God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  When Rupert arrived before Gloucester, Massey refused to surrender and this led to a second crucial decision – to lay siege to the city rather than storm it. This decision arose, it is said, from Charles’s own distaste for the human costs of the storming of Bristol, and to that extent it can be admired, but from a military point of view it was a questionable judgement. Gloucester could probably have been stormed quite quickly, whereas a siege tied down a large number of troops and gave Parliament time to levy a relieving force. On 27 August, Essex led out an army of 15,000 men, including men of the London Trained Bands, which entered Gloucestershire at Stow-on-the-Wold on 4 September. There an attack by Rupert failed and Essex reached Gloucester on 5 September. It was not a moment too soon, since Massey had only three barrels of powder left when they arrived, but their arrival had an immediate effect. Charles, unwilling to be caught between Essex’s army and the Gloucester forces, withdrew rather than risk losses and Essex was able to raise the siege on 8 September. There then began a race to prevent Essex reaching London. This relieved an appalling position, and boosted morale, but military advantage still lay with the royalists. Rupert still intended to engage Essex, but not in front of a hostile city, and further west royalist successes had continued as Barnstaple, Bideford and Exeter surrendered between 28 August and 4 September. West of Poole only Lyme, Plymouth, Dartmouth and Wardour Castle now held out for Parliament.66

  Between late February and late April important measures had been taken to stiffen the parliamentary alliance, but the military tide had certainly not turned. Parliament also faced enemies within. In March, Charles encouraged the development of what became known as Waller’s plot.

  The revelation of the Waller plot

  He issued a commission to seventeen prominent London citizens, empowering them to lead an armed rising on his behalf. It was not activated until May, but the effort reveals the insincerity of Charles’s interest in the Oxford treaty. Edmund Waller, one of Parliament’s commissioners at Oxford, was the chief conspirator, and the list of his contacts was impressive – the Earl of Northumberland, John Selden, Bulstrode Whitelocke and Simonds D’Ewes, for example, all of them prominent Puritan critics of Charles I’s government. The plot was revealed theatrically, at the end of May, for propaganda effect: news was deliberately withheld until the fast day on 31 May, when MPs were summoned from morning worship to hear the revelations. By that point there was, of course, no danger since the chief conspirators were already under arrest, but the announcement and the precautionary mustering of the militia caused a considerable stir. Two of the chief conspirators were hanged in front of their own houses. Waller himself escaped, however, through a ‘combination of bribery and informing on his contacts’. He was fined £10,000 and banished.67

  The execution of the plotters

  London’s allegiance was not certain. Since January a radical caucus had been agitating for more rigorous prosecution of the war effort, their petitioning matched by practical measures to raise men and money through a committee at Salters” Hall, established in March. But the leading figures in these initiatives were new men, and their activities cut across the powers of existing bodies, such as the City’s militia committee. In July a more radical step was proposed in a scheme for a general rising – intended primarily as a means to support more thorough prosecution of the war under Waller, and independent of Essex’s command, the City would raise a volunteer army, funded directly from sources intended for that purpose. The initiative was associated too with attempts to dictate the membership of the parliamentary committee to oversee its use. These radical initiatives were a direct counterpoint to the activities of the Harley Committee and the progress of radical reformation in the City and the construction of extensive fortifications.68

  But although the revelation of the Waller plot made it unwise to speak in favour of peace in London, it seems clear that the city was divided. In August the Lords prepared peace proposals which abandoned the position adopted in the Oxford negotiations, terms so soft that Essex refused to subscribe. News that they had been passed by the Lords, and that the Commons had agreed to consider them, led to consternation in the City. A co-ordinated attempt was made to exploit fears for the future of Protestantism in order to scupper what would have amounted to a capitulation. Some 5,000 men were reported to have demonstrated on 7 August in the Palace Yard against the proposed treason to the commonwealth. On 8 and 9 August, however, Parliament was surrounded by large crowds of women, wearing white ribbons, and calling for peace. The Commons was driven to publish a long explanation of their reasons for rejecting these proposals.69

  The theatrical revelation of the Waller plot had been a prelude to further measures to stiffen the ideological and administrative sinews of the parliamentary war effort. On 9 June, Parliament imposed the Vow and Covenant. It was justified by the ‘popish and traitorous plot, for the subversion of the true Protestant reformed religion, and the liberty of the subject’, pursued by a popish army and manifest in the ‘treacherous and horrid design lately discovered, by the great blessing and especial providence of God’. These popish forces had been ‘raised by the King’. In view of the ‘constant experience, that many ways of force and treachery are continually attempted, to bring to utter ruin and destruction the Parliament and Kingdom, and, that which is dearest, the true Protestant religion… all who are true-hearted and lovers of their country should bind themselves each to other in a Sacred Vow and Covenant’. Subscribers were to acknowledge these distractions to be a punishment for their sins, and to promise not to lay down arms while the papists were in arms; to disavow the late plot and report any future ones; and most importantly, ‘according to my power and vocation, assist the forces raised and continued by both Houses of Parliament, against the forces raised by the King without their consent’. By declaring that ‘I do believe, in my conscience, that the forces raised by the two Houses of Parliament are raised and continued for their just defence, and for the defence of the true Protestant religion, and liberties of the subject, against the forces raised by the King’, the Vow had in effect dropped claims that the armies were fighting for the defence of the King’s honour and person. This was made the substance of a separate short declaration of ‘loyalty to the King’s person, his crown and dignity’. To some extent, or on some readings, it was in direct conflict with the Protestation, and royalist commentators were quick to say so.70 The purpose was clear enough, however: to shore up support for the continued war effort – this was the oath urged by Pym on Essex’s troops following the defeat at Chalgrove and the sacking of Wycombe.

  On 12 June the future of the Reformation, a core element of the cause defined by the Vow and Covenant, was put in the hands of an assembly of divines, the Westminster Assembly. This was a consistent part of the negotiation platform of course, but a highly contentious issue – arguably the one at the heart of the instability of the parliamentary coalition. There was a suggestion that this was a means of kicking the issue of church government into the long grass while drawing the Scots back into English politics. Certainly for Sir Cheney Culpeper, a Kentish gentlemen of radical views but no great political influence, this initiative was closely related to the desire for an alliance with the Covenanters and to separate the sheep from the goats. On 16 June he wrote to Samuel Hartlib, with whom he maintained a regular correspondence, commending the ‘covenant lately made for the uniting of ourselves’ but also hoping for another ‘which I hope shortly to see for the stronger union of the 2 kingdoms in their common interest of religion and liberty’. Both would benefit from a confession of faith which in turn would be the basis of ‘a better union and correspondency between all the reformed churches and states, against the civil and ecclesiastical Babylon which God will certainly bring to judgement’. Although the military support from the Covenanters was shortly to be adopted, and was associated with just such a covenant, Culpeper was disappointed in his hopes for a confession of faith. When it became clear that the Covenanters intended to impos
e a Presbyterian church settlement Culpeper became quite scathing about our ‘geud brethren’. Initially, however, he was hopeful that ‘the well affected in both nations being united by Covenant first with themselves and then with one another, our strength and our enemy’s may be fully known’.71 This mirrored an element of the Waller plot, which had been to take a census of royalist sympathizers in London, parish by parish.72

  On 14 June there followed a renewal of press licensing, suggesting that this desire to get the message out was closely associated with a desire to suppress rival or misleading messages and to preserve decency. A Commons order of August 1642 had sought to impose a crackdown on publication by re-establishing the partnership between government and the Stationers” Company, and in March another order turned the parliamentary committee for examinations into a kind of Star Chamber for the press by giving it powers of search, seizure and imprisonment. These elements of the policy were now brought together. The officers of the Stationers” Company along with the Gentleman Usher of the House of Lords and the Sergeant of the House of Commons were given powers of search, seizure and arrest of authors and printers. It was partly in response to lobbying from the company, whose commercial interests had been damaged by the collapse of their monopoly. But there was also a clear political purpose, to suppress ‘the great late abuses and frequent disorders in printing many false, forged, scandalous, seditious, libellous, and unlicensed papers, pamphlets, and books’ which had been published ‘to the great defamation of religion and government’.73

  This redefinition and restatement of the parliamentary cause called forth from Charles a declaration that Parliament was not free and anyone abetting it in its usurpations was guilty of high treason. On the other hand, with some named exceptions, those who joined him in Oxford would be pardoned. This caused more than a little unease at Westminster.74 Seven lords did indeed abandon Parliament and three of them went to Oxford, but Charles hesitated to welcome them, aware of the hostility to converts among those who had been there from the start. Henrietta Maria was prominent among those hostile to such fair-weather friends and in the end the opportunity was missed. Although only Clarendon seems to have recommended a warm welcome at the time, most royalists subsequently came to see the coldness of the reception as a mistake.75 Although military success concealed the fact, there were divisions at Oxford. Moderate counsels, associated in particular with the ‘constitutional royalists’, were competing with a much harder line taken by military men and championed by Henrietta Maria. If failure to take advantage of the military position in the high summer of 1643 in order to impose terms had reflected the continuing influence of moderates, there were signs that the position was shifting. As Henrietta Maria’s influence became increasingly important, the moderates were to find it harder to make their case.76

  These noble defections from Westminster reflected the despondency of those hoping to negotiate a settlement. The revelation of Waller’s plot had led more or less directly to measures to confirm the ideological basis of Parliament’s cause, and their treatment in Oxford confirmed that opinion there was hardly more conciliatory. Charles was known to be negotiating for a cessation in Ireland in order to bring forces back to England. The continuing failure of parliamentary forces to make ground in the war and the dismal prospects of negotiation provide the context in which the inhibition about the excise was finally broken.

  On 22 July, Parliament adopted the excise and thereby completed the administrative and financial revolution which underpinned its war effort. A central committee was established, co-ordinating the efforts of professional tax gatherers. Previous taxes depended on local officeholders acting voluntarily, which obviously increased the possibilities for evasion but also softened the edges of any potential confrontation. Excise men were soon widely loathed, denounced as a biblical plague in terms strongly reminiscent of the denunciation of monopolists. The tax was also regressive, raised as a flat rate and imposed on (among other things) meat, salt and beer, all of them staple elements of the diet of the poor. Butchers and saltworkers were prominent in the subsequent resistance to the tax. Despite these problems the excise survived and was, like the assessment, retained by the restored monarchy to become a staple element of public finances throughout the eighteenth century. Parliament had, between October 1642 and July 1643, created the financial instruments which supported the eighteenth-century empire.77 But it did not make them popular; nor did it make them very plausible as defenders of the ancient constitution.

  Three days earlier Parliament had formally requested military aid from the Covenanters. The Westminster Assembly had begun work on a new church settlement, acting under the authority of Parliament and with the abolition of episcopacy certainly on the agenda. Parliament had become an executive body, raising taxes, seizing property, ejecting ministers, licensing the press, setting armies in the field and fleets out to sea, all on the authority of ordinances which had originally been justified as measures necessary owing to the absence of the King. A careful reading of Husbands” Exact collection revealed the case for defensive arms, in defence of religion, law and the liberty of Parliament. But iconoclasm, the burning of the Book of Sports, the (possibly malicious) ejection of parish clergy, not to mention the constitutional and administrative radicalism of the parliamentary war effort, all threatened to open a fatal gap between the rhetoric and the reality of the parliamentary cause. This was a carefully chosen and cautiously staged answer to the common concern that zealous reformation led to social disorder, but it was clearly much beyond the aims of redress in 1640. So too, the Vow and Covenant had severed the defence of the King’s person, crown and dignity from the defence of the true religion and the liberties of Parliament. Even before a military alliance with the Covenanters was ratified, these developments had put a strain on the loyalty men felt to the choices they had made in 1642. Bruno Ryves clearly recognized the potential here.

  The relief of Gloucester had required the loan of fifty subsidies from London, ten times as many as had been granted at any one time during the 1620s, which was forced out of the city on 18 August. At the same time the Commons felt the need to rebuke John Saltmarsh, the increasingly radical divine, for some apparently derogatory remarks about the royal family. When the issue was discussed Henry Marten defended Saltmarsh, saying ‘it were better one family were destroyed than the whole kingdom should perish’ – a not very coded statement of conditional loyalty to the King. Challenged, he said without hesitation that he did indeed mean the royal family. He was imprisoned in the Tower and excluded from the House for three years.78 Parliamentarians trod an increasingly thin line: as the measures necessary to fight the war became more radical, the claim to be in defensive arms to protect monarchical government seemed increasingly difficult to justify. The King’s posture of respect for local offices was undermined by the behaviour of some royalist troops, but it is easy to see why those who had chosen Parliament might have begun to feel that they had chosen wrongly, or were backing a losing side.

  Sir Hugh Cholmley, for one, had acted reluctantly in taking up arms for Parliament. He later claimed that he had regarded the Militia Ordinance as an act of war against Charles and the Nineteen Propositions as unjust and unreasonable. However, ties of friendship (most of his friends were parliamentarians) and hostility to Strafford’s friends and allies, who were throwing in their lot with the King, had persuaded him to accept a commission from the Earl of Essex. Acting decisively, he took control of Scarborough Castle and led 500 men in a successful action at Guisborough on 16 January 1643. Slingsby, his royalist opponent, died of his wounds three days later. Although this was a relatively minor skirmish, which figures barely at all in the military histories of the war, Cholmley was sickened by what he saw. He had refused to lead his forces into the West Riding in support of the Fairfaxes, convincing his commanders in London that this was prudent, rather than treacherous. When the Queen arrived in York from Bridlington, however, in March 1643, he changed allegiances. He claimed now t
o be certain that Pym, not Charles, was the warmonger; and he admitted to acting to defend his home, tenants and constituents from invasion and plunder by the royalists. He subsequently held Scarborough for the King, stubbornly in 1644 after the war in the north had turned against the royalists, and went into exile after he eventually surrendered it. He returned to England in the 1650s, but was widely distrusted, and even despised.79 Cholmley was later able to present all this as consistent and personally honourable, placing it squarely in the context of oaths of allegiance and the Protestation, which he had sworn.80 But for those who had commissioned him, or who had thought him an ally, it was clearly possible to take another view.

  Clarendon believed that Cholmley had initially accepted the parliamentarian commission because of his friendship with Sir John Hotham, who had refused the King entry to Hull in April 1642. Hotham too had second thoughts. Late in 1642 he promised Lord Digby, a prisoner in his charge, that he would surrender the town to the King. When it came to it, he changed his mind and drove away the besiegers, but by April 1643 he and his son were at odds with other parliamentary commanders. Troops under the command of the younger Hotham were ill-disciplined and this had led him into conflict with the Fairfaxes, Cromwell and Hutchinson. The elder Hotham, in the course of this dispute, had referred to Cromwell and Hutchinson as ‘Anabaptists’, suggesting that he, at least, was unimpressed by the attempt to identify the parliamentary cause with more advanced reformation. By the early summer of 1643 their disaffection with the parliamentary cause had led both Hothams into correspondence with the Earl of Newcastle about changing sides. In mid-April the younger formally approached Newcastle promising to do the King good service. When their intentions became public on 18 June the younger Hotham was imprisoned in Nottingham Castle. In his defence he alleged that the strength of the parliamentary forces was restricted to defacing churches. He escaped from Nottingham and contacted Henrietta Maria, who seemed willing to welcome his defection, before going to Hull to see his father. By the time he got there, however, the Commons had ordered the traitors” appearance at Westminster, and he was arrested from his bed on the authority of the mayor. The defences were put in the hands of the citizens, and his father Sir John, hearing what was up, fled in a hurry on horseback. He was knocked off his horse at Beverley, however, and returned to Hull, whence father and son were sent to London by sea. Their court-martial was long delayed, suggesting that there was some sympathy for their position in London, but they were eventually found guilty and executed in January 1644.81