God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  Disputes about strategy and tactics within the army of the Eastern Association became inflected with these larger concerns about religious order. The Earl of Manchester was thought by many to be far too reluctant to seek out action following Marston Moor. On 10 August, Manchester refused an order to go against Rupert in Chester, where a significant force seemed to be mustering, something symptomatic of his military and political caution. Not until September did Manchester agree to take cavalry to the aid of Brereton in Cheshire. On 1 September the Committee of Both Kingdoms wrote the first of fourteen letters urging the army to move south to prevent the royal army, now returning from its victory over Essex at Lostwithiel, from regaining winter quarters in Oxford. Three orders from the Commons reinforced the message, and the need for haste, but by mid-October the army was still no further west than Reading.57 Newbury and its aftermath confirmed this reluctance on Manchester’s part. This perhaps reflected revulsion at what he had seen during the siege of York, and was certainly fuelled by a growing sense of the futility of the conflict.

  Cromwell, his second-in-command, on the other hand, had no such hesitations, and was becoming embroiled in partisan struggle within the army. In particular Cromwell was in open conflict with Lawrence Crawford, a Scottish major-general. Crawford accused Cromwell of packing the army with Independents, which was probably true after York but not before. Cromwell had intervened to protect Independents from hostile Presbyterian officers, but this was probably in a spirit of brotherhood that he shared with his superior, Manchester. After August 1644, though, there is evidence that he actively promoted sectarians in the army. He was motivated in this, it seems, by growing resentment of the persecuting spirit of Presbyterian officers, hostility to the increasingly obvious determination among them to impose a Presbyterian settlement on England and a feeling that victory at Marston Moor belonged to him, not them. When Cromwell became openly critical of Manchester’s generalship in the autumn of 1644 it was inevitably inflected with these religious tensions. Although Manchester remained popular in the association, his command was increasingly difficult and, to many at Westminster, increasingly ineffective.58

  The military advantages of an alliance with the Covenanting Scots were therefore offset by the political and religious complications that it created: many Protestants did not see Presbyterianism as liberation; nor was it what most opponents of Charles had been seeking in 1640. Potentially at least, Covenant politics were deeply problematic even for those committed to further reformation, particularly so on the issue of church government. In the autumn of 1644 Cheney Culpeper does not seem to have found the tensions irreconcilable, and he was clearly not alone. Similarly, William Dowsing, apparently more Independent than Presbyterian on matters of church government, was very active in 1644 extirpating popery and superstition in East Anglia, acting under warrant from the Presbyterian Earl of Manchester. On the other hand, his journal finishes in October.

  Formal peace negotiations reopened at the end of 1644, with the parliamentary coalition in a strong military position but increasingly publicly divided over what kind of settlement to insist upon. There had been contacts between the two sides throughout 1644, with Essex a key figure on the parliamentarian side. The Oxford parliament had written to him in February, hoping that he could be an instrument of peace, and shortly before the surrender at Lostwithiel he had been contacted directly by Charles. On both occasions he said, as he always did, that he did not have the power to treat on his own behalf. Among the royalists there were significant divisions, and considerable personal hostility to Rupert. He secured a kind of agreement with Digby, who assured him that it was Newcastle rather than him who was held responsible for Marston Moor. But moderate royalists, in the Oxford parliament and at court, saw Rupert’s influence as a primary obstacle; indeed, he was attacked as ‘the only cause of war in this kingdom’.59 It was hardly fair, but was an indication of a significant level of hostility.

  Moderate counsels were not dominant, however. Charles himself seems to have been in combative mood: ‘The settling of religion and the militia are the first to be treated on; and be confident that I will neither quit episcopacy nor that sword that God hath given into my hands’. He was also just as capable of self-righteousness as his Puritan opponents:

  Nothing can be more evident than that Strafford’s innocent blood hath been one of the great causes of God’s just judgement upon this nation by a furious civil war, both sides hitherto being almost equally guilty, but now this last crying blood being totally theirs, I believe it is no presumption hereafter to hope that the hand of justice must be heavier upon them and lighter upon us, looking now upon our cause, having passed through our faults.

  In pursuit of these ends his best hopes, as he well appreciated, lay in the divisions among his enemies:

  I am put in very good hope – some hold it a certainty – that, if I could come to a fair treaty, the ringleading rebels could not hinder me from a good peace; first, because their own party are most weary of the war; and likewise for the great distractions which at this time most assuredly are amongst themselves, as Presbyterians against Independents in religion, and general against general in point of command.60

  There was also the hope that Montrose’s success in Scotland might further strengthen Charles’s position. The Earl of Glamorgan was sent to Ireland in December to negotiate for military support, with powers to deal with the Pope to secure help from any other willing Catholic powers. Henrietta Maria was in France seeking aid from Mazarin.61 Forces were balanced in Oxford, but the moderates were able to persuade the King that he might get a good deal, given the divisions on the parliamentary side.62

  Charles could be persuaded to listen, therefore, but, as it turned out, what he heard was more or less out of the question for him, and he had reasonable hopes that he would not have to listen much longer. Parliamentary commissioners arrived in Oxford on 20 November 1644. The proposals included the demand that Charles swear the Solemn League and Covenant, abolish episcopacy, assent to reformation following the recommendations of the Westminster Assembly, pursue uniformity between England and Scotland and end the saying of Mass at court. He was also to agree to a number of specific pieces of legislation, to declare the Cessation void, and leave fifty-eight named supporters to justice. On the militia the terms were equally stringent: all military officers were to be ‘persons of known integrity, and such as both kingdoms may confide in for their faithfulness to religion and peace of the kingdoms’. This was to be monitored by a joint Anglo-Scottish committee, and appointments to numerous offices of state were to be nominated by both Houses of Parliament. These were more stringent terms than had been offered in early 1643, and probably reflected the influence of the Scottish members of the Committee of Both Kingdoms.63

  After some informal discussions in Oxford it was agreed that negotiations would open at Uxbridge on 30 January 1645. These Uxbridge proposals came after a year of bloody fighting and it is clear that around the country considerable hope was invested in them, at least if the reaction to their failure is anything to go by. But this was never a hopeful basis for settlement. Charles was presented with terms he would not accept and which he was actively seeking to avoid. This was suspected at the time, and publicly confirmed the next year when his private correspondence was captured and published. Along with other revelations this did unquestioned damage to his reputation, but his position was not necessarily unprincipled – he could not accept the terms offered, which were being urged on the basis of military success, and so it was reasonable enough that he should be seeking to find ways of undermining his opponents and inducing them to offer more realistic terms.

  While some parliamentarians sought to get Charles to accept terms he surely would not accept, others at Westminster turned towards overcoming the strategic weaknesses of the previous campaign. In the complex recriminations that ensued it is possible to distinguish two problems. The southern army had been hampered by the reluctance of the Trained Bands to move,
which contributed to Waller’s immobility, and by the destruction of Essex’s army at Lostwithiel, which was perhaps a reflection of problems in the direction of the war. The problems in the Eastern Association were more narrowly political – an escalating conflict between Independents and Presbyterians, which affected war aims. Reforms tackling the logistical problems in the southern army were made against the background of the political problems manifest in the Eastern Association army.

  In late November, as what became the Uxbridge negotiations were being launched, Waller and Cromwell reported to the House of Commons on the recent campaigns, in response to an invitation from the Committee of the Army. Waller complained of Manchester’s failure to come to his support at Shaftesbury, and Cromwell joined in the criticism. Cromwell in particular exceeded the bounds of politeness in his public criticism of Manchester. Despite the fact that he was a commoner speaking of an earl, and a second-in-command speaking of his superior, he did not hesitate to blame the failures of the campaigns on Manchester, and in particular on his reluctance to fight. The earl’s response, made a week later in the other House, was withering. It was a reasonably effective defence of his military record and a clear attack on Cromwell’s politics and religion, quoting Cromwell to the effect that he would rather fight the Scots than the King and that he wanted only Independents in his own army, and reporting comments from Cromwell that implied the levelling of social distinctions between aristocracy and commoners.64

  These tensions should not be underestimated. The Covenanters were hopeful that they could charge Cromwell with being an incendiary between the two kingdoms – something in breach of the Solemn League and Covenant – and Essex and Holles were apparently willing to go along with it. One night in early December some of Cromwell’s leading political opponents were invited to the Earl of Essex’s house to discuss a plan to impeach him on these grounds.65 Cromwell, it should be remembered, had only signed the Covenant when it was imposed nationally, and these events can only have confirmed the suspicions that he and others felt about that particular deal. On 4 December, Holles reported Manchester’s accusations against Cromwell to the House, to which Cromwell issued a long and forceful denial.66

  It was from this debate that the proposal for Self-Denial arose. On 9 December the Committee of the Army endorsed the criticisms of Manchester. During the ensuing debate, in what was no doubt a co-ordinated move, Cromwell made a speech which included an important assertion. Parliament’s enemies, and even some of those who had initially been its friends, had become hostile to the vested interests created by the war: ‘that the members of both Houses have got great places and commands’ and ‘will perpetually continue themselves in grandeur and not permit the war to speedily end, lest their own power should determine with it’. He called for the army to be put into another method, and the war more ‘vigorously prosecuted’. The alternative, he suggested, was that ‘the people can bear the war no longer, and will enforce you to a dishonourable peace’.67

  Careers and fortunes were indeed being made on the back of the war, and Cromwell was prescient too: in the spring and summer of the following year locally organized armed groups began to intervene in the war, seeking to limit its effects on their localities. For him, rapid victory was the way forward, and that required reorganization. In early July, exasperated by the refusal of local levies to march onward, Waller had written to Parliament: ‘till you have an army merely your own, that you may command, it is in a manner impossible to do anything of importance’.68 This was to become the logic of the New Model Army.

  Zouch Tate, the chair of the committee, stood up and in response to Cromwell’s speech proposed the Self-Denying Ordinance and a reorganization of the war effort. Tate was in fact a strict Presbyterian, but he had no doubt that Cromwell was right about the need to prosecute the war vigorously, and about the kind of administrative reforms that would allow that. The northern armies could continue in alliance with the Covenanters, and measures were taken to secure more regular supply for them, but in the south there was an obvious need to rebuild and remodel.69 It was not possible, however, to reorganize the southern armies without dismissing the existing command, and that was not easy to do directly. Self-Denial was a neat political solution to this difficulty: it disbarred all Members of Parliament from all civil and military office. In effect it barred all peers (not just Essex and Manchester) from command, since they were all, of course, members of the Lords: it would bring an end to the Earl of Warwick’s command of the navy as well. There were other advantages too. It answered the charge that there were vested interests at Westminster whose profits depended on a prolongation of the conflict, and offered an expiation of the sins which had led to God’s judgements at the end of 1644. In September the Westminster Assembly had considered the causes of the military failures, finding them in the sins of the assembly, Parliament, the army and the people. Self-Denial had psychological and religious appeal for those of a Puritan outlook.70 There was an obvious disadvantage though, in that it would bring to an end a number of highly successful military careers against which no complaint was currently being raised – those of Cromwell, Fairfax senior and Waller, for example.

  Self-Denial and New Modelling were closely related and considered responses to the logistical and political failures of the campaigns of 1643. Neither found an easy passage through the Lords, however. Self-Denial would remove noble influence from all civil and military office, both locally and nationally. Criticism of members of the Lords lay behind both measures and one of the obvious effects of the formation of the New Model would be to take the leading military command away from the Earl of Essex.71 Resistance to the Self-Denying Ordinance could be overcome, however, by pressing on with the New Model Ordinance. This consisted of three principal proposals: the creation of a national army, free of regional loyalties and obligations; that this army would be professional, dedicated to the prosecution of the war without any allied political purpose; and that it was to have first call on parliamentary funds. The logic of all these measures was plain, and clearly reflected sensible thinking about the problems of previous campaign seasons. Pressure was applied to the Lords by including in the ordinance the names of the commanders, which achieved the same end without the need for the Self-Denying Ordinance. It was also made known that the Commons would not allow the Uxbridge negotiations to go forward without first seeing these reforms.72

  As on previous occasions, then, peace negotiations ran in parallel with attempts to bolster the war effort, so that from late November until early January there were contradictory currents in parliamentary politics. At Westminster the progress of Self-Denial and New Modelling was tied to the development of the Uxbridge treaty. Through January the Lords seem to have resisted Self-Denial, and to have wanted to protect Manchester, but the pressure to create the New Model pushed them in that direction. Pressure for New Modelling, in turn, owed something to the fate of the Uxbridge negotiations.

  In the event, this was the shortest formal peace negotiation of the war. Discussion opened on 30 January and was over in three weeks. The three principal topics were religion, the militia and Ireland, to be discussed for three days each in rotation. There was no progress on any of them. The prospects of agreement, of course, were nil – the bargaining position on religion was Presbyterianism, something to which Charles could not, in conscience, agree.73 Charles wrote in a private letter on 6 February: ‘I should think if in your private discourses… with the London commissioners you would put them in mind that they were arrant rebels, and that their end must be damnation, ruin, and infamy except they repented and found some way to free themselves from the damnable way they are in… it might do good’.74 At the eleventh, or perhaps thirteenth, hour, the King made an offer of places to some of the leading parliamentarians (but not at the expense of current, honest incumbents) and to come to London on condition that the armies disbanded. He may have been encouraged to play for time in this way by news of another victory for Montrose in Scotland. Th
e suggestion that he might come to London, extremely unlikely to be accepted at Westminster, was strongly opposed by Henrietta Maria.75

  The failure of the negotiations, recognized on 22 February, considerably weakened moderate royalism, and in the following years hardliners such as Digby and Henrietta Maria were very prominent in the King’s counsels, despite the latter’s exile, at least if the letters between husband and wife are to be believed. A royalist Western Association was formed to stiffen the sinews of the English war effort, to which Hyde and Sir John Colepeper were sent as advisers to the Prince of Wales in early March. This effectively exiled two principal moderates from the court without giving them much influence in the Western Association.76 As the negotiations faltered militant parliamentarianism had also prospered: on 13 February the Lords finally accepted the New Model Ordinance and it was passed two days later. There were subsequent delays over naming commands, and the Self-Denying Ordinance was not passed until April, but vigorous military action was once again in hand.77

  The formation of the New Model Army and the passage of the Self-Denying Ordinance served military purposes but have been invested with a more than military significance. A national standing army had been created from which aristocratic command had been excluded. It was to be the New Model Army which carried through a coup in 1648 leading directly to the trial and execution of the King. Disappointment at the failure to follow up the victory at Marston Moor was expressed by some in criticism of aristocratic leadership. It seems clear that the greater mobility of the King’s forces and the more decisive leadership that was offered had allowed him to recover a seemingly desperate situation between July and October. These things – concern about the commitment of Essex and Manchester, the lack of mobility and co-ordination in the parliamentary forces – came together in the New Modelling of the Parliamentary army over the winter of 1644–5. But they were also, of course, connected with religious and political positions. Vigorous prosecution of the war by Parliament was not simply a matter of logistics and organization but also one of political commitment.