God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  this rebellion is grown to such a height that I must not look of what opinion men are who at this time are willing and able to serve me. Therefore I do not only permit but command you to make use of all my loving subjects” services, without examining their consciences – more than their loyalty to us – as you shall find most to conduce to the upholding of my just legal power.44

  Newcastle’s army was renowned as papistical through the rest of the war.

  Parliament’s success was much more immediate. In May the earls of Essex, Holland and Northumberland had attended a muster of 8-10,000 men in London. Subsequent attempts to enforce the Militia Ordinance were largely successful, particularly in the south-east. A committee for printing had been re-established in June 1642 which seems to have been energetic in publicizing the cause – there were 9,000 copies of a declaration of 4 July against the Commission of Array for example. The House of Commons itself failed the test of raising money on the Propositions, but it was successful in Hertfordshire and elsewhere, funding a productive drive to recruit volunteers in London and the south-east. On 8 August six bands of foot (4,800 men) set out for Warwick, accompanied by eleven bands of horse. When the Earl of Essex left London to join the army on 9 September he was watched by the full City militia, in arms.45 When he got to Northampton he was at the head of 20,000 men. This might have threatened a quick resolution given the unimpressive response to royalist recruiting at that stage. Sir Jacob Astley, the King’s infantry commander, was said to have been worried that the King was so poorly supported that he might be ‘taken out of his bed if the rebels should make a brisk attempt to that purpose’.46

  It is difficult not to think that Charles had the worst of all this. Petitions for accommodation between King and Parliament, and of loyalty to bishops, had come in from all around the country, but the King struggled to find men willing to fight for him in the Midlands. West of the Pennines he had more success, although it is difficult to see this as building on a long-term commitment to the cause, at least in most of the Marches. Elsewhere royalists manoeuvred, with mixed success, for local control. The success of individuals established the roots of regional royalist armies in the north and west but the King’s own field army was slow to build in the Midland counties. It created a federation of regiments under particular commanders as much as an integrated army.47 A map of military outcomes – strongpoints and towns held, musters achieved, armies assembled – is probably not a map of enthusiastic royalism. For both sides mobilization through print, preaching and the use of local institutions as a platform for partisan politics had been crucial. There were more musters by the authority of the ordinance than the Commission of Array, and petitions in support of Parliament were offset more by petitions for accommodation than by positive support for the King against Parliament. There were plenty of signs of reluctance to go to war, but far fewer than many people thought Parliament should concede.48

  Two military parties were forming but it is by no means clear that opinion at large was dividing neatly into two camps. There was no National Covenant, but instead a series of contentious slogans – the Prayer Book or Protestation – and attempts to read in natural and supernatural events signs of God’s purposes. Amidst all the shouting it is possible to discern the formulation of coherent, and radical, constitutional theories, but they were not always officially owned, and neither did they command universal assent. Neither was there an equivalent of the Covenanters” Tables: a revolutionary body responsible for the campaign. Instead there were contests for existing institutions of national or local government – Parliament, quarter sessions and assizes. There is very little evidence of pure neutralism, in the sense of a disengagement from the political issues, but there is plenty of evidence of hesitation in committing to one ‘side’ or to resolving the conflict by force. For individuals this posed crises of conscience, in choosing between propositions which had not previously been understood as alternatives, or using established arguments in ways that must have flirted with insincerity. The apparent need to secure political and religious ends had produced a constitutional crisis, and as that crisis played out largely consensual values were presented as alternatives. Potential conflicts in a common-sense system were being forced into the open: quite different meanings were applied to an apparently shared language of politics, with increasingly lethal consequences. But it was both common and understandable to try to contain these conflicts within existing languages of honour, loyalty and legality and so forth.

  How people chose was a product of circumstance as well as conviction. Explanations for patterns in these choices vary according to who was making the choice, under what circumstances, and what the question was. Signing a Root and Branch petition in December 1641 might reveal a religious sensibility most likely to lead to an affinity with Parliament, but a lot could have changed by August 1642. It was certainly a different kind of choice from acquiescing in the use of a Grand Jury to support a partisan use of the militia, or to signing up for military service against the King’s army. Different kinds of choice were being made at different moments, and there was always an element of calculation about local conditions, too. It was also the case, of course, that there were more than two sides to the arguments, and many more than two possible positions. In other words, numerous choices confronted people without a clear sense of two sides. Choosing sides in such circumstances was painful and, probably, conditional.

  The difficulty and complexity of these choices are made clear for almost any individual whose thoughts about the issues have come down to us. Sir Edmund Verney famously overcame his personal political preferences and joined the King’s army, admitting as much to Hyde: ‘My conscience is only concerned in honour and gratitude to follow my master. I have eaten his bread and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him; and I choose rather to lose my life (which I am sure I shall do) to preserve and defend those things, which are against my conscience to preserve and defend’. He was indeed to die in the first major battle of the war, bearing the King’s standard with great courage. Of his four sons three joined him in the royalist cause. His second son, another Edmund, had fought for the Protestant cause in the Low Countries, and heard the news of the army raised to fight the Scots with ‘sorrow’. But he did not hesitate to join the King’s army and castigated his parliamentarian brother Ralph for his desertion of the King. It was, he said, ‘unhandsomely done’. ‘I am tooth and nail for the king’s cause, and shall endure to the death, whatsoever his fortune be’. ‘[C]onsider that majesty is sacred; God says “touch not mine anointed”… you say you intend not to hurt the king, but can any of you warrant any one shot to say it shall not endanger his very person?’ Ralph stayed firm to the parliamentarian cause until late in 1643, but then retired to France to consult his conscience, suffering expulsion from the Commons and sequestration. Despite these sufferings, however, he did not renounce his parliamentarianism.49

  Many of those who faced these choices thought long and hard about them. The godly, following the advice of casuists, prayed, read the Bible (perhaps even opening it at random to see if God guided them to a relevant chapter), discussed and reflected. Lord Paget, a moderate reformer, became a royalist general following such a period of reflection:

  It may seem strange that I, who with all zeal and earnestness have prosecuted (ever since the beginning of parliament) the reformation of all disorders in Church and Commonwealth should now (in a time of great distraction) desert the cause. Most true it is that my ends were the common good, and whilst it was prosecuted I was ready to lay down both my life and fortune, but when I found a preparation of arms against the King, under shadow of loyalty, I rather resolved to obey a good conscience than particular ends.50

  The dictates of a good conscience drove a wedge between old friends and fellow travellers Sir Ralph Hopton and Sir William Waller. Hopton became a successful royalist general, Waller enjoyed a period of press coverage as ‘William the Conqueror’ in Parliament�
�s service. On the eve of their encounter on the battlefield at Roundway Down, Waller wrote his much-quoted letter to Hopton:

  That great God who is the searcher of my heart knows with what a sad sense I go on upon this service, and with what a perfect hatred I detest this war without an enemy; but I look upon it as sent from God… God… in His good time send us the blessing of peace and in the meantime assist us to receive it! We are both upon the stage, and must act such parts as are assigned us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour and without personal animosities.51

  Lady Sydenham wrote in similarly civil terms to Lady Verney that her son Sir Ralph had ‘chosen the strongest part, but I cannot think the best’. ‘It staggers me’, she wrote, that he could believe that he was fighting for the liberty of the subject when his partisans ‘take all from them that are not of their mind, and… pull down their houses and… imprison them, and leave them to the mercy of the unruly multitude’. Nor could she find it is ‘in God’s law to take up arms against their lawful King to depose him; for sure they have not made his person known to all those that they have employed in this war to spare him and not to kill him’. But still, she trusted his good faith: I ‘am confident he does believe it is the best, and for that he chose it’.52

  In these difficult circumstances, with allegiances to the King, friends and family cutting across political priorities, civil war allegiances are difficult to predict on the basis of previous behaviour. Attitudes in the 1630s, or even in 1641, are no clear guide to civil war allegiance, although general patterns do emerge. At the core of royalism were ideas of loyalty, but also concern for the constitution and the integrity of the national church. A group of influential figures arrived in the emerging royal camp by this route. Opponents of Laudianism, they became more concerned about the threat of religious disorder posed by the campaigns for Root and Branch, and by the ways in which Pym and his allies had overridden the law. These men – the Duke of Richmond and Lennox, the Earl of Hertford, the Earl of Dorset and his younger brother Sir Francis Seymour, the Earl of Southampton, Lord Willoughby of Eresby, Sir Edward Hyde, Viscount Falkland, Sir John Colepeper and Sir John Strangways – followed a trajectory similar to that of Sir Edward Dering. Colepeper, for example, had been quick on his feet in November 1640 with a vivid denunciation of the Personal Rule, but had co-operated with Dering to organize the controversial Kentish petition of 1642.53

  Others, as we have seen, were sceptical that raising an army against Charles could be seen as a loyal act, or that it could be guaranteed that in fighting his army one was not endangering the King himself. There was also a royalist war party, keen to see opposition crushed, regality restored and the rebels brought to heel: Charles’s nephew Prince Rupert, his wife Henrietta Maria, as well as Lord George Digby and John Ashburnham.54 Prince Rupert was the son of the exiled Elector of the Palatinate. In 1637 he had done service in Germany and was captured in 1639, at the age of twenty, and held prisoner in Linz, Austria. There he studied military arts, and he joined the King’s ranks with practical and theoretical experience of war, as well as some iron in his soul. In England he established a well-deserved reputation as a hot-head and he took a firm line with rebels. Digby had credentials as a reformer in the early months of the Long Parliament, but was driven into active royalism by the attacks on episcopacy and by the attainder of Strafford. He was, throughout the war, conspicuously loyal, although embroiled in a developing rivalry with Rupert.55 Catholics, like the rest of the population, were more likely to be uninvolved than to be military partisans, but they were disproportionately royalist. These were quite different registers of royalism.56

  On the other hand, men like Pym could see such a clear threat to religion and liberty that qualms about the means seemed secondary to the ends. The motives for individuals in taking sides were manifold, of course, and the implications of their doing so equally varied. What is clear is that the two sides consisted of complex coalitions of allies, with varying concerns and differing degrees of conviction and commitment. Polemic and local circumstance might serve to reduce complexities to polarities – Militia Ordinance or Array, Prayer Book or Protestation, King or King and Parliament – but in reality there must often have seemed to be right on all sides.

  It is relatively easy to lay out the issues, but very difficult for all these reasons to find out who identified with which arguments and even more difficult to say why. This has been at the heart of academic debate about the civil war for several generations as models have been found to relate ideological preferences to economic and social interest, religious background or age. The data is often good enough to disprove these models, but has never proved sufficient to clinch an argument in favour of any of them. Not the least of the problems, of course, is that the vast bulk of the population, even those of high status, left little direct evidence about their allegiance, still less the reasons for that allegiance. But it is also clear that what was at stake in supporting one side or another changed over time, and between places. It was one thing to have a preference for a party position, another to sign up to fight, or to refuse to.

  In most places, however, the establishment of local military control was not the outcome of democratic consultation, but of opportunism. Maps of military control are not maps of popular allegiance. For example, Oliver Cromwell’s decisive action in seizing the store of arms at Cambridge for the parliamentary side is more significant for who Cromwell became than for its immediate military significance. Nonetheless, because of who he subsequently became, we can tell quite a lot about the motivation of this particular opportunist. Son of a minor gentry family, Oliver Cromwell had hit hard times during the 1630s, perhaps slipping below the level of the gentry and into the ranks of the husbandmen. Educated by the famous Puritan author Thomas Beard, Cromwell clearly grew up with a godly piety, and had considered emigration to the New World. But it was probably at some point in the late 1630s that he had what turned out to be his formative experience, something akin to the modern experience of being born again. From then on his life seems to have been driven by an intense providentialism. At difficult moments he often seemed paralysed as he searched for signs of God’s intentions for him, but once he felt sure what they were he was capable of decisive action. He had played a minor role in the Commons following his election to the Long Parliament, but did make some important interventions, perhaps at the prompting of John Pym, to whom he was related by marriage. But it was surely his convinced providentialism that allowed this minor gentleman to seize plate belonging to Cambridge colleges and intended for the King – something close to theft and treason.57 Cromwell’s politics were not despised in his local area but in the City of Cambridge, and particularly in the University, there were plenty of people who might have wanted to support the crown.58 In Kent, Cornwall, East Anglia and even the Marches of Wales, apparent military control concealed local divisions. The military geography of the country, therefore, cannot be taken to reflect the complexion of local political and religious opinions.

  Attempts by individuals to mobilize for one side or the other were not always successful, however. On the day that the King raised his standard at Nottingham, Charles Lucas set out to raise forces in support of him. In stepping out of his house he was stepping almost straight into the pages of history. He was observed by a watch set by the Corporation of Colchester, who raised the alarm in town. Crowds attacked his home the next day, discovering a store of weapons and effectively thwarting his plans. Over the subsequent weeks roving crowds attacked the homes of other prominent local recusants and royalists. This popular parliamentarianism had roots in the local economy and social structure, but was also the product of local history. The local politics of the Lucas family, and their relations with the borough of Colchester, and the perceived role of local recusants and royalists in mobilizing the county, created quite clearly identified targets for crowds fired up by a commitment to Parliament as the defender of liberty and Protestantism. These ideas were mobilized among a popul
ation bound together by the cloth trade, and suffering a recession widely blamed on the failure of settlement, and on the papists in particular. They drew on parliamentary measures such as the Protestation, calls for the disarming of papists and recusants, and on the 8 September order, and were not quite disowned by Parliament either. Although local courts continued to operate, and records survive, there is little evidence of a concerted local effort to quash this insurrection.59

  A later compendium of Bruno Ryves’s Mercurius Rusticus which reported the actions of the ‘Colchester plunderers’ and other parliamentarian barbarities

  Such popular agency was not unique. Royalist mobilization in Somerset was halted by apparently spontaneous resistance from below, leading to a massive mobilization of the local Trained Bands. When the Earl of Bath tried to publish the Commission of Array in South Molton, Devon, in the spring of 1642, he was met by a hostile crowd, estimated to contain 1,000 people or more. An eyewitness claimed ‘the common sort of the town… fell in a great rage… and swore that if… [the royalists] did attempt any thing there, or read their Commission… they would beat them all down and kill them, aye, if they were all hanged for it; and thereupon betook themselves to arms, both men, women, and children’.60 The earl was more interested in his position in London than in the county, and that may have affected his local influence when he succeeded to the lieutenancy, but this was, nonetheless, a powerful demonstration of popular agency. When the gentry of North Devon came out in support of the Commission of Array it was observed that ‘those men will never get renown and credit again of their Country’.61 Cheshire royalists were clear that they did not enjoy unanimous popular support and when William Davenport asked his tenants for support in the King’s service they wrote that although they would not ‘harbour a disloyal thought’ against the King, ‘yet we dare not lift up our hands against that honourable assembly of parliament, whom we are confidently assured do labour both for the happiness of his Majesty and all the kingdom’. Davenport noted in his diary that the next day, a sabbath no less, ‘not staying or belike caring much for me or my answer’, they had enlisted for parliamentary service.62 In Warwickshire, the godly activist Lord Brooke appealed below the ranks of the gentry, who were disproportionately royalist. In alliance with the middling sort, some of whom can be positively shown to have been ideologically motivated, he took military control in a county where the gentry were twice as likely to be royalist as parliamentarian. In Gloucester, too, activists below the level of the gentry took the initiative as their social superiors hesitated.63