The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  But the most striking developments of all in James’s reign were the English settlements planted in America after the disappointments of Raleigh’s colony at Roanoke in Virginia. Urged on by the popularizing writings of Richard Hakluyt, especially his book relating Elizabethan voyages of discovery, Principal Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, England woke up to the possibilities of the New World, which was already resounding to Spanish, French and Dutch accents. Most of the English settlers in the first part of the seventeenth century were Puritans, who founded the group of colonies several hundred miles north of Virginia known collectively as New England, where they could worship after their own fashion.

  A group of Separatists from Scrooby in Nottinghamshire began the settlement of New England when they set sail in the Mayflower and founded Plymouth colony in 1620. In the decade preceding the Civil War, perhaps as many as 5,000 Englishmen and women a year emigrated to Plymouth’s neighbouring colony of Massachusetts, established in 1629 by a group of Puritan lawyers led by John Winthrop as a reaction against the increasingly ferocious measures taken by Charles I and Archbishop Laud to wipe Puritan practice from the face of England. Other colonies along the eastern seaboard followed during Charles’s reign, including Vermont, Connecticut and Rhode Island. The penalties against Catholics inspired Lord Baltimore to establish the Catholic colony of Maryland in 1632 just north of Virginia, named in honour of Charles I’s wife Queen Henrietta Maria. While the northerners depended on exporting fish and skins for their livelihood, the southerners soon depended on importing African slaves from the English traders on the west coast to work their large tobacco and cotton plantations, since like the Spanish they believed their European constitutions prevented them from labouring in the humid heat.

  A Virginian ship washed up on an island began the settlement of the Bermudas in 1609 and many islands in the Caribbean followed. There too the English settlers began to import African slaves to work their plantations. Since the ancient Greeks, honey had been used for sweetening, but the discovery of sugar cane and its superior taste resulted in the Caribbean specializing in cultivating it. The slave trade begun by Jack Hawkins developed into a longstanding and degrading institution. Manufactures from England such as textiles were sold to west Africa in exchange for slaves, who were then transported in the dangerously unhealthy confines of slave ships to the West Indies and the southern colonies such as Virginia. To pay for the slaves sugar, cotton and tobacco were sent back to England’s most important ports, Bristol and Liverpool. Many respectable English merchant families made their fortunes in this convenient triangular trade.

  But though all these developments were changing the lives of the English–so that by the end of the century Englishwomen in the most obscure parts of the country could sweeten their new drink, tea, with West Indian sugar while their husbands and brothers smoked pipes of American tobacco–the new king had immediate problems close at hand. Though Charles I disliked Parliament as much as his father had done, he was at its mercy, for he needed supplies to pay for the continuing war against Spain.

  Charles I (1625–1649)

  Divine Right (1625–1642)

  Charles I was grave, slow in thought and, owing to a speech impediment, no less slow in conversation. Though he lacked his father’s great intellect, he had a wonderful eye and was a connoisseur of the arts. Thanks to him the royal family began a collection of works by superb contemporary painters such as the Dutchman Peter Paul Rubens, whom Charles commissioned to execute the magnificent vision of James I on the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall. Charles also acquired old master pictures like the Raphael and Leonardo cartoons now at Windsor and in the National Gallery. He was the patron of the Italianate architect Inigo Jones, who built the exquisitely simple Queen’s House at Greenwich and many other beautiful classical buildings. Jones introduced the Palladian style of architecture into England, with transforming effects on the country houses of the era–Wilton, near Salisbury, with its double cube room, is the most famous example.

  Jones also designed many masques for Henrietta Maria to act in. The French queen, who was small and childlike, delighted in acting for the king with her ladies. These Renaissance inventions were fantastic court entertainments, almost like plays, with elaborate costumes, and with lines usually written by the playwright Ben Jonson. Despite growing Puritan disapproval of play-acting, vehemently expressed in sermons and pamphlets, Charles’s court was famous for its amateur theatricals. These masques tended to have for their theme the divine majesty of the king, which had a special appeal to Charles as he was intensely religious. He became close friends with the rising star of the Church of England William Laud, and appointed him Bishop of London in 1628 and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. Laud reinforced Charles’s sense of the monarch as the Lord’s Anointed, whose views could not be questioned, and he even went down to the Houses of Parliament to put this view across during Charles’s first Parliament.

  This Parliament, no less than those of James I, was turbulent and contentious. The antagonism between king and Commons continued into Charles’s reign without a break. On behalf of his sister Elizabeth, Charles had agreed to fund a new military expedition by his uncle King Christian of Denmark against the Catholic League in Germany. But though he expected to be granted supplies for a popular war, the Commons was in a very belligerent mood and refused to grant the new king customs duties for life as was traditional at the beginning of a new reign–they would be for one year only. MPs also demanded that Buckingham be sacked, suggesting that Charles look back to the wise behaviour of Elizabeth, who had relied on the advice of a council rather than the rule of favourites. Though Charles dismissed Parliament for its insulting behaviour, he soon had to recall it because of increasing foreign difficulties. A quarrel over the treatment of the Huguenots in France meant that Charles was also at war with his French brother-in-law Louis XIII, who had been England’s ally against the Habsburgs.

  The atmosphere at his second Parliament was extremely frosty. At Buckingham’s suggestion, the noisier and more critical MPs like the former chief justice Sir Edward Coke and the Yorkshire landowner Sir Thomas Wentworth were made sheriffs by royal command, which meant that they could no longer attend the Commons. But gagging them made no difference to the temper of the House; it was now led by a gifted orator, the Cornish baronet Sir John Eliot. The Commons continued to call for Buckingham’s impeachment, so Charles actually went down to Westminster to berate MPs for questioning his servants, particularly one who was so close to him. Once again Charles dismissed Parliament, warning MPs that whether it was called at all was entirely up to him, and he further antagonized them by temporarily imprisoning Eliot. Meanwhile Charles’s inability to manage Parliament prevented England from committing troops to Christian of Denmark against the German Catholics, with the result that Christian and his army had been comprehensively defeated.

  But Charles was obstinately determined not to be beaten by the Commons. More sensible rulers would have been forced by his dire financial and political situation to retreat from any warlike activities. Egged on by the high-handed and arrogant Buckingham, Charles instead cranked up the hostilities with France to a higher level by going to the rescue of the rebellious Huguenots at western France’s port of La Rochelle. Since Parliament had been dissolved, he decided to resort to yet another unparliamentary tax to raise money for the wars. The method he used was a forced loan, imposed on all those liable to pay tax. Hundreds of the most respectable citizens throughout the country, men of wealth and position, went to prison rather than submit. Within weeks came a legal challenge from five knights of the shire. In what is known as Darnell’s case, they demanded to know of what crime they were accused, asking to be released through the well-known common law writ or process of habeas corpus. Habeas corpus forced anyone holding any prisoner to produce him in front of a judge and describe his offence; if the judge did not accept that the alleged offence was a crime, the prisoner had to be released
. But although the judges in Darnell’s case ruled in favour of returning the knights to prison, the only reason given for their incarceration was that it was the king’s command, which in itself seemed a poor reason and a tyrannical precedent.

  Nevertheless, even with the forced loans there were still insufficient funds for the war against Louis XIII, and in 1628 Charles was once again forced to recall Parliament. The Commons was determined to make it clear to the king that he could not carry on in the way he had been. The more extreme members presented the king with a very strongly worded denunciation of his policies in a protest entitled the Petition of Right. Masterminded by the MPs Sir Edward Coke, Sir John Eliot and the country landowner John Pym, it is generally considered by historians to be one of the most significant constitutional documents of English history. The Petition of Right informed Charles just what the law was regarding ‘the rights and liberties of the subject’, and demanded an end to what its authors described as all the king’s illegal innovations. If the king would not assent to the Petition, the Commons said they would impeach Buckingham. This threat secured the royal assent, and in return Charles got the supplies he had asked for.

  These were the mere opening shots in what became constant warfare. Buckingham, now Lord High Admiral of England, was never brought before the Commons. Later that year, to immense popular delight, he was murdered in Portsmouth by a Puritan madman while supervising ships to go to the aid of La Rochelle. But the House of Commons was not done yet. In its next session in 1629 it launched yet another assault upon the king. This time it attacked his religious advisers, Sir John Eliot producing a bill that condemned anyone who allowed Arminianism or any innovations in religion (meaning Roman Catholicism), or paid customs dues without Parliament’s permission.

  Under Laud’s influence the Church of England had become completely identified with Charles’s political policies. From every pulpit Anglican priests preached Divine Right and the duty of non-resistance to the king. Moreover the thoroughgoing way in which Laud was restoring the Church’s ceremonies to the rituals of Henry VIII’s time (what is now known as High Church), such as bowing at the name of Jesus, convinced most Puritans that he was on the point of returning England to Rome. In fact Laud had no such intention. But his hatred of Puritans and his unqualified support for a king who to contemporary eyes was a tyrant aroused the widespread conviction that the-soon-to-be-reintroduced Roman Catholicism would be the natural handmaiden of absolutism and oppression. These fears were exacerbated by rumours that the price of Henrietta Maria’s marriage had been a promise to suspend the penal laws against Catholics. This had indeed been the case, though that secret part of the marriage treaty had not been fulfilled. Meanwhile Henrietta Maria’s habit of openly worshipping at her own Roman Catholic chapel within the Palace of Whitehall did nothing to calm the situation.

  When Charles heard that, despite his assenting to the Petition of Right, the debates at Westminster were getting completely out of hand, and that Laud, his new Bishop of London, was being attacked as a traitor, he sent a message from Whitehall to order the speaker of the House of Commons to halt the proceedings. But the Commons shut the door in the face of the king’s messenger. Astonishingly, instead of the MPs leaving the chamber as the speaker had been trying to get them to do, two strong young MPs Holles and Valentine got the speaker by the arms and held him down in his chair while the House voted through Eliot’s motions. By the time the king’s troops arrived from Whitehall to break down the doors, it was too late. The motion had been passed. But as a result of this behaviour Parliament was once again dissolved. Sir John Eliot was imprisoned in the Tower of London where he died three years later, his poor treatment having fatally aggravated his consumption.

  In the fight between Parliament and the king, the gloves were now well and truly off. For eleven years, up to 1640, Charles managed to rule without calling Parliament. After his past errors he had enough common sense to realize that he could not both govern without Parliament and carry on two wars abroad. He therefore made peace with both France and Spain and utterly abandoned his sister, brother-in-law and the Protestant cause on the continent, where the immensely bloody Thirty Years War continued to rage until 1648.

  The king’s chief advisers in this period were Bishop Laud (Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633) and Sir Thomas Wentworth. The immensely efficient and hardworking Wentworth had been offended by what he considered to be the revolutionary new rights the Commons was claiming over the king. With his advice Charles began to rule through the prerogative courts, where the conventions of the common law were not observed, such as the Court of Star Chamber, the Council of the North (which functioned as a sort of northern Star Chamber) and the Court of High Commission, which Laud used vigorously to enforce uniformity in the Church against the Puritan clergy.

  Laud was determined to wipe out Puritanism. It was, he said prophetically, ‘a wolf held by the ears’ waiting only to spring. During his Primacy he and his supporters visited every single diocese in England to test the parish clergy’s beliefs and their use of ritual. Where the clergy failed they were sent before the Court of High Commission to be imprisoned and savagely punished–and savage was the only word to describe their treatment. William Prynne, a Puritan lawyer and the author of Histriomax, a book that attacked play-acting as immoral–which was seen as a thinly veiled attack on the queen–was tortured, branded with hot irons and had his ears cut off. It was during these years that perhaps 30,000 Puritans, confronted by such treatment and being unable to worship as they pleased, emigrated with their families to the freedom of America.

  Laud and Wentworth, who were intimate friends, both believed that what England needed were effective reforms in every department of state. They called their attempt to bring greater efficiency to Church and state ‘thorough’ government. Wentworth, who had tried out ‘thorough’ as president of the Council of the North, was sent to Ireland to bring order to the country and implement Laud’s obedience to episcopal rule there. His strong arm tactics were just as unpopular as Laud’s, and he managed to alienate every faction in the country.

  The absence of Parliament and the oppression of the Church bred an atmosphere of the greatest dissatisfaction in England, her inhabitants being unused to having no voice in the nation’s affairs. English monarchs had always needed the goodwill of the local landowners and merchants to act as unpaid judges and magistrates and help keep order in the countryside, but now in the 1630s the machinery of government began to break down as many of the gentry refused to serve Charles I.

  Furthermore, as the years went by, it looked as if Parliament might remain in abeyance indefinitely. Charles proved superb at finding obscure laws that could be revived to provide substitute taxes, such as the feudal relic that any man owning over a certain acreage without being dubbed a knight could be fined. Reasons were found to return some of the old pre-Reformation Church lands to the king, enraging not a few landowners, as did extending the royal forest and subsuming valuable land. Charles craftily increased the customs duties of tonnage and poundage, though Parliament had granted him these taxes only for the first year of his reign.

  It was not until 1634 that the king revived the old ship money levy. In theory this ancient right was levied on all maritime towns and ports to build more ships in time of danger. Certainly the Royal Navy did need to build more ships to protect England against the increasingly hostile Dutch navy, but on the whole this tax was raised only during wartime, and England was not at war. The seaport towns, their merchants and corporations, nonetheless paid up without a murmur, but the following year, when the king extended ship money to inland districts, it became clear that this was tax by the back door.

  A wealthy Buckinghamshire landowner named John Hampden, who was an old friend of Sir John Eliot as well as a former MP, refused to pay ship money, and in 1638 his case was brought before the courts. Although the ship money was pronounced perfectly legal by the judiciary, Hampden’s case and Hampden himself sharpened the mounti
ng anger against the king’s government. It was not, however, in England but in Scotland that the discontent was to first manifest itself in revolution.

  Most unwisely, though inevitably in view of ‘thorough’, Charles and Laud had turned their attention to reforming religious practices in Scotland and bringing them into line with England’s. They decided that the Scots would benefit from a new prayer book, even though the Scots were just like the English Puritans in that they preferred to invent prayers as they went along. A storm now burst about their ears. At the first reading of the new prayer book at St Giles in Edinburgh there was very nearly a riot when the service began. A footstool was hurled at the Dean of St Giles by a woman named Jenny Geddes, who became a national heroine, and the sedate streets of Edinburgh became the scene of wild civil disorder which spread throughout Scotland. In March 1638 most of the nation signed a document called the National Covenant which bound all its signatories to defend the true reformed religion based on interpretation of the Gospel and to resist papistry.

  Angry messages flew back and forth across the border from a newly created committee of prominent Scotsmen led by the Earl of Argyll and the Earl of Montrose. Known as the Tables it became in effect the government of Scotland, committed to protecting Scots Presbyterianism. Although Charles now withdrew the prayer book, it was too late. A General Assembly of the Church had met at Glasgow, abolished the bishops whom James had introduced and Charles had reinforced, and declared that the king had no right to interfere in the Church of Scotland. It paid no attention to Charles’s order from London that the Assembly was to dissolve itself.

  A more sensible king would have backed off at this point but Charles was infuriated by the challenge to the royal authority by Scottish subjects. To him there was no question but that he must go to war against the Scots, and the standoff between himself and the Scots in the summer of 1639 is called the First Bishops’ War. But since he had no army and no Parliament to raise money for one, he could only appeal to the ancient hatred of the English for the Scots, and the angry mood the English were in meant he raised very few that way. He was rapidly forced to make peace, and by the Treaty of Berwick he allowed a free parliament and General Assembly of the Church to thrash out their discontents.