ These are the words of a modest and relatively impartial man caught between the two factions. His voice, like that of many others, would soon be muffled by the increasingly rebarbative tones of those urging stronger and stronger action against their opponents. One Londoner who refused to follow the lead of parliament was advised ‘to leave the town lest his brains were beaten out by the boys in the streets’.

Events now had a momentum of their own, each move prompting a countermove and each rumour producing a further reaction. Bulstrode Whitelocke, a parliamentary supporter, remarked later that ‘it is strange to note how we have insensibly slid into this beginning of a civil war, by one unexpected accident after another, as waves of the sea, which have brought us thus far’. Many volumes have been written on the social or religious ‘cause’ or ‘causes’ of the civil war, but one principal motive may simply have been that of fear. Pym and his colleagues knew that, if the king were to prevail, they could all suffer a traitor’s death.

One parliamentarian, Lord Wharton, wrote in June 1642 to the chief justice who was with the king at York. He asked him how it was that the kingdom did not contain one person of prudence and skill ‘to prevent the ruin coming upon us’? His colleagues at Westminster were not disloyal, and he knew that those about the king ‘wish and drive at an accommodation’. So why could not an agreement be reached by both sides? Thomas Knyvett believed, two years later, that ‘the best excuse that can be made for us, must be a fit of lunacy’.

At the beginning of June parliament, guided by Pym’s opportune and careful management, delivered ‘nineteen propositions’ to the king; among them was the wish, or command, that the king dismiss his forces and accept the validity of the militia ordinance. He was to accept the religious reforms outlined by the members of parliament and to exclude popish peers from the Lords. His principal officers should be appointed only with the approval of parliament, and all important matters of state must be debated there. The document became in the words of one parliamentarian, Edmund Ludlow, ‘the principal foundation of the ensuing war’. Ludlow said that the question came to this: ‘whether the king should govern as a god by his will and the nation be governed by force like beasts; or whether the people should be governed by laws made by themselves, and live under a government derived from their own consent’.

The king of course rejected the demands out of hand with the words ‘nolumus leges Angliae mutari’ – we do not wish the laws of England to be changed. He said that acceptance of parliamentary demands would ensure that he became ‘but the outside, but the picture, but the sign, of a king’. The propositions were ‘a mockery’ and ‘a scorn’. Yet some still held back from confrontation. A parliamentarian, Sir Gilbert Pickering, wrote to a friend that ‘there are now some overtures of accommodation … and most men think they smell the air of peace. Yet provide for war.’ Seventeen counties sent forth petitions for such an ‘accommodation’ between the two sides.

At the beginning of July it was reported that the royalists had mustered in Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire; it was soon known that the king had placed himself at the head of a force of cavalry. On 11 July parliament declared that the king had already begun the war, thus diverting any blame for beginning the conflict. On the following day the earl of Essex was placed in charge of a parliamentary army, and the king promptly declared him to be a traitor. The first blood was shed three days later, when a townsman of Manchester died from wounds inflicted by a group of royalist troopers. The two sides now competed to seize control of the munitions of the local militias.

A ‘committee of safety’ was set up by parliament which, through the summer and autumn, began to organize soldiers, weaponry and supplies; it was a high command in another sense, since it oversaw military strategy and communicated between parliament and the commanders in the fields.

The two sides were now beginning to acquire a definite shape. The early supporters of the king were prompted by loyalty and by the doctrine of obedience. Sir Edmund Verney expressed it best by saying of the king that ‘I have eaten his bread and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him’. Verney lost his life, shortly after writing this, in the first great battle of the conflict. His sense of honour overrode all other considerations. It was a question of what was known as ‘the old service’ or ‘the good old cause’.

A majority of the peers and the greater landowners supported the king, since his privileges guaranteed their own. Twice as many families of the gentry also took the king’s part. The puritan gentry, of course, were parliamentarians. A puritan divine, Richard Baxter, anatomized the situation very well. He claimed that ‘on the parliament’s side were the smaller part, as some thought, of the gentry in most of the counties, and the greatest part of the tradesmen and freeholders, and the middle sort of men, especially in those corporations [towns] and counties which depend on clothing and such manufactures’. An element of popular or lower-class royalism, still to be recognized today, was evident in the zeal of porters and watermen, butchers and labourers, for the king’s cause in the larger towns and cities; the language of the street often condemned ‘parliament dogs’ and ‘parliament whores’. They wore red ribbons in their hats as a sign of their allegiance.

Religious dissenters overwhelmingly took the side of parliament, of course, while the Roman Catholics and those of orthodox faith supported the king or, for fear of reprisals, remained neutral. The universities and cathedral cities were largely for the king, although the clergy were often opposed by the aldermen, while the dockyards and chief ports were for parliament. A great number of towns, however, wished to stay out of the conflict altogether.

In the most general terms the north and west were sympathetic towards the king while the southeast, and London in particular, supported the parliamentary cause. Yet all of the counties were divided. The north of Lincolnshire was largely royalist, for example, while the south remained generally for parliament. It has been recorded of Derbyshire that the belt of iron and coal in the eastern stretch of the county was royalist while the lead areas of the north supported parliament. This may be an aspect of human society rather than of geology; the lead areas contained many independent small masters, while the areas of coal and iron depended upon larger enterprises controlled by a single master or landlord. In other counties the wooded areas containing isolated and self-sufficient parishes harboured the puritan cause, while the communal villages exploiting ‘mixed’ farming took the royalist side.

More subtle calculations have also been made. It has been estimated that the royalists were slightly younger than the parliamentarians, this statistic boosted by the fact that many young men joined the king in a spirit of bravado as well as patriotism; in parliament itself the royalist members had been on average eleven years younger than their puritan colleagues. It is clear that the judges of the land were divided in their allegiance, some of them worried by the constitutional pretensions of the king, while the staff of the various offices of the state were more likely to be active parliamentarians. The lawyers, too, had a long history of hostility towards the courtiers.

The majority of the population were neither hot nor cold; they may have been indifferent to the opinions of either side, but they were alarmed and intimidated by the change that had come over the kingdom. The partisans on both sides had provoked the conflict, and it was they who would end it. The rest stood by and waited. They did not care about the form of government, according to one member of parliament, Arthur Haselrig, as long ‘as they may plough and go to market’. Some said that the affair should be decided by a throw of the dice.

Sir William Waller, the parliamentary general in the west, wrote to his royalist counterpart, Sir Ralph Hopton, that ‘my affections to you are so unchangeable that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person; but I must be true to the cause wherein I serve’. He declared that he hated a war without a true enemy but ‘I look upon it as opus domini [the work of the Lord] … We are both on the stage and we must act those parts that are assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour, and without personal animosities.’ This is one of the noblest sentiments uttered in the period.

There was not a town or county that remained undivided by opinion and argument; factional conflict was everywhere apparent from the largest town to the humblest parish. Some sportsmen named their packs of hunting dogs ‘roundheads’ or ‘cavaliers’, and the children in the streets would engage in mock battles under those names.

Many families were also split in their allegiances, although it was sometimes believed that this was a convenient ploy to save family property if one or the other party finally prevailed. First sons were likely to be royalist, while younger sons remained ‘neutral’ or ‘doubtful’. Yet not all family differences were settled amicably. Sir John Oglander, who took no part in the conflict, wrote in his commonplace book that ‘thou wouldest think it strange if I should tell thee there was a time in England when brothers killed brothers, cousins cousins, and friends their friends’.

On the afternoon of 22 August Charles rode into Nottingham, where the royal standard was taken from the castle and fixed in the ground beside him. It was a silk flag with the royal arms and a motto, ‘Give Caesar his due’; it was suspended from a long pole that was dyed red at the upper part, and was said to resemble a maypole. The king quickly scanned the proclamation of war, and corrected certain words. The declaration was then read in an uncertain voice by the herald, after the trumpets had sounded, but all threw their hats into the air and called out: ‘God save King Charles and hang up the roundheads.’ The standard was blown down that night in the middle of a storm. Clarendon reported that ‘a general sadness covered the whole town, and the king himself appeared more melancholic than he used to be’. The civil war had begun.

25

The gates of hell

By the late summer of 1642 the king had managed to gather an army, partly comprised of the trained bands of the counties who remained loyal to him and partly of the ready supply of volunteers animated by loyalty or by the desire for pay and plunder. By the time he left Nottingham he was leading seven or eight regiments of infantry, and on his subsequent march he was joined by several regiments of cavalry; altogether he had the command of some 14,000 men.

Others might soon be inclined to join them since, at the beginning of September, parliament declared that those who opposed its intentions were ‘delinquents’ or ‘malignant and disaffected persons’ whose property could be confiscated. Those who had favoured the king without taking any action for him, or those who had remained neutral, now believed themselves to be threatened. The declaration further divided the nation into two parties. Many landowners and grandees who had taken no part in the struggle now decided to raise forces for their king so that their own lives and estates might be defended. Simonds D’Ewes, the parliamentarian diarist, confessed that the declaration ‘made not only particular persons of the nobility and others but some whole counties quite desperate’. The king was greatly hearted by his opponents’ error, and confidently expected many more recruits to his cause. In that hope, he was not mistaken.

On 9 September the earl of Essex rode out to his army at Northampton. He took with him a coffin and a winding sheet as a token of his fidelity to the end. He commanded an army of 20,000 men and it was widely believed that he would defeat the king with ease. Clarendon wrote of him that ‘his pride supplied his want of ambition, and he was angry to see any other man respected more than himself, because he thought he deserved it more, and did better requite it’. He was a man of great wealth and power. He liked to be known as ‘his excellence’, and was considered to have no equal but the king. He had the habits, and the manners, of a great lord like those of the Wars of the Roses. But it was not yet clear that he was a great commander. His reserve and his aloof manner were perhaps mistaken for wisdom. He was not a natural rebel, in any case, and his position at the head of the parliamentary forces rendered him deeply uneasy. It seems that his ultimate purpose was to detach the king from his ‘evil councillors’ and bring him back to London in the role of a constitutional monarch working alongside parliament. That is not what his parliamentary allies required.

In the course of this autumn some 40,000 men were gathered, and by the summer of 1643 the number had risen to 100,000. The armies were in many respects equally matched. They contained many men who believed that the war would be a short one, and that they would return to their fields in time for the next harvest; it was widely considered that one great battle would decide the issue. Many of them were poor and had been pressed into service by their landlords or employers.

From one Shropshire village, in the army of the king, were a farmer in debt, the son of a man who had been hanged for horse-stealing, a decayed weaver, a vagrant tailor and a family of father and three sons who lived in a cave. The soldiers on both sides were sometimes scorned as ‘the off-scourings of the nation’. Men were released from prison and pressed into service. It was said that some of the best trainees were butchers, because they were used to the sight of blood. For some the war came as a welcome relief from more mundane suffering, and such men eagerly sought the opportunity to seize money or goods. One veteran, Colonel Birch, recalled that ‘when I was in the army some said, “Let us not go this way, lest the war be ended too soon”’. They were also given provisions that were more plentiful than their food at home; the normal ration was supposed to be 2 pounds of bread or biscuit and 1 pound of meat or cheese each day. They were allowed one bottle of wine or two bottles of beer.

The royalist troops in particular were accused of drunkenness and lechery, and in the early months of the war it was reported that a group of them had murdered an eight-months pregnant woman in Leicestershire. Nehemiah Wallington, a puritan artisan from Eastcheap, wrote that ‘they swagger, roar, swear, and domineer, plundering, pillaging or doing any other kind of wrong’.

Yet the abuses were not reserved to one side. The royalists may have wrecked the taverns, but the parliamentarians desecrated the churches. The climate of war turns men into animals. It was said that, when troops were quartered in a church or hall, the smell they left behind was frightful. They pissed and defecated in corners. They often brought with them contagious diseases that became known as ‘camp fever’.

Many of the soldiers had of course volunteered out of genuine conviction. The parliamentary soldiers often chanted psalms as they marched, and the ministers preached to them upon such texts as the sixty-eighth psalm, ‘Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered…’ More secular rivalries also animated them; it was reported that the men of Herefordshire fought against the men of Gloucestershire, the Lancastrians against the Northumbrians.

The men carried pikes or muskets, but some were still armed with bows and arrows in the old fashion. The pike itself was supposed to be 18 feet long, with a steel head, but many of the soldiers cut it down as too cumbersome; the pikemen were also armed with a short sword. The muskets were charged with weak gunpowder and the men were advised to shoot only when the weapon was close up against the body of the enemy; since there were no cartridges, the musketeer held two or three bullets in his mouth or in his belt. They had to load and then fire with a lighted cord known as a ‘match’. Others preferred to shoot arrows from their guns. They wore leather doublets and helmets that looked like iron pots.

Not all of the troops, however, were untrained or ill-prepared. There were professional soldiers among them who had fought in France, Spain and the Low Countries. Mercenaries were also used on both sides. Many of the commanders had seen service on the European mainland. These were men who had perused such manuals as Warlike Directions or Instructions for Musters and Arms; they were the leaders who would have to give basic training to their troops. ‘Turn the butt ends of your muskets to the right … Lay your muskets properly on your shoulders … Take forth your match. Blow off your coal. Cock your match … Present. Give fire.’

A first skirmish or encounter took place near Worcester. Essex had moved his army towards the town and, on hearing the news, the king sent Prince Rupert to support the royalist stronghold. Rupert of the Rhine was the king’s nephew and, at the age of twenty-three, had already enjoyed great success as a military commander. His expertise, and his experience, were considered to be invaluable. He was high-spirited and fearless; he was also rash and impatient. Yet on this occasion, in a limited engagement, he routed the parliamentary cavalry and killed most of its officers.

Clarendon wrote that the incident ‘gave his troops great courage and rendered the name of Prince Rupert very terrible, and exceedingly appalled the adversary’; he added that ‘from this time the Parliament began to be apprehensive that the business would not be as easily ended as it was begun’. Oliver Cromwell himself had grave reservations about the conduct of the parliamentary army. He told his cousin, John Hampden, that ‘your troopers are most of them decayed serving men and tapsters, and such kind of fellows, and their [royalist] troopers are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons, and persons of quality’. Cromwell believed that if parliament were to prevail, a new and more glorious force should be formed.

There was perhaps still one way to avert the conflict. The parliamentarian grandee of Worcestershire, Lord Brooke, declared that he wished ‘to avoid the profusion of blood’. So he offered his royalist counterpart in the county, the earl of Northampton, to ‘try the quarrel by sword in single combat’. A duel might therefore have decided the course of the civil war. It was a medieval expedient but it emphasizes the extent to which this war was essentially still seen as a baronial combat. Yet the political and social world had changed since the fifteenth century.

The king moved with his army to Shrewsbury, only 50 miles away from the parliamentary forces. For three weeks both sides remained close to one another, but neither made any move. No one was eager for battle. Charles decided to press the issue and advance towards London. Essex was obliged to prevent him. The earl also wished to present a petition to the king, but Charles refused to see him. Why should he parley with a traitor?

The king moved forward slowly towards London, but Essex remained on his trail. The first battle of the civil war took place at Edgehill, in southern Warwickshire, where the royalist forces had rested on the evening of 22 October; the parliamentary army was only a short distance away and Charles had decided to attack from the summit of a range of hills that gave him the advantage. It was an uncertain struggle, with Rupert’s cavalry for a while in the ascendant but the parliamentary infantry holding its own. Both sides claimed the victory, when in truth neither prevailed. The number of the dead amounted to a little over 1,000. A trooper wrote to his mother that ‘there was a great deal of fear and misery about that field that night’.

It was the first experience of battle for most of the participants, and it came as a salutary shock. The soldiers had been badly organized and Rupert’s cavalry, in particular, had run out of control. Many of the men and some of the commanders, weary and disgusted at the slaughter, fled for their homes. The king, never before in a war, was himself horrified by the death of some of his most loyal commanders. He seems also to have been alarmed by the extent of the enemy, and murmured before the battle that he did not expect to see so many arrayed against him. The earl of Essex was equally dismayed. He had hoped that one great battle would resolve the issue, but the result had been bloody and uncertain. Might this be a harbinger of the whole war? He had raised his standard against his sovereign, however, and there was no easy way forward.

The king was urged by Rupert immediately to march upon London, but instead Charles rode with his men 20 miles south to Oxford, where he had determined to establish his headquarters. It was from here, at the beginning of November, that he once more set out for the capital. On the news of his approach the terrified citizens took up whatever weapons they possessed; parliament sent a delegation to the royal camp to open negotiations but the king, while giving gracious words, still pressed forward. Prince Rupert attacked a parliamentary force at Brentford, 8 miles out of London, and then proceeded to fire some of the houses in the town; the word ‘plunder’ now entered the English vocabulary. It was to be the prince’s method throughout the war.

The citizens of London decided, under the direction of their parliamentary masters, to make a stand. The apprentices and trained bands, to the number of 6,000, were assembled in Chelsea Field near the village of Turnham Green in Chiswick. The earl of Essex went into the city and pleaded for more men, until eventually a ragged army of 24,000 Londoners advanced to Turnham Green close to the royalist army. On Sunday 13 November, the two forces stood face to face without giving way. The king, fearing any grievous loss of life, withdrew to Hounslow. Even his most ardent supporters would have hesitated before launching a general assault upon the city itself. Yet he had lost his best, and last, chance to defeat his enemies. He was not given the credit for his mercy, however, and his withdrawal at the last minute was considered to be a public humiliation. Thus it was presented, at least, in the printing presses controlled by parliament.

A pause in hostilities prompted calls from some quarters for peace and accommodation. Parliament raised four proposals for the attention of the king; it already knew that he would reject them. A crowd of Londoners approached the common council calling for ‘Peace and truth!’ whereupon someone shouted out, ‘Hang truth! We want peace at any price!’ Demands for an end to hostilities were frequent throughout the course of the war but, at each stage of the process, the activists won their cause over their more diffident colleagues. The more combative members of parliament, for example, believed that a peace with the king would amount to capitulation. Instead they began to make approaches to Scotland in an attempt to gain military aid.

It was also important that more money should be raised. On 25 November it was agreed that an assessment should be levied upon London, but that was only the beginning. In the next few weeks and months John Pym worked to pass legislation concerning land taxes, general assessments, confiscations, property taxes and rises in excise duty. All men of property were obliged to make contributions to the public funds, on the understanding that the money would eventually be repaid by ‘public faith’, an obscure and possibly meaningless phrase. The levies were excused on the familiar grounds of necessity and imminent danger. In the following year an order went out that those who had not voluntarily contributed would be fined one fifth of their income from land and one twentieth of the value of their personal property.

The king now established his household and himself in Christ Church, Oxford, while Prince Rupert moved into St John’s College. All Souls became an arsenal while the king’s council assembled at Oriel. A strange change came over the face of the university. The main quadrangle of Christ Church was turned into a cattle-pen. It became a substitute court, also, with satires and love poems circulating from hand to hand.

Both sides now considered their strategies for the conflict to come. The royalist plan was slowly to descend on London from the north and the west, with Prince Rupert and his cavalry offering assistance from Oxford. The ports of Plymouth and Bristol in the west, and Hull in the north-east, were to be seized from parliament so that they could not become a menace to the flanks of any advancing armies. Parliament in turn already held London as well as the counties of the southeast and the midlands; it had determined to form them into ‘associations’ so that they could more easily combine and cooperate in the face of the enemy.

Oliver Cromwell held true to his intention, expressed to his cousin, John Hampden, of creating a regiment that would be a match for ‘the gentlemen’ of the other side; he picked industrious and active men from a range of occupations whom Richard Baxter, a leader of the puritans, considered to be ‘of greater understanding than common soldiers’. If any of them swore he was fined a shilling; if he became drunk, he was set in the stocks. They became known, sometimes in praise and sometimes in irony, as ‘godly’ or ‘precious’ men.

The first news was kind to Charles and his forces. One of his commanders, the earl of Newcastle, took York and seemed firmly in command of the northern counties. The king himself stormed Marlborough and seized it from a parliamentary force; he was, according to the French ambassador, ‘prodigal of his exertions … more frequently on his horse than in his coach, from morning till night marching with his infantry’. Parliamentary prisoners were often sent to Coventry under armed guard; hence the familiar expression.

Many still held to the belief that it would soon be over, their confidence strengthened by the opening of negotiations at Oxford between the two sides at the beginning of February 1643. Parliament had drafted some propositions for peace; in particular the king would be obliged to honour the bills already approved by parliament and allow the trial of certain ‘delinquents’. Although these terms were not to the king’s liking he maintained that ‘I shall do my part and take as much honey out of the gall as I can’. In a private communication, however, he wrote that God himself could not ‘draw peace out of these articles’. He replied with a list of conditions, the first of which was the return to him of his forts, revenues and ships. A few days later parliament voted that his answer was no answer at all. The hopes for peace were short-lived.

The pace of the war was quickened with the return of the queen, Henrietta Maria, together with money and fresh arms from her brief exile. A severe and prolonged tempest kept her at sea. ‘Comfort yourselves, my dears,’ she told her attendants, ‘queens of England are never drowned.’ After she had landed at Bridlington in Yorkshire some ships in the service of parliament bombarded with cannon fire the house in which she lodged, forcing her to take refuge under a bank in a field. Parliament then destroyed her chapel in Somerset House, and a painting by Rubens that had been placed over the high altar was thrown into the Thames. Yet ‘Her She Majesty Generalissima’, as she styled herself, was not cowed. She travelled from York to her husband in Oxford with 3,000 infantry, thirty companies of horse and six cannon. In the early spring of 1643 John Evelyn recorded in his diary that the whole of southern England saw an apparition in the air; it was a shining cloud, in the shape of a sword with its point reaching towards the north ‘as bright as the moon’.

The balance of the fighting in subsequent months seemed to be tilting towards the side of the royalists, but nothing was decided. The battles were small and often indecisive, but local victories were won on both sides. The best troops were those who fought for their own territories, naturally enough, but no large-scale engagement changed the fortunes of war.

It was fought, piece by piece, across the nation without much central planning or control. Leeds had to be taken by the royalists, for example, to relieve the earl of Newcastle who might then go on to assist the earl of Derby who was hard-pressed in Lancashire. The king’s forces were besieging Gloucester but an army of Londoners under the command of Essex relieved it. The royalists were making gains in the north, but they lost the key town of Reading. Taunton fell to them, but Plymouth was saved by the parliamentary fleet. Small wars erupted in almost all of the counties. The citizens of one town might furnish a force for parliament while the adjacent manor houses collected troops for the king. Very little of the action was coordinated properly. Opposing armies would come upon one another by chance. No one knew what was really happening.

London was harassed by fears and rumours, its population swollen by refugees from the fighting elsewhere. In the spring of 1643 a great defensive earthwork began to rise around the city, and many houses in the suburbs were demolished to provide clean lines of fire from twenty-eight ‘works’ or forts that were ranged along it. Ramparts were constructed behind a ditch 3 yards wide, and the total height of the fortifications in some places reached 18 feet; the ‘wall’ surrounded the city in a circuit of 11 miles. Much of it was built within three months by the citizens themselves. The Venetian ambassador estimated that 20,000 men, women and children were engaged in the work; the ‘furious and zealous people’, as John Evelyn described them, were so enthusiastic that they even worked on Sundays. No trace of this great wall of London survives.

The city also had to be defended from the enemy within. It was believed that one third of the population still supported the king, and that many royalists had infiltrated the trained bands. At the beginning of June a royalist plot was discovered to take over the city and to arrest the leading parliamentarians; loose talk by some of the conspirators led to their arrest and interrogation. There was another enemy inside the city. It was ordered that the Cheapside Cross should be removed from the site where it had stood for 350 years; all other ‘popish monuments’ were also to be destroyed.

In May 1643 a small skirmish acquired, in retrospect, much significance. Oliver Cromwell was 2 miles outside Grantham with a small force of horsemen when he came across a division of royalists; they were twice the size of his company but at once he gave the signal to charge. Speed and surprise were always his favourite methods of warfare. The royalists broke ranks and fled from the scene or, as Cromwell himself put it, ‘with this handful it pleased God to cast the scale’. A number of ‘godly’ men, inspired by their commander, had defeated an apparently stronger enemy.