God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  Over the winter of 1642–3 there was little in the military fortunes of the war, or the diplomatic position, to shift the weight of royalist opinion. Powick Bridge and Edgehill did wonders for royalist morale and, although Turnham Green had raised parliamentary spirits, the fortunes of the field armies had not bolstered their negotiating position. Neither, on the whole, had the numerous regional campaigns. In the autumn of 1642 the royalist forces from Cornwall crossed the Tamar and put pressure on Plymouth. Privateers raised in Cornwall successfully evaded Warwick’s ships and the situation was sufficiently serious by December that the Committee of Safety turned its attention away from the defence of London to the situation in the south-west. Although the royalists did not succeed in taking Plymouth they did summon (that is, demand the surrender of) Exeter on 30 December and stormed Topsham, cutting the city off from the sea, before they were forced to pull back, having over-extended themselves.30

  In the north, Newcastle advanced successfully in December, taking York on 1 December, engaging Fairfax at Tadcaster on 6 December and forcing his retreat to Selby the following day. By establishing his position at Pontefract, Newcastle cut communications between what had emerged as important parliamentary bases in the West Riding cloth towns and the strategically crucial port of Hull. The capture of Newark secured communications with Oxford. However, royalist victories for Saville at Leeds and Wakefield were not followed up: Bradford and Halifax resisted successfully and both Leeds and Wakefield were retaken. Nonetheless, the parliamentary hold on Yorkshire was weakened through the autumn and winter, and neighbouring parliamentary commanders – Gell in Derbyshire and Irby in Lincolnshire – were unwilling to help. The capture of Nantwich by Sir William Brereton served to make the military position in the north appear more balanced, but it was really the royalists who had more to be pleased about. Although Newcastle could not easily move south, given the sustained strength of Parliament’s forces in the West Riding and at Hull, his was the better position.31

  In Oxford the King’s position was consolidated by the establishment of garrisons at Banbury and Brill. The parliamentary forces had abandoned Worcester on 5 November, and on 5 December Marlborough was stormed (and ruthlessly plundered). As the Earl of Stamford marched to the south-west to support resistance to Hopton, Gloucestershire was left weakened and the Earl of Hertford advanced through the gap with his Welsh regiments to Oxford, taking Cirencester at the second attempt on 2 February. By early December, Charles was also in a strong position internationally: the Danish court had given encouraging signs of support and the death of Richelieu and the succession of Mazarin as chief minister in France seemed to offer the prospect of French support too.32

  Through the autumn and winter, therefore, the King’s military position had become clear: his base in Oxford was consolidated and Cornwall and Wales were in the hands of his supporters. The Earl of Newcastle had established a strong position in the north. His three forces were, however, separated by significant parliamentary forces: Hopton’s advance was blocked in Devon and by Bristol and Gloucester; Newcastle was hampered by Brereton, the West Riding and Hull. Parliament’s power base was also clear: London and its resources were the foundation on which Parliament’s position was established, Sir William Waller had established a powerful position in the southern counties and Parliament had secure control over the south-east.33 Overall, the King’s position was not bad, which meant that his opponents” position was not good (see Map 2).

  The rebuff received by Sir John Evelyn at Reading in early November was of a piece with the military action at Brentford and the attitude displayed afterwards: it reflected the growing confidence on the royalist side. On 6 December, John Lilburne, a prisoner from the fighting at Brentford, was charged with treason. Sentenced to death he was only saved by a declaration of the Houses that, if he were hanged, the same punishment would be meted out to all prisoners that fell into parliamentary hands.34 Little had happened since August to dispirit the royalists, or to convince them that they might have to pay a price for high-handedness after the war, although fear of reprisal clearly continued to serve as a restraint.

  Parliament, on the other hand, faced more difficulties in stiffening the sinews of its coalition. By November there were two positions emerging in parliamentary ranks as to what would be a sufficient settlement. A number of members, prominent among them Denzil Holles, were horrified by the potential costs of war, as revealed at Edgehill and, in Holles’s case at least, Brentford. Holles had an honourable record as a parliamentary defender of law and religion, and his views were close to Pym’s. He was a much less effective speaker, often referred to as intemperate, but he had also been in at least as much trouble. In 1629 he had helped to hold the Speaker down in his chair to prevent him dissolving Parliament until some final business was rushed through, and had read a paper which denounced Arminianism and unparliamentary customs duties as treasonous. He was arrested, released and finally tried in 1630, living under a whopping bail for the rest of the decade. Given his record it is little surprise that he was prominent in supporting Pym’s programme, including a proper revenue settlement, although he actively worked to save Strafford’s life, presumably because he was his brother-in-law. On two other issues, he tended to caution – in early April 1641 he had spoken about the threat of mechanic preachers and in late 1642 he had direct experience of the trauma of war. Given a military command in the West Country he was present at the parliamentary defeat at Sherborne Castle, where more than half his men were lost. He returned to London, where he recruited his regiment back to strength in time to join Essex at Edgehill, where he was praised for his role. But at Brentford his regiment was surprised. Holles was not there, but one third of his men were killed, and the others captured. According to D’Ewes, writing in late November, he ‘was much cooled in his fierceness by the great slaughter made in his regiment at Brentford’.35 In order to achieve a settlement Holles was willing to see concessions to Charles on the control of civil government, so long as religion was made safe. Throughout the spring of 1643, and the rest of the 1640s, he was a supporter of settlement whenever a formal peace seemed to be possible.

  A harder line was taken by others, prominent among them Pym, who thought no settlement was safe without constraints on the King’s freedom to choose officers of state. In his view the King was in the hands of military hardliners, and no peace could succeed while their counsels prevailed.36 Henrietta Maria’s apparent success in raising money for Charles provided the context for the first Assessment Ordinance on 29 November, which imposed a tax by the authority of an ordinance. It was the first of many and, in fact, the form of the tax became the basis for direct taxation for the following 140 years.37 It was also far heavier than ship money and arguably even less legally justifiable, resting as it did on an ordinance. Three days earlier, the Commons had heard a suggestion that a strict league should be entered into with the Dutch republic, an initiative which presumably grew out of the same apprehension.38 On 15 December the counties of Leicester, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Rutland, Northampton, Buckingham and Bedford were combined in a single Midland Association – an attempt to bolster the war effort by giving it a basis larger than a single county. On 20 December the Eastern Association was formed and, on 31 December, Warwickshire and Staffordshire were associated under the command of Lord Brooke.39 These measures, necessary to secure a stronger bargaining position, were in themselves problematic, both locally and nationally. Pushing ahead with the war effort created new pressures for peace, and reinforced many of the existing ones.

  London was also divided between those keen to prosecute the war and those keen to secure an early peace. Although a deputation from the City had approached Parliament on 13 November petitioning against any accommodation40 and made a loan, there was by now a powerful peace movement in London which produced petitions for accommodation through December and January. Throughout the war, in fact, there was a popular royalism in London, drawing on resistance to godly reformation, th
e financial demands of the parliamentary war effort and loyalty to the monarch. The extent of this can be gauged from the known support offered to the royalists from London and the prosecutions for words spoken against the parliamentary cause. On 8 December a crowd gathered at Haberdashers” Hall, site of the meeting of the Committee of Both Houses for the Advance of Money: originally responsible for raising supplies for the army it had oversight of the imposition of penal taxation on neutrals or passive royalists who had failed to lend money or supplies voluntarily. It was one of the nerve centres of the war effort, in other words, and active parliamentarians present that day were jostled. Four days later a meeting of the City’s Common Council was disrupted by a large crowd. They were identified as royalists by their opponents, but what they demanded was peace: when someone shouted ‘Peace and truth’ someone else immediately replied ‘Hang truth! We want peace at any price’. There was violence outside, prompted by the arrival of soldiers going about other business, and petitioners were openly threatening to pursue more violent courses if their demands were not met. Pressure was maintained through the rest of the month, and peace petitions were presented on 17, 19 and 22 December. They drew on the ranks of prosperous and middling tradesmen, and men of relatively conservative religious views can be identified as prominent among them. They seem to have identified the Lords rather than the Commons as their most sympathetic audience.41 The threat of disorder may have lain behind the closing of the theatres in September and the ban on bear-baiting on 12 December.42 In early January a further escalation took place, when a large number of apprentices gathered in Covent Garden to call for peace, threatening to plunder houses there. Their petition claimed 20,000 signatures (probably an exaggeration), but it was agreed that it could be presented only by a delegation of twenty.43

  Maintaining the war effort in Parliament and London was a political problem, just as it was for the King in Oxford and the royalist heartlands. The seriousness of the problem entered the calculations of each side about the military strength of their enemy’s position. Two days before the apprentices” peace petition was presented Edgehill was in the news again. On 1 January, between 3 and 4 p.m., ghostly apparitions appeared there that seemed to point to God’s desire for peace. ‘[F]earful and strange apparitions of spirits as sounds of drums, trumpets, with the discharging of cannons, muskets, carbines, petronels’ caused ‘terror and amazement of all the fearful hearers and beholders’. Four days later people in Kineton heard ‘the doleful and hideous groans of dying men… crying revenge and some again to ease them of their pain by friendly killing them’. Trembling in their beds, they heard what appeared to be the beginning of an assault, which sent many to hide in corners or under their bedclothes. Those brave enough to look out of their windows saw horsemen riding against one another before vanishing. The following night a strong watch was set and many people witnessed a full-scale battle, which began at midnight and ended ‘in the twinkling of an eye’ at daybreak.

  These events were reported to the King by Samuel Marshall, the minister of Kineton, and Charles sent six men from Oxford to investigate. Having stayed several days they saw and heard these phenomena for themselves and were able to identify a number of the apparitions, including Sir Edmund Verney. Robert Ellit, who claimed to be an eyewitness to these events, had a pamphlet published, as did Thomas Jackson, whose pamphlet rehearsed essentially the same story, with more detail, and was certified not only by Marshall but also by William Wood, JP.44 Sky battles such as this were an unusual but not unknown phenomenon, and were widely regarded as having a contemporary political meaning. They could be seen as a kind of ‘special providence’, a direct message from God, and certainly belong with a wider interest in such wonders: these years seem to have been good ones for such wonder pamphlets.45

  That such phenomena meant something was obvious, but it was less clear what they meant, and authors were characteristically wary about interpreting them very directly. The New Yeares wonder was cautious but did note a fairly limited meaning: some learned observers suggested that a search be made for unburied carcasses, which, being duly done, revealed that there were indeed some.46 A great vvonder was bolder. Historical precedent suggested that such diabolic visitations ‘appear either in premonstrance of God’s Judgements, or as fatal ambassadors to declare the message of mortality and destruction to offending nations’. Following such signs God afflicted Germany and other places ‘with the horror of a civil and foreign wars’.47 The fact that this apparition appeared at Christmas-time suggested that ‘the saviour of the world who died to save mankind, had been angry that so much Christian blood was there spilt’. But here, of course, interpretations might differ as to the fault, or even the response that was required. Ellit concluded that it was the significance of the New Year that really counted: ‘the hopeful and believing Christian to put on new obedience unto heaven, and begin with the New Year, a newness of life and conversation’.48 Both authors concluded that these terrifying apparitions should induce men to seek peace, but Jackson seemed to place the onus for this on the royalists. It was at Edgehill, he rather controversially claimed, that Essex had ‘obtained a glorious victory over the cavaliers’:49 surely such an interpretation suggested a view about whom God might be speaking to. But his conclusion was more neutral: ‘What this does portend, God only knows, and time perhaps will discover; but doubtlessly it is a sign of his wrath against this land, for these civil wars, which He in his good time finish, and send a sudden peace between his Majesty and Parliament’.50 But what, specifically, was the cause of His anger, and against whom was it directed?

  These pamphlets saw in the horrors of Edgehill an argument for a speedy peace, and that probably resonated with many people both at the centres of power in Westminster and Oxford, and in the country at large. January saw many petitions for peace or accommodation, and a ‘pleasant dialogue… suitable to the times’ called Peace, and No Peace.51 Open warfare had changed the terms of political debate, and choices made in the tense summer of 1642 might well now seem misjudged; and continued warfare did not seem to be favouring the parliamentary cause either.

  On the other hand, pressure for peace raised the spectre of a capitulation, moreover a capitulation to someone who was not trustworthy. Two pamphlets from this period, Plaine English and An Answer to Mis’Led Dr Ferne, gave intellectual support to a stronger parliamentarian line. This is, of course, only a minor part of the press output in these months, but the arguments are significant, and part of a wider pamphlet exchange. Plaine English was sufficiently provocative to produce explicit responses and Richard Baxter, the Shropshire Puritan, religious writer and active parliamentarian, was to claim it marked the death of constitutionalism.52 The fear that Parliament would conclude a weak peace prompted a profoundly radical response.

  During the previous autumn a number of pamphlets had considered the right of a parliament to depose a king. An Answer took a strong line on this question, arguing that the authority of all kings was essentially elective, deriving from a view that the authority of the most numerous opinion should prevail. A similar argument was preached before the Lord Mayor in March 1643, the same month that Prynne, one of the three Puritan martyrs of the Personal Rule, published a pamphlet rehearsing numerous historical precedents for deposition. Henry Marten, who had apparently favoured deposition as early as 1641, was imprisoned in August 1643 for supporting such views, but his was clearly not a completely isolated case. Prynne had by that time published the fourth part of The Soveraigne power of Parliaments and Kingdomes, which translated the key arguments of the notorious Vindiciae, contra tyrannos in favour of tyrannicide.53

  Implied in this power of deposition was a renunciation of the idea of constitutional balance which had characterized the Answer to the XIX Propositions. In December 1642 the Discourse between a Resolved and Doubtful Englishman had said this explicitly – necessity allowed Parliament to set aside constitutional and legal precedent and the King had no power to reject legislation. This truth a
bout where power lay had been revealed only slowly and that had made it more palatable: ‘that necessity might make the people know that that power was just and reasonable, as fearing the people’s weakness could not digest these strong and sinewy truths, whereunto their stomachs had not of long time been accustomed’. Such truth was all that made us ‘firm, and resolute, and true Englishmen’, however. The Privileges of the Commons had argued, in December 1642, that the Commons was superior to the Lords and in the following March The Priviledges of Parliament argued that the Houses could impose legislation on a dissenting monarch.54

  Such claims were difficult to justify on the basis of precedent and rested instead on a radical view of the basis of political authority. They were suggesting in effect that the ancient constitution – the complex of rights and liberties enshrined in the common law and customs of the kingdom – should give way before parliamentary sovereignty. As the author of Touching the Fundamental Laws put it in February, the ultimate authority was not Parliament but that ‘universal and popular authority, that is in the body of the people, and which (for the public good, and preservation) is above every man and all laws’. It was here that Plaine English made its distinctive claim – that the people could renounce the authority of parliaments too, if that body threatened to betray their interests. In the immediate circumstances of January 1643, this threat lay with the dominance of proponents of an easy peace in Parliament, and the absence on business of the more resolute members. The danger was that Parliament ‘out of an intolerable weariness of this present condition, and fear of the event [outcome], agree to the making up of an unsafe unsatisfying accommodation’. War weariness, and fear of the outcome, threatened a betrayal of the cause and of the sacrifices already made which was here being countered by the assertion of political fundamentals.