In late March, as the Oxford treaty failed and Parliament’s military campaigns failed to thrive, there are clear signs of a desire to stiffen the sinews of the parliamentary war effort. However, this administrative problem was inextricably entwined with a desire to define the cause, while at the same time seeming to some people to transform it. Behind the noise of the day-to-day news it was possible to perceive larger trends and deeper problems – the reluctance of armies to move, the difficulties of securing an effective strategic control of particular commanders, the problems of co-ordinating effort, and of supplying the armies. At various points, both sides had experienced these handicaps, but they seemed more urgent for the parliamentarians by the spring of 1643.
One important innovation was the formation of regional armies. In 1642 troops had been mobilized through county institutions, and by custom, tradition and sentiment they identified their role with the defence of that county. Throughout the war troops proved reluctant to cross county boundaries, although this was not a universal phenomenon. The London Trained Bands were willing to march out of London to support the larger cause, and parliamentary armies at Turnham Green and Sherborne included levies from outside the county. Nonetheless, it was recognized as a problem very early on, and Hopton, for example, had raised volunteers willing to travel once he had secured control of the Cornish Trained Bands. The royalists depended more on regiments raised by particular men acting under a direct commission, and these tended to be more mobile, but on the parliamentary side part of the answer was seen to lie in the association of contiguous counties into regional bodies.12
Early parliamentary measures of defence had suggested that counties might call on neighbours for assistance in the case of a royalist attack and in October 1642 that had become a formal prescription, extended to the eastern, midland and western counties in ordinances passed between mid- December and early January.13 The measures taken in October had been associated with a move to create a political bond too, when Pym ‘with very great vehemence’ promoted a ‘covenant or association that all might enter into’ to help link ‘ourselves together in a more firm bond and union’. Parliament agreed to publish its intention to draw up a Covenant with God to defend ‘his truth… with the hazard of our lives against the King’s army’. In East Anglia, however, there was more support for the military reform than for the proposed oath or covenant. Even so, attempts in the late autumn to co-ordinate efforts in the various associated counties had limited effect and it was not until 11 January that it was agreed to put the ordinance for the Eastern Association into effect. No action was taken until 9 February, when local committee men met in Bury St Edmunds. The vision at Westminster had been of an oath of association supporting an army supplied from the voluntary contributions of those associated. Locally it was decided to proceed by imposing a rate instead – evidence of the tricky local negotiation necessary to secure consent to military mobilization.14
Despite the difficulties, both sides saw the need for regional military organizations. The royalists attempted to create associations and Parliament launched a number through 1643, in a rather uncoordinated way. Confused and ad hoc measures layered associations on one another as each ordinance failed to repeal previous measures. As a result some counties were formally associated in different ways – Shropshire, the most extreme example, was in five different associations in six months. More coherence was emerging by 1644, but there were two features of these early measures: their lack of coherence and suspicion at the county level of the new regional committees. Even in East Anglia – according to popular legend a hotbed of Puritan enthusiasm for the parliamentary cause – these measures required careful handling and caused considerable friction.15
Military measures on the parliamentary side were imposed by the power of ordinances, and some of the people who had held their noses during the crisis following the attempt on the Five Members might now be more uneasy about the long-term implications of these innovations. During February and March a loan was raised and repaid to set the navy to sea, and an ordinance passed to find sailors to man the ships.16 On 7 March the Lord Mayor and citizens of London were given the necessary powers to fortify London, allowing them to trench, stop and fortify the highways leading into the City, and to raise a local rate to pay for the work. In next to no time, in the light of the obvious military threat through the spring and summer of 1643, London was turned into a fortress. Towns elsewhere felt vulnerable – obvious targets of military action and not easily defensible – so co-operation with this project was not in itself a measure of allegiance to the parliamentary cause. If the royalists came, they would not necessarily be careful to damage only the property of committed parliamentarians. Surely one of the largest public construction projects in early modern England, the construction of London’s defences was turned into a moment of civic celebration, at least if some observers were to be believed.17 Not all the massive burdens being imposed by the war were met with such enthusiasm: not all had such an obvious and necessary function.
The most powerful demonstration of the potential of ordinances, however, was the creation of an elaborate and productive financial apparatus. In late February, Parliament had imposed a national tax, the Weekly Assessment, on the authority of an ordinance. It was a measure of fearful power, successfully circumventing the problem of local evasion which had drawn the teeth of the main parliamentary tax before 1640, the subsidy. Faced with a demand for a parliamentary subsidy local assessors had winked at or actively supported under-assessment at a staggering level, an administrative weakness which rendered the tax increasingly inadequate to the needs of the crown. In Norfolk, for example, the value of an individual subsidy had fallen by 70 per cent between 1590 and 1630, a crippling loss in a period of inflation, and this was not untypical. The assessment avoided this problem by imposing a fixed sum on the whole country, stipulating how much was to be raised in each county and borough. Local assessors then divided this burden – this system retained local discretion about relative liabilities, but not the power to determine the overall yield. The yields were phenomenal by pre-war standards. Hunstanton, Norfolk, had paid £5 18s for the subsidy of 1626. In 1640 the subsidies cost £10 12s and the poll tax £58 2s 6d. In the twelve months to December 1643 it paid £138 12s. In Hanworth, Norfolk, the assessment was imposed at an annual rate nine times higher than ship money. Examples of this kind could be multiplied endlessly. The burden never went away, either – this was the dominant form of direct taxation for the next 140 years. The financial success of the measure during the 1640s did not recommend it to many contemporaries, however, nor the fact that it was raised by ordinance.
Even more alarmingly, on 28 March, Pym proposed an excise – a tax on consumption which was regarded with deep hostility in Stuart England. There was no current means of taxing commercial wealth, since taxes fell either on the value of land or on personal goods. Taxing consumption provided a means of getting at commercial wealth, but this awful expedient was regarded with horror. In 1628, it has been said, ‘excise’ was almost a swear word. Faced with Pym’s suggestion in 1643 one speaker expressed astonishment ‘that he who pretended to stand so much for the liberty of the subject should propose such an unjust, scandalous, and destructive project’.18
Although the excise was too loathsome to be countenanced Parliament had, the previous day, found it possible to stomach the Sequestration Ordinance. To the modern eye this was hardly a less objectionable measure, and was certainly extraordinary by pre-war standards. It established local committees with remarkably wide powers to seize the estates of ‘notorious delinquents [who] have been causers or instruments of the public calamities’. The profits of the estates would thereafter be ‘applied towards the support of the great charges of the commonwealth and for the easing of the good subjects therein, who have hitherto borne the greatest share in these burdens’. The definition of ‘notorious delinquent’ was a generous one. A number of bishops were named but the act extended well beyond them to
all persons ‘Ecclesiastical or Temporal’ who had raised arms, voluntarily contributed to the royalist war chest, supported the royal armies in any other way, co-operated with robbery and spoil of parliamentarian activists, taken any oath or association against Parliament, or imposed any tax or assessment on behalf of the royalist forces. Such powers were justified in the light of the ‘unnatural war raised against the Parliament’, but it is possible to imagine that such measures might begin to erode support.19
In early May the principle that the royalists should pay was taken further with the imposition of the Fifth and Twentieth Part. Those who had not contributed or lent to the parliamentary cause, or at least had not done so in proportion to their wealth, were to be subject to formal taxation of up to one fifth of the yearly value of their real estate and one twentieth of the value of their personal goods. This was placed in the hands of yet more committees.20 Here were taxes far heavier than Charles had imposed, with little better legal justification; and financial penalties with a much wider impact than the notorious fines of the Personal Rule. There was a real risk that the cure might begin to seem worse than the disease.21
Parliament was in effect improvising a system of government, since it had never previously been an executive body, and many of the functions it was now forced to undertake were therefore pretty much unprecedented. Although this gave it greatly increased powers, it did not necessarily foster efficient use of them. In military matters Parliament ended up with two parallel systems: the defensive forces mustered under the deputy lieutenants and the field armies under the command of the Earl of Essex. As other volunteer forces were raised they were subject to Essex, but the militias continued under local command. When the associations were formed Parliament nominated a major-general for each, but the commissions were formally given by Essex, who also licensed the subordinate commissions issued by regional commanders.22 Essex’s commission had been issued by the parliamentary Committee of Safety, which had been created on 4 July 1642, replacing the Committee of Defence. The liaison between the civilian and military authorities was not always smooth, however. The Committee of Safety was not regularly informed by local military bodies, and suffered from the subsequent appointment of committees with overlapping responsibilities. It was composed of members of the two Houses, served as the supreme council of war, and as an executive body, but in both respects was more reliant on parliamentary votes than the Privy Council, or previous councils of war, had been. As a form of military command it was less than perfect. There was also a Committee for the Navy and for the Mint, the Ordnance, the Posts and the Tower of London. Particular measures taken to mobilize the parliamentary war effort called forth further committees – for the Advance of Money, for Compounding (penal taxation) and for Sequestration.23 Each committee was called into existence by a particular piece of legislation – it was not a planned constitution, and arose from particular decisions rather than a coherent policy. Government by committee then supplemented the decision-making by committee which had characterized the political sclerosis in the first two years of the Long Parliament.
Central committees were mainly staffed by MPs, and struggles within Parliament over policy can be followed through the memberships of these committees. Other committees had a combined membership of MPs and others. For example, there was no central committee for assessment but there were commissions empanelled in the localities instead, and the same was true for the militia and sequestration. In these cases the system owed something to patterns of pre-war administration of the subsidy and militia, but in many counties local committees for the militia, assessment and sequestration coalesced into a single county committee, whose powers and composition came to be resented. On the other hand, these local committees might come into conflict with other arms of the parliamentary administration, and there were many local disputes over these issues. Each source of revenue had a committee responsible for raising but not spending the money, and in practice they worked through county committees nominated by Parliament, while the money was disbursed by a number of different treasuries. Not the least of the complications was that military effort was increasingly co-ordinated on a regional basis whereas the basis for finance remained the county. This was confused, giving many opportunities for jurisdictional rivalries, and more or less invited conflict between bodies with different territorial interests in view.24 Much of this was in place by the summer of 1643, and certainly the general pattern of ad hoc accretion of committees on the parliamentary side was well-established. It looked quite different from the system of government in place a year earlier, and which the parliamentary armies were supposedly defending.
Administrative innovation went in tandem with attempts to define and publicize the cause. On 24 March, Edward Husbands had been given copyright for an Exact collection of official declarations and messages of Parliament and the King. A careful and painstaking production, it seems, for example, to have followed the typeface of each declaration as it was originally published, black letter (a kind of Gothic used in particularly important declarations) and Roman type used as appropriate. The text, which ran to 955 pages, was followed by a chronological table of contents. It was an invaluable source of reference, was bought by local authorities, and has been drawn on extensively by historians ever since. It must have been a significant investment of time and money for a commercial printer, and that was presumably the justification for giving copyright to an individual. There is no surviving commission for the work, but the suspicion must be that Husbands was asked to enter into this financially risky enterprise, which tied up capital in a large stock of paper and relatively expensive typesetting. Penny pamphlets offered much more rapid turnover with a much smaller initial investment. This was not necessarily good business. Certainly when he produced a continuation, in August 1644, it was definitely in response to a commission.25
Husbands offered no editorial comment, but the scope of the collection is revealing. It opens not with the first ordinances (of the summer of 1641), nor with the opening of the parliamentary session in October 1641, but with the King’s first speech to Parliament following his return from Scotland, on 2 December 1641. It ends with the Assessment Ordinance and related measures in late February and early March 1643. The King’s speech had expressed disappointment that the legislation of the previous summer had not achieved settlement and attributed that to fears and jealousies about his government. There then follows an escalating dispute about the King’s interference with parliamentary privilege – he had given an opinion on a measure in Parliament before it was presented to him, something which breached the privilege of free speech. From December 1641 onwards, of course, it was easy to make a case that the privileges of Parliament were increasingly threatened by violent intervention, culminating in the attempt on the Five Members. This selection seems therefore to have silently narrated a history, in which the fears and jealousies identified by the King as the cause of the trouble were shown to be justified by the actions of those around the King. It culminates in the military measures necessary to open a new military campaign in the spring of 1643. The preamble of the Assessment Ordinance, which is reproduced in full, depends on such a history:
The Lords and Commons now assembled in Parliament, being fully satisfied and resolved in their consciences, that they have lawfully taken up arms: and may and ought to continue the same for the necessary defence of themselves and the Parliament from violence and destruction, and of this Kingdom from foreign invasion, and for the bringing of notorious offenders to condign punishment, which are the only causes for which they have raised and do continue an army and forces.26
They were forced to raise an assessment as the fairest way to support this necessary effort. It is difficult not to see this as a propaganda exercise, an attempt to define the cause which was about to make renewed financial and administrative demands. Of course, as propaganda, it was aimed at the very committed reader: perhaps those local officeholders on whom the administrative burden of the war was
falling. One such committed reader was John Lilburne, who was later to use it to hold Parliament to account.27
Defence of Parliament had been closely linked to the defence of reformation, and here we come to the demise of Cheapside Cross. On 30 March, three days after the Sequestration Ordinance and two days after the proposed excise, a committee was despatched from the Houses to arrest the Capuchins, a calculated insult to Henrietta Maria, and her chapel at Somerset House was purged of images and idols. Among them was a painting by Rubens, valued at £500, which was thrown into the Thames.28 Like Cheapside this had been the focus of hostility for a long time, in this case restrained by diplomatic pressure from the French ambassador and by deference to the King. Inhibitions were lifting, however. The previous week a group of London ministers had been asked to view the windows of the Guildhall chapel, and their hostile report went further, expressing concerns about Cheapside Cross and other images in the City. On 24 April a committee was appointed under Sir Robert Harley to ‘receive information, from time to time, of any monuments of superstition or idolatry in the Abbey Church at Westminster, or the windows thereof, or in any other Church or Chapel, in or about London: and they have power to demolish the same, where any such superstitious or idolatrous monuments are informed to be’. All churchwardens and other officers were required to help in this work and the committee was to meet at 2 p.m. that day.29
Henrietta Maria charged with treason and royal houses purged of popery, May 1643
God’s FURY, England’s FIRE Page 35