God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  English government depended on active involvement, sometimes informed explicitly by classical histories, which prompted action for the public good, but which might be critical of the crown. Felton had demonstrated the existence of these ideals of active Christian citizenship, capable of opposing the King’s favourite and military commander in the interests of the commonwealth. His actions also demonstrated the tensions caused by Caroline policies in the fraught conditions of Reformation Europe. These elements of Caroline political culture, and Caroline politics, were exaggerated by the personalities – Felton’s own, the melancholy loner, and Buckingham’s – and by war, financial problems and meetings of fractious parliaments. The 1630s were calmer – with no Buckingham, parliaments or war and a lower intensity of public debate – but the calm was not a dumb obedience. The issues that concerned Felton – religion, the King’s advisers, money and war – were concerns shared by many others, well beyond the ranks of those willing to applaud the assassination. During the 1630s English government continued to depend on active local officeholders; political issues and argument continued to circulate, and fuel discussion; and some tensions remained.

  We cannot say that these questions were the talk of every alehouse, and it seems unlikely, but it is practically possible that they might have been. Political awareness was available to the villagers of Stuart England, and their participation was essential to the functioning of government. Practice and precept made them self-activating for the public good, defined in terms common with the magisterial class. Local misgivings about particular policies could be expressed through foot-dragging and legal challenge and, to some extent, through the normal channels of government leading up to the court. During the 1630s, however, they could not be expressed in Parliament and so local grievances accumulated. The problems of the 1620s had not gone away, although the absence of war, and of a talking shop, clearly helped to reduce the temperature. But the apocalypse continued to threaten and militia reform proceeded: fighting a war against fellow Protestants in the light of all this was unlikely to meet uncritical obedience.

  3

  Drawing Swords in the King’s Service

  The English and the Bishops” Wars

  As far we can possibly tell, Alexander Powell, of Holt, Cheshire, was not a natural rebel or traitor. His background and personal history, though, to the extent that we can reconstruct them, did make him likely to oppose the war against the Covenanters. In 1638 he had been accused of attending church to hear preaching by a minister who had been suspended for his advanced Protestant views. These meetings, labelled conventicles by the ecclesiastical authorities, had been winked at by the churchwardens, reflecting perhaps the extent to which ‘Puritan’ sympathies were entrenched among village worthies in that part of the country. Puritan preaching had certainly enjoyed some success in fostering hotter forms of Protestantism in the county. It was quite possible for ‘Puritans’ such as Powell to be active in their local communities, pursuing charitable work or fostering an alliance between magistrate and minister aimed at the eradication of sin. But in 1638 Powell turned a beggar away from his house, saying, ‘No sirrah, you shall have no alms here for shortly you will be pressed to war, and then you will fight against us’. Soldiers were about to be pressed in the north-west to fight against the Covenanters, and when the press was used it was exactly such men who were vulnerable: it was not unlikely that this man may have been on the verge of being pressed for service against the Covenanters. Powell seems then to have been asserting the importance of a religious affiliation with the Covenanters over obligations to his ungodly but vulnerable neighbours.1 The pressure of events was making plain potential contradictions in the world view of Charles’s subjects.

  We do not know how many people there were like Powell, but we do know that military mobilization by prerogative power in order to enforce Laudian ceremonialism would have plenty of opponents. A Buckinghamshire gentleman came to the attention of the authorities for saying that ‘he cared not [for Laud], for he has been the occasion of this strife between the Scots and us, and I care not if he heard me’. Libels in Ware (Herts.) proposed delivering Laud to the Scots rather than being eaten up with superstition and idolatry, and claimed that the conflict with the Covenanters arose from their resistance to idolatry and the Mass. Others were willing to blame the King, who, according to a man in Pembrokeshire, wanted ‘a good headpiece’, unlike his wise and learned father. A vicar in Northamptonshire who preached obedience was interrupted by a parishioner who said the King should yield to the Covenanters, and another argued that God’s will might be that England’s pride should have a fall. In Newcastle a man was reported to have argued that the Covenanters ‘did nothing but in defence of their own right and maintenance of the Gospel, and did but defend themselves against those that would have brought in popery and idolatry among them’. He declared himself unwilling to fight, ‘for unless his conscience moved him to it, he would not fight for any prince in Christendom’. Perhaps even more significantly, he was provoked by someone saying ‘beshrew the Scots that stand out against the King, for they are likely to put us to a great deal of charge, and it is likely we shall all go and fight against them’: hardly the most positive statement of support for the King’s position.2 Lurking behind all this must have been some sense that this was the wrong war – Charles had been at pains to stay out of the European wars but was now raising troops against his own, Protestant, subjects. Since many others were keen to have a parliament to discuss secular and religious grievances, it was not only opponents of Laudianism and militia reform that were qualified in their support for the King.

  The demands of the wars had an impact on an informed and engaged political society in which a degree of consensus and co-operation was essential to successful government. There was no such consensus behind the policy of armed intervention against Scottish Calvinists: opinion was instead divided. Laudianism and militia reform clearly had supporters in England or they would have made no headway. Neither were opponents of these policies necessarily advocates of the Covenanters” religious views, or political tactics; nor were they necessarily equally offended by all these policies. Still less were they in favour of the dissolution of royal government. Reluctance to support the war effort might proceed from a positive sympathy for the Covenanters” cause, an unwillingness to support the use of the prerogative or armed Catholics against the cause, or a sense that this crisis might be useful as leverage in securing redress of English grievances. There was a difference, in other words, between being pro-Covenanter and being not anti-Covenanter, and different arguments might support either of these positions. For Charles the issue was plain – this was a rebellion. For others the issue was more complicated and this undoubtedly added to the normal problems of mobilizing for war in early Stuart England. English opinion was far more ambivalent and divided than opinion in Scotland, but a King seeking to raise an army by prerogative power would clearly have hoped for less ambivalence and more commitment.

  These complex responses help to explain why building the necessary consensus around military mobilization proved so very difficult. Among those in trouble in Exeter were the mayor and two aldermen.3 At the King’s rendezvous in York in late April 1639 two peers refused the military oath. They were Viscount Say and Sele, member of the Providence Island Company and supporter of Hampden’s case, and Lord Brooke, another member of the company and a man of godly piety.4 Others clearly thought it inadvisable to proceed without the support of a parliament: extraordinarily this was the first time since 1323 that England had gone to war without the summoning of a parliament.5 Winning this one would be uphill work.

  Divisions in England came into the open, and came to matter, because Charles had to rely exclusively on English forces to crush the rebellion of his Scottish subjects. This had not been his original intention. In Scotland his hopes rested on George Gordon, Marquess of Huntly, who had offered protection to the Aberdeen Doctors, an eminent minority who had supported the royal
position against the Covenanters. During Hamilton’s mission Charles had encouraged Huntly’s efforts to resist the promotion of the Covenant in the north-east and he now hoped that Hamilton could join Huntly, who was raising forces in Aberdeenshire.6 In Ireland Charles hoped for help from Randall MacDonnell, the Catholic Earl of Antrim. Antrim also had claims to land in Scotland and he hoped to pursue those claims through opposition to the Covenanters. As early as January 1638 he had offered to raise troops for the King in Ulster and he now hoped to make good on that offer.7 With forces moving south from Aberdeenshire and across the North Channel into the western highlands, Charles hoped to bring an English force to the Borders, forcing the Covenanters to fight on three fronts.

  This strategy, however, quickly collapsed. In Ireland, Charles was in the hands of Sir Thomas Wentworth, the Lord Deputy. Schooled in the harsh world of Yorkshire politics, Wentworth had made his way by appealing to the royal court for patronage and protection and, when it suited, to the country as a champion of local interests. He was prominent in the parliaments of the 1620s as a critic of the court, but rose to be president of the Council of the North, vanquishing local rivals in the process. He was then made Lord Deputy in Ireland, the kind of promotion which can also be seen as an exile. In Ireland he acquired a reputation for authoritarian government, partly because he was indeed authoritarian and partly because he attacked all vested interests equally boldly. His service there was valued by the King, however, who gave him the title of Lord Lieutenant in January 1640 and elevated him to the peerage shortly after as the first Earl of Strafford. In England, in more normal circumstances, he would have been less authoritarian than in Ireland, but in the Scottish crisis he counselled Charles to take a strong line.8 Nonetheless, he opposed Antrim’s mobilization, and doubted the usefulness of his troops. In north-east Scotland, Huntly was outfaced by a better-mobilized Covenanter force, which took a number of castles, leading Huntly to disband his forces rather than risk defeat, and Hamilton was diverted from his rendezvous with Huntly to the Firth of Forth. There he found landing unsafe, not least because his own mother appeared in public with a pistol and threatened to shoot him if he came ashore. Charles had also sought help from the Dutch and the Spanish. The Dutch were completely uninterested and the Spanish claimed that they could not commit troops because suitable bread ovens would not be available in England. That the Privy Council explored the range of available bread ovens perhaps reflects a certain desperation, or an inability to take a hint.9

  Despite his initial intentions, therefore, Charles had to rely entirely on his English forces. The achievement was not negligible: two large armies were mobilized to fight the Covenanters in just over a year, 15,000 in May 1639 and nearly 25,000 in August 1640.10 But the Earl of Northumberland, commander of the English forces, had counselled against going to war in July 1638, on the grounds that ‘The People through all England are generally so discontented, by reason of the multitude of projects daily imposed upon them, as I think there is reason to fear that a great part of them will be readier to join with the Scots, than to draw their swords in the King’s service’.11 Things were little better once war broke out. On their way to fight in the second of the Bishops” Wars, in 1640, some English troops did in fact behave as if they were on the other side, carrying out iconoclastic acts to purify parish churches and refusing to obey papistical officers. English opinion was divided, and complex, not uniformly hostile to the war, and we should not ignore the achievement; but division was not what Charles had expected, and it was not welcome. It precipitated the end of his Personal Rule in England and prompted a crisis which ultimately led to the dissolution of his authority in England, Scotland and Ireland.

  On 9 February 1639 the Privy Council had conceded that members of the Trained Bands (that part of the able-bodied population summoned to muster which had been equipped and trained to modern standards) need not serve. They could instead send substitutes, an important concession to anticipated resistance.12 Many others were pressed from the general population – the common practice in the case of foreign service since the Trained Bands were too precious to be sent abroad. Impressment, by contrast, was often the occasion for ridding villages of undesirables. Officeholders in place for perhaps one year would have to live with their neighbours for much longer than that. It is easy to see why, when asked to pick some men to serve abroad, they might not choose the most popular and hard-working lads in the village or their neighbours? most promising sons. The home counties were responsible for equipping conscripts from local rates, and paying their expenses to the point of embarkation.13 The mobilization against the Covenanters might have been regarded as a defensive action, allowing the use of the Trained Bands rather than conscripts, and in allowing the use of substitutes the Privy Council had significantly weakened the potential of the war effort.

  Pressing men for military service was never easy, but in early 1639 it intersected with domestic discontents. George Plowright, constable of Burton Latimer, Northamptonshire, was the kind of village worthy who provided the backbone of English local government. His family had been freeholders in the village for over a century and he had served not only as constable but also as an overseer of the poor, sidesman and churchwarden.14 However, conflicts over royal policies during the 1630s intersected with local rivalries to make his life very difficult. When he went to Northampton in 1638/9 to pay ship money receipts to the sheriff his horse was requisitioned for the royal posts, even though he was himself on royal service. He blamed Thomas Bacon, with whom he had clashed previously over religion and the forced loan, and with whom he had been in dispute over ship money since 1635. In retaliation Plowright brought a case against Bacon in Star Chamber. In March 1639 Plowright was pressed for service against the Covenanters: something highly unusual given his status and office. He again blamed Bacon, who had been accused of using impressment maliciously in the past and who had been served with a writ to appear in Star Chamber five days before Plowright was pressed. Conveniently, it would mean that Plowright would be in York when the case came before the court.

  Forced to intervene, the Privy Council was in an uncomfortable position. It could hardly leave Sir Rowland St John, the Deputy Lieutenant ultimately responsible for the impressment, twisting in the wind. On the other hand, from the point of view of the Privy Council, Plowright was clearly on the side of the angels in Northamptonshire. He had the support of Robert Sibthorpe, a scourge of the local Puritans and an almost embarrassingly keen supporter of Charles and Laud in ecclesiastical matters, who during the Forced Loan controversy had preached that consent was not necessary for the King to raise money from his subjects. Sibthorpe interceded with St John on Plowright’s behalf, enabling Plowright to send a deputy to join the army, and his intervention clearly reflected political solidarity. Sibthorpe had brought a case against Bacon over ship money, and noted Plowright’s service in collecting the duty despite the hostility of local ‘Puritans’, expressing regret that his reward might now be to risk perishing at the hand of the Scottish Puritans. Before the Privy Council, though, St John maintained that Bacon had had no role in the pressing of Plowright, and that Plowright had been guilty of malpractices. The Privy Council had little choice but to uphold the authority of the Deputy Lieutenant, and Plowright was imprisoned and landed with the costs of both parties.15

  Here and elsewhere, the local met the national. Rivalries and hostilities among the local gentry and middling sort might become invested with a larger political and religious significance. This does not reflect a fatal weakness of the whole mobilization since large numbers of men were raised, but it does demonstrate the potential of the Covenanters” cause to polarize English opinion. Latent conflicts were coming into the open, or were allowed freer expression.

  By design, and because of the substitution clause, the infantry contained large numbers of pressed men. Even husbandmen (small farmers) and agricultural labourers seem to have been spared, so that labourers in non-agricultural trades predominated – m
en without the status or patrons to protect them from service.16 They were often untrained and poorly armed or even unarmed. Although Charles raised significant sums in loans and contributions from prominent individuals, there was not enough money to make up the lack, since coat and conduct money barely covered the costs of getting soldiers to camp. It was also of dubious legality, raised by the lieutenancy, whose powers in that respect had been left poorly defined by the repeal of legislation in 1605. It had previously been used to get soldiers destined for foreign service to port, and was reimbursed (in theory at least) from parliamentary grants. Neither of these things was relevant to the current case, since this was not a force being raised for foreign service, and no parliament was planned. People were quite capable of making a connection between this and ship money. Many of the nobility were reluctant to serve in arms and the officer corps was inexperienced. England’s arms industry had not had regular business under Elizabeth or the early Stuarts, and it had atrophied during the Caroline peace. As a result ordnance was difficult to find.17 These latter problems reflect the relative lack of active warfare over the previous generation rather than a political weakness: no arms industry could thrive in the absence of a lively market.18

  Contemporaries, not least the Covenanter leadership, were not convinced that the English forces were inferior to the Covenanters”, but there is little doubt that the Covenanters enjoyed more support in Scotland than Charles did in England. They were able to draw on the military experience of large numbers of men who had served in the continental wars, and that experience also informed the methods of mobilization, which was further inspired by the preaching of a committed clergy. There were fewer pressed men, and behind the whole effort lay greater enthusiasm for the cause.19