God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  Although Henrietta Maria had seemed willing to welcome this kind of friend, many other royalists took a sterner view. Sir Edward Nicholas, Secretary of State to Charles during the war, wrote of the father: ‘The rebels have seized him, his son, their wives and children, and sent them all prisoners to the rebellious city, London, where the justice of God will, I believe, bring him to be punished by the same usurped power that at first did encourage him in his first act of rebellion; for falser men than he and his son live not upon the earth’. Others thought him proud and covetous. There was a more charitable view, although not an entirely positive one: that he was a man of judgement, albeit one whose passion and pride overbore that judgement on occasion. Views of the son were less equivocal: Clarendon thought him full of ‘pride and stubbornness’ and Cholmley, who was after all on thin ice here, described him as ‘a very politic and cunning man, [who] looked chiefly at that which stood most with his own particular interest’.82

  Fighting alongside Cholmley at Guisborough was Sir Matthew Boynton, a gentleman of sufficiently significant standing to have been knighted on 9 May 1618 and created a baronet the following week. Member of Parliament for Heydon in the 1620s, he had by 1637 become sufficiently concerned about the direction of affairs in England to have sold lands in the Tees Valley, intending to follow the Pilgrim Fathers to the New World. He pulled out at a late stage but joined the Independent church at Southwark. When war broke out he acted quickly, raising troops for Parliament, and it is easy to see the roots of this political and military history in his previous history. It was Boynton’s second son who took Sir John Hotham (his own uncle) prisoner at Beverley on 29 June 1643; and it was Sir Matthew himself who on 22 July 1645 captured Scarborough from Sir Hugh Cholmley, after an arduous and destructive siege.83 In 1648, however, the younger Boynton was to desert his parliamentary command in the hope of a royal military victory in the second civil war.84

  The realities of war, and the lack of clarity in war aims, caused divisions on both sides, but on the parliamentary side the overall military situation encouraged defeatism among the less committed. The litany of military reverses, which continued more or less without interruption through the summer of 1643, was accompanied by a series of treasons and betrayals. Essentially personal decisions, by Hotham and his son and by Cholmley, had a decisive military impact, delivering secure control of the north to the royalist forces under Newcastle.85 The fall of Bristol in July was of even greater significance to the war in the west and here, too, questions were asked about military honour and loyalty. In this case, with no very good reason, treason charges were successfully made against Nathaniel Fiennes, who was sentenced to death and only reprieved at the request of the Earl of Essex. According to contemporary understandings of the laws of war to continue in a forlorn defence was to cause unnecessary loss of life and in those circumstances surrender was the honourable military decision. Most modern commentators agree that Fiennes had judged this correctly, but to contemporaries who had witnessed side-changing and plots, and whose knowledge of conditions on the ground was hazy, it was a decision that could easily be suspected.86 Fiennes was forced into a public vindication of his actions.

  Honour was an elusive quality, difficult in these circumstances to define. It could be recognized in opponents, and difficult to discern in apparent friends; but sticking to an initial commitment was not necessarily what honour dictated either. It is not clear that the behaviour of Hotham and Cholmley was in any simple way less principled than that of Boynton: they might have argued, in fact, that their changing allegiances arose from a surfeit of principle. Cholmley was certainly insistent that his position was principled, and Boynton’s son clearly felt by 1648 that the cause had shifted and that he no longer wanted to support it. Given the costs of the war, and the shifting basis of the two coalitions, it is certainly possible to see a refusal to carry on fighting as an honourable position. Sir John Hotham had after all accepted a commission to take control of Hull in the face of armed popish conspiracy against Parliament; not for the cause that was now taking shape. The case of Fiennes makes it appear rather more complex: there was an honour code governing surrender, but in the heat of battle a surrender offered too easily might look quite like a change of sides. These questions were posed continuously for those in arms. In May, James Chudleigh had deserted the parliamentary cause, following his capture at the battle of Stratton Hill, and wrote to his father encouraging him to do the same. It had been widely thought among royalists that Massey would surrender Gloucester in the summer of 1643, since he seemed unwilling to resist the King in person, but his resolve was apparently strengthened by feeling within the city. Sir Alexander Carew rethought his allegiance in August, following the fall of Bristol and the deterioration of the military position in the west, and contacted Sir John Berkeley with a view to changing sides. He delayed, however, ‘so sottishly and dangerously wary of his own security… that he would not proceed till he was sufficiently assured that his pardon was passed the Great Seal of England’.87

  Amidst these ambiguities it is plain that some men had a clear view about honourable conduct. Following defeat at Adwalton Moor, Sir Thomas Fairfax had stayed in Bradford until all was lost, fighting his way out and leaving behind his wife and many followers. En route to Hull he had abandoned his small daughter, who could not bear the hard ride to Hull, apparently thinking she would die. His daughter joined him a day after his arrival in Hull, revived after a night’s sleep, and his wife was ‘sent to him with all courtesy by the stately Newcastle, who was too gallant a cavalier to make war on ladies’. Similar courtesies were observed at the siege of Arundel Castle in January 1644. Once negotiations for a treaty had been opened, the parliamentary commander, Sir William Waller, invited Lady Bishop, the wife of the royalist commander, and her daughters to dine with him.88 Such things clearly mattered. On 10 August 1643, when Charles summoned Gloucester to surrender, a soldier and citizen came out to deliver the reply. The city was at His Majesty’s orders as soon as it was signified to them by the two Houses of Parliament, they said. Having delivered their message they wheeled around, turning their backs on the King; and putting on their hats in which the orange ribbons denoting their allegiance were prominently visible, they rode off. This was a gross breach of etiquette, which evoked laughter among the courtiers, but strengthened the King’s determination to press on with the siege. In July, frustrated by his failure to bring the royalists to battle, Essex had proposed to the Speaker of the House of Lords that the terms rejected by the King in Oxford should be offered again. If he refused them, then the King should be asked to withdraw and the two armies be allowed to fight a single battle to settle the quarrel. The idea was studiously ignored.89 Insistence on honourable, civil, courteous behaviour was an understandable response to the moral ambiguities confronted by those seeking to act in a principled and consistent way. Whether, in these conditions, honour had any clear meaning was less certain.

  Settling into a longer campaign created new political issues, arising from the war itself. Those who were fighting to preserve legal propriety and those fighting to defend religious decency might change their mind about which side best represented their views. Clearly, there were different views among the parliamentarians about what the war was for and how the cause could be strengthened. From the spring of 1643 until the early autumn, military fortune favoured the King, and this tended to make these questions very pressing on the parliamentary side. Relative military failure, in itself, posed problems for the solidarity of the parliamentary coalition, but it did so in less direct ways too. At Edgehill and Turnham Green there had been an element of excitement, or even euphoria, about the response of the troops. During the following years the hard realities of soldiering became obvious. The horrors endured in Germany during the Thirty Years War were well-known, and fears that England might ‘turn Germany’ were common. They were quickly reinforced by Edgehill, Brentford, Marlborough, Birmingham and Lancaster. The almost forgotten skirmish at Guisbor
ough was sufficiently appalling to shift Cholmley’s allegiance, and the agonizing death suffered by Hampden had many fellows. Charles was in the end reluctant to storm Gloucester, having seen the aftermath of the storming of Bristol, where, as one participant put it, ‘as gallant men as ever drew sword… lay upon the ground like rotten sheep’.90 Given the political uncertainties about war aims the problems raised by these terrible experiences were more complicated than simple revulsion at the experience of warfare: what was this suffering supposed to achieve, and was it doing so?

  Military campaigns imposed heavy burdens on individuals and communities and continued fighting posed a problem of political and religious mobilization. But as the campaigns became more destructive, without being more decisive, and novel institutional measures were taken to support them, the war became a political issue in itself, complicating the choices made in 1642. In justifying new measures and trying to stiffen the sinews, again particularly on the parliamentary side, more radical religious and political arguments were voiced. Parliament’s war effort, increasingly closely associated with zealous reformation, was stepped up in two distinct phases: one towards the end of the Oxford negotiations and extending into late April, the other in June and July. This process too led to some revision of the choices of 1642. By late summer, Parliament’s military fortunes were at a low ebb, radical administrative measures were being taken, supported by rhetoric which would not have commanded much support a year earlier. The core of the parliamentary cause was being more clearly defined and could not easily be presented as merely defensive. The problems this posed were obvious in the defections of 1643. Domestic radicalization had benefits in fighting the war, but also costs in threatening the solidity of the coalition of 1642. This was to become still more the case in the autumn, as Parliament concluded a military alliance with the Covenanters, and Charles negotiated a cessation in Ireland in order to allow him to bring troops across the Irish Sea. Meanwhile, Parliament had not really enjoyed the fruits of this escalation either, although the relief of Gloucester had lifted spirits.

  Bruno Ryves’s strategy in Mercurius Rusticus, of contrasting the actions of parliamentarians with their rhetoric, was a common one, and manifested the much larger problem posed by the contested meaning of key terms. Publicity magnified the obvious problem: conditions of necessity had made the meaning of apparently plain words (law, reformation, treason, honour) obscure. The truth in these conditions was very elusive – both in the sense of reliable accounts of what was happening and, more importantly, what it meant. Versions of the truth could not be taken on trust either, as polemics consistently undercut the authority of the other side. Meanwhile, for an uncommitted reader of the flood of pamphlets that swept from the presses, it was difficult to identify the grounds of honourable personal conduct.

  10

  The War of the Three Kingdoms

  The Irish Cessation and the Solemn League and Covenant, 1643

  By late 1643 both sides had secured outside help, further complicating the politics of mobilization and the difficulty of negotiating an eventual peace. The King sought a truce in Ireland to release troops for service in England; Parliament sought military help from the Covenanters. The English civil war had been a consequence of crises in the other kingdoms; England was now to become the cockpit of a war of all three kingdoms.

  There were three armies in Ireland. The confederated Catholics, the original rebels, had risen against the government, having been frustrated in their hopes of securing concessions from Wentworth in return for financial support for the crown. They were now seeking freedom of worship and security of their estates and religion. Given the climate in England freedom of worship was unthinkable, but security of estates and religion were, potentially, negotiable. The Confederates had been sensitive to the realities of English politics-for example, they did not refer to their assembly in Kilkenny (which met two days after the battle of Edgehill) as a parliament because the oath of confederacy had bound them to acknowledge the King’s rights, among which was the sole authority to summon parliaments. They also recognized the authority of English common law and statute, so long as they did not infringe the liberties of the Irish people or the free exercise of their religion. There were of course divisions over what these demands meant in practice, and it is significant that they were the confederated Catholics. rather than the united Catholics, or simply the Catholics. It was a loose coalition, formed in the months after the rising, in the light of military needs. Its politics are best understood in terms of a tension between a peace party, anxious for a rapid settlement with the King, and a clericalist wing, seeking to extract maximal religious concessions from the King now that a rising was underway. There was also a middle group, negotiating between these positions, led by Nicholas Plunkett, a distinguished Dublin lawyer. Plunkett had acted against Wentworth on a number of occasions during the 1630s. Initially opposed to the rising he had risen rapidly in the ranks of the Confederacy once he had committed himself to its cause. He was one of the most prominent Catholic politicians of the mid seventeenth century, but his politics were not dogmatically confessional-his was a campaign for the rights of Catholics under the crown. His sense of what kind of peace would suffice was at odds with that of other influential figures in the Confederacy. Nonetheless, and despite their internal differences, the Confederates were surely correct in thinking that the King was a more likely friend than the English parliament and in October 1642 they had petitioned the King in these terms, ‘which granted, we will convert our forces upon any design your majesty may appoint’.1

  English forces in Ireland were based in Dublin under the command of James Butler, Earl of Ormond. The son of a prominent family (he was the 12th earl), he is normally commended above all for his loyalty. The Butlers had remained Catholic at the Reformation and so, despite a long record of crown service, had become subjects of suspicion. James was taken into royal wardship in 1614, however, and educated under the austerely Calvinist eye of George Abbot. Although his education was otherwise rather neglected, this created a breach with the Catholic past of the family and opened the door to service of the crown, something essential to the interests of ambitious landowners and something that Ormond pursued enthusiastically ever after. Sympathetic to the royalist cause in England, and serving under a royal commission, he was securely royalist. But this was less true of other figures in the Dublin government. Fear of popery and (Catholic) rebellion, such a prominent part of the English parliamentarian case, played powerfully among Ireland’s Protestant elite. In October 1642, the month of the assembly at Kilkenny and of the battle of Edgehill, Parliament sent commissioners to Dublin hoping to get this army to renounce its loyalty to the King.2

  A third army had been sent by the Covenanters in April 1642 to make Ulster safe for Presbyterianism, under the command of Robert Monro, and partly funded by the English parliament. A veteran of French, Danish and Swedish service, Monro had shown no hesitation in throwing in his lot with the Covenanters, and when he took up the commission of Major-General of the Covenanting army in Ireland he was probably in his mid-forties. The proposal for a Scottish army to preserve Protestantism in Ireland had initially come from both Parliament and the King, but by the time that the army was sent the King was no longer behind it. This army was obviously more likely to fight for Parliament than for the King, should it become interested in joining the English war. There were also a number of regiments raised in England, the Adventurers, on the promise of reward from confiscated lands, whose loyalties were clearly far more likely to be parliamentarian.3

  Of these armies in Ireland the Confederates were most likely to be royalist, but an alliance with Irish Catholics would cost Charles support everywhere else. Monro, of course, was unlikely to be anything but pro-parliamentarian, but the allegiance of the English forces under the command of Ormond might be contested. Viewed strictly as a matter of military policy the King’s best option was to seek peace with the Confederates, hoping thereby to release Ormond�
��s forces for service in England. Early in 1643 Charles ordered the expulsion of the parliamentary delegation from Dublin, and sent a commission to Ormond and others to hear the grievances of the Catholics. This process went ahead despite a military initiative from Dublin, and despite the demands of the Confederates, which were too far-reaching to be granted. By April, a ceasefire seemed plausible, but not a full settlement, and over the summer of 1643 this is what was negotiated. On 15 September, after a year of military failure, Ormond managed to secure a twelve-month cessation of arms in Ireland, leaving only very limited royal outposts on the east coast and around Cork in the South-west, and some fortresses in the north and west. Ormond’s misgivings were shared by other influential figures such as Murrough O’Brien, Earl of Inchiquin (a Protestant of distinguished parentage and commander of the government’s forces in Munster), and Barnabas O’Brien, Earl of Thomond (governor of County Clare). But the larger logic of the arrangement was plain. Ormond’s hesitations fed doubts about this peace party strategy among the Confederates: that the bargaining position was being given up too easily or to someone who could not be fully trusted.4