Not trusting to the course of law, however, some of Strafford’s friends, with Charles’s knowledge, hatched a plot to spring him. On 3 May, fearing that Strafford was not going to survive the attainder, Charles sent loyal troops to take control of the Tower, but they were foiled by the lieutenant of the Tower and vigilant citizens. The public failure of the plot, ‘the first army plot’, did Strafford no favours.57
Nehemiah Wallington was among the huge crowd that gathered at Westminster the same day, prompted by a declaration that Charles would not allow the attainder to succeed. Several thousand gathered in the morning and by the afternoon the crowd had swelled to perhaps 10,000. The demand, paradoxically perhaps, was for justice and execution. When the Earl of Arundel arrived his way was deliberately blocked, and he was forced to say that he was working to achieve the execution of Strafford. These words, reassuring in one way, were met with the threat that ‘they would have justice, or take it’. As for Arundel, they said, ‘we will take his word for once’. At midday the Lords adjourned and many peers left by water. Some of those who took coaches were subject to personal abuse – the Earl of Bristol, for example. Pembroke, a supporter of the attainder, was able to pacify the crowd. John Lilburne, the celebrity radical, was also among the crowd. A London apprentice, originally from the north-east of England, he came from a minor gentry background and had a grammar school education. In the house of Thomas Hewson, a Puritan clothier, he had immersed himself in the Bible and emerged with an intense personal piety. During the 1630s he had been imprisoned for helping to distribute Burton’s publications. Present at most of the crucial disturbances of the period 1640–42, Lilburne became a successful soldier and then a prominent controversialist in print and in the courts. He was questioned the day after these events for some treasonable words, and at this distance in time it sounds like it was a fair cop.58
Despite the efforts of the Lord Mayor crowds assembled again on 4 May in the feverish atmosphere created by the revelation of the army plot. Some of the crowd were indeed armed, as had been threatened the previous day and the social profile was, if contemporaries are to be believed, less respectable. In the Commons the main business was the drafting of what became known as the Protestation, intended as a litmus test of political reliability. Those swearing to it would bind themselves to protect the true religion, and its passage seems to have calmed fears about the direction of events. The crowd eventually dispersed in the late afternoon, when the text of the Protestation was read out by Cornelius Burges, a well-known radical divine, client of the Earl of Bedford and a key figure in the London Puritan brotherhood.59
More excitement followed the next day, when a rumour swept the City that the House of Commons was being besieged by papists. Wallington closed his shop and rushed to the defence of the Commons, along with many others. When an old woman interrupted the sermon at St Anne’s, Blackfriars, with the news, people ‘ran up and down as if they had been wild’. As armed men hurried through Moorfields on their way to Westminster, women wept in the streets.60
Hostile contemporary accounts habitually claimed that the crowds in London’s streets in May and November 1640, and May 1641, were a low-born rabble. Those that can be identified, however, were often socially respectable, and more fair-minded commentators noted the social mix of these crowds. The leadership and organization seem to have been generated in London, within the City’s middling sort or from activists. There were continuities in the participation of Lilburne, Wallington and others, and there is no reason to suppose they needed, or wanted, the support of MPs in order to mobilize. Indeed, there is every reason to think that they felt the pressure should be operating in the opposite direction. The placards, petitions and crowd mobilizations drew on the crowded commercial society of the City, not on the natural obedience of thousands of inhabitants to MPs representing other constituencies.61
When the Lords did pass the attainder, on 8 May, therefore, there were good grounds for thinking that this significant political gesture, arguably the most significant so far achieved by the parliament, owed something to the pressure of London’s crowds. This was certainly true of the royal assent – the final necessary step to pass the bill into law. Charles was by no means inclined to give his assent – his loyalty to Strafford, and determination to save him, had already been amply demonstrated. But his judgement was affected by the arrival in Whitehall of a crowd said to number four or five thousand, among them armed men. Charles was advised by the Privy Council and the Archbishop of York that the only way to quell these disorders was to sacrifice Strafford. He regretted submitting to this pressure for the rest of his life.
In the days before the execution tensions continued to run high. Rumours spread of a planned French invasion to save Strafford, an attack on a bawdy house served as a guise for economic and social protest, there were attacks on the Queen Mother and a guard was placed on St James’s Palace. The execution itself drew a crowd of 100,000, also immortalized by Hollar, and following Strafford’s death celebrations continued long into the night. Bonfires were lit and those who failed to join the celebrations had their windows broken. Strafford had not made a helpful ‘last dying speech’, with the result that it was necessary to pretend that he had, and a pamphlet was published purporting to be a repentant speech he had made prior to reaching the scaffold. It was immediately denounced as a hoax.62 In all sorts of ways the virtue of the outcome – Strafford’s death – was undermined by the unseemliness of the means.
The execution of the Earl of Strafford
Strafford died unlamented except perhaps for the way that he had come to his end. Here were populism and something close to judicial murder in tandem. Strafford himself thought that the Lords had been affected by the crowds.63 A second important reason for acquiescence in these dubious proceedings was the vividness of fears about a popish plot, but this too was felt differently by different people. On 19 May a board in the gallery of the House of Commons had cracked and Walter Earle’s son had ‘cried out Treason, Treason and many of the burgesses had run away with swords drawn’. Other members, however, merely laughed at the panic and remained in the House. Arthur Haselrig, a notoriously hot Protestant who had clutched hold of an image in his alarm, was jeered for flying to the horns of the altar. Anti-popery, in other words, was extremely powerful, but its more extreme manifestations were not universally persuasive. It is significant both that there were parliamentary proposals in the summer of 1641 to geld Jesuits and that they were not accepted.64 Those anxious about legal propriety or political decency could take little comfort from Strafford’s trial or the crowds that (successfully) bayed for his blood during the passage of the attainder.
In May, seven months after the assembly of the parliament, some progress was finally being made but the principal achievement, the execution of Strafford, left a legacy of division and bitterness which further undermined attempts at settlement. Certainly, these proceedings against Strafford were a final nail in the coffin of the Pym-Bedford plans: their association with these events is unclear, but they finally ended their hopes of retaining the King’s favour. Equally, the army plot to seize Strafford increased fears that Charles might employ a military coup against the troublesome parliament. Committed to the abolition of episcopacy by their alliance with the Covenanters, and now tarred with the brush of populism, these were people with whom Charles would not deal. Bedford was in any case dying – he caught smallpox in the first week of May and died on 9 May.65 Strafford’s end was in some ways a consummation of the politics of 1640: opposition to royal policies was most powerful as a movement of redress rather than rebuilding, and drew considerable strength from opinion outside Whitehall and Westminster. But these events also accelerated some of the divisive political trends that had emerged since November 1640: rebuilding would be difficult in the atmosphere of distrust and mutual recrimination which now reigned.
In particular Parliament’s search for security for the future led it onto new constitutional ground, fuelling fear
s of a Puritan populist conspiracy against the monarchy. On the day of the attainder of Strafford, Parliament had passed an Act against its own dissolution. If the Triennial Act had tiptoed awkwardly round the implications of such measures for the prerogative, there was no such hesitation after the army plot. At this point over half of the members of Charles’s Privy Council in November 1640 were dead, under arrest or in exile, but further safeguards seemed to be necessary to some MPs.66 The political context for this was clear: the revelation of the army plot and the fear that all the talking about grievances would come to nothing because of the King’s advisers.
Immediately, however, the prospects looked good as a constructive legislative programme finally materialized. Revenue measures were not necessarily far-sighted, although they had far-reaching implications. On 12 May the Houses voted on a bill based on Pym’s earlier proposal for grants of a fixed sum, in this case the £400,000 subsidy. The bill was not treated with urgency until December, but it is a sign of the growing seriousness of measures to settle the financial question.67 In the meantime, a poll tax was granted in June 1641, with high hopes. It passed from first reading to royal assent in only eleven days and in some places appears to have captured a large slice of the population, but the yield was disappointing (£250,000 compared with the £1m some had hoped for). This reflected widespread evasion, and there was also a problem of slow payment.68 Its failure made the adoption of the £400,000 subsidy more or less inevitable. A Tonnage and Poundage Act was finally passed on 22 June. This was in one sense a tactical measure, since it granted the duties for less than two months, starting retrospectively on 25 May, and there were frequent subsequent renewals as negotiations continued. But the effect of the Act was to transform the customs into parliamentary taxes. It abolished those impositions which had been taken without ‘common consent in Parliament’, setting almost all the various duties instead on a statutory basis, and it stated that the rates at which the duties were to be imposed would ‘be hereafter in this present Parliament altered in such manner as shall be thought fit’. Parliament had taken control of the Books of Rates too.69
With new sources of revenue available the legal basis of the fiscal expedients of the 1630s was taken away: on 7 August ship money and forest fines were declared unlawful; knighthood fines were abolished on 10 August. Collectively, these measures had profound implications for the basis of crown finances. Prior to 1640 only about 25 per cent of crown revenue depended on parliamentary sanction, and that figure was probably falling. When Charles’s son took possession of his throne in 1660 it was on the terms of these 1641 reforms. During his reign about 90 per cent of his revenue depended on parliamentary sanction.70
There was rapid progress towards the redress of grievances, too. The courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, the two courts most responsible for the enforcement of Laudianism, were abolished on 5 July. All these measures enjoyed considerable political support, but, collectively, they represented a redrawing of crucial aspects of the constitution, changes which were never reversed. This rapid progress owed something to the need to get things done before members returned home for the harvest. Attendances were dropping and there is evidence of anxiety that constituents would not be happy at the return on a year of talking.
Another development that focused minds was Charles’s decision to go to Scotland. In itself this was a reasonable enough enterprise – it was after all one of his kingdoms and he was in the process of finalizing a treaty with a Scottish army. But in the atmosphere of distrust and anxiety that lingered after the attainder of Strafford, and the first army plot, this trip to Scotland was regarded with deep concern. There were signs in Scotland that the remarkable unity of the Covenanting movement was beginning to fracture. A number of leading noblemen had come to feel that the restraint of royal power was going too far, and that a new danger was emerging. Prominent among them was James Graham, later first Marquess of Montrose. It has been said persistently that Montrose was ambitious rather than anything else. His undoubted enthusiasm for the Covenanting cause – he played a prominent role in its mobilization – was attributed to disappointment at his reception at the English court in 1637. If that was part of his motive he must have been frustrated by the dominance of the Earl of Argyll – his superior in wealth and influence. But it was also conviction that made him pull back and by the time of the second Bishops” War he was no longer a prominent Covenanting leader. He had also been significant in the organization of the Cumbernauld band, partly in opposition to the growing dominance of Argyll.71
Montrose and others encouraged Charles to come to Scotland as early as March, and Charles had announced his intention to do so in April. Quite what he intended is not clear, but he was suspected in Scotland of planning some kind of move against the Covenanters (those who had written to him are known to posterity as the ‘Plotters’). In England it was feared that he intended to raise Scottish support for moves against Parliament, or that he intended to use the northern army to impose his authority. In the spring, at the time of the plot to spring Strafford from the Tower, there had also been discussions about the possibility of bringing the English northern army south in order to teach Parliament some discipline. These two army plots reflected the fact that the northern army had become resentful about the reluctance of Parliament to pay their wages and board, and come to regard Parliament with hostility. Lavish grants of money to enable the disbandment of the armies certainly owed something to the desire to see them gone before Charles went north.
A short-term problem – the difficulty of trusting this particular king to pass through two large armies without causing trouble – again led to proposals which had far-reaching implications and which raised the political stakes. This was compounded by a continuing fear of court Catholics – that the King was not reliable so long as he was surrounded by agents of the plot to subvert the law and religion. The Ten Propositions, agreed on 24 June 1641, arose from ‘A large conference with the Lords, concerning several particulars about disbanding the army, the Capuchins & c.’ They made demands which would have been quite startling a year earlier. As well as calling for disbandment of the English army and appealing to the Covenanters to withdraw part of theirs, the Houses asked Charles to delay his journey until more business in England was settled (including the tonnage and poundage bill). Beyond that the proposals clearly encroached on royal power: a wish not only to remove but also propose royal counsellors; a desire to restrict the religious freedoms enjoyed by his wife; the proposal to take over the education of the princes (to ensure that they grew up good Protestants); the view that anyone entering the kingdom as a representative of the Pope was committing treason; that the militia and defensive resources of the kingdom be placed in reliable hands; that the King should be more sparing in inviting Catholics to court; and that pensions should be withheld from recusants ‘held dangerous to the state’. It was clear who would do the ‘holding’ in this case. The militia demand (‘That there may be good lord-lieutenants, and deputy-lieutenants; and such as may be faithful and trusty, and careful of the peace of the kingdom’) was later to harden into a demand for parliamentary control – a precipitant of the war, and a sticking point in all subsequent negotiations.72 This was well short of that, but the direction of politics was plain. The difficulty that prominent politicians had in trusting Charles was radicalizing demands, and this despite the substantial legislative programme achieved in the early summer. This was a truly worrying sign, since it is difficult to see how Charles could have rebuilt this trust, or his opponents suspended their distrust.
A second significant obstacle to a lasting settlement was the very public and divisive religious debate. The failure of Root and Branch proposals had amplified that debate without offering a resolution. The Protestation, passed in the aftermath of the revelation of the first army plot, exacerbated religious conflicts, both in Parliament and in the provinces. The preamble made no bones about the popish plot to subvert law and religion and about the danger
s presented by a plot to move the army against Parliament. It was, to say the least, tendentious and provocative, but this account of recent history justified an oath of association to defend ‘as lawfully I may with my life, power and estate, the true reformed Protestant religion expressed in the doctrine of the Church of England, against all Popery and popish innovation’. Those who subscribed were collectively bound to maintain the King’s royal person and estate, the power and privilege of parliaments, and the rights and liberties of the subject.73 In structure it was much like the Scottish National Covenant, therefore, and Baillie made the comparison directly. But it was shorter – there was no historical account of what the doctrine of the Church of England was. More importantly still, it was deliberately silent on the discipline of the church. In the frenzied debate of the Protestation a number of members who saw some ‘hint intended’ against bishops and the liturgy argued that ‘the word discipline might be adjoined to the word doctrine’.74 They failed, and the Protestation became, for those in the know, a defence of the doctrine but not necessarily the discipline of the church.
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