Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Although these legal victories by the king caused some to grumble, many of his subjects would probably have agreed with the claim of Edward Hyde, a prominent royalist and author of the influential History of the rebellion and civil wars in England, that in the 1630s England ‘enjoyed the greatest calm and the fullest measure of felicity that any people in any age for so long time together have been blessed with’, rather than with the verdict of Nehemiah Wallington, a London craftsman, who compiled a record of the 1630s expressly so ‘that the generation to come may see what wofull and miserable times we lived in’. In any case, those who thought like Wallington had limited outlets for their views so long as Parliament remained out of session – and, as one observer put it, ‘none could expect a Parliament, but on some necessity not now imaginable’.16

  The success of Charles's ‘Personal Rule’ required him to avoid creating such a ‘necessity’ because, as Anzolo Correr, the Venetian ambassador in England, observed, Charles had ‘changed the principles by which his royal predecessors have governed’ by ‘ceasing to rule by Parliament as his predecessors used to do’. He continued:

  It remains to be seen if he will continue and if he can achieve through royal authority what former kings did by the authority of the realm. It is a difficult matter, and all the more dangerous now because, it seems, the kingdom is agitated about two great matters, religion and the reduction of the liberty of the people, both of which the king has thoroughly stirred up [perturbate]. This will produce a major confrontation if not a great upheaval [gran turbolenza].

  The ambassador invoked ‘the example of Henry III, who suffered prolonged disasters and upheavals in what was called “the Barons’ Wars”’, four centuries before, because, Correr opined, ‘the people are so discontented that if they had leaders – which they have not – it would be impossible to placate them’. Correr's analysis, although admirable for England, completely omitted Scotland and Ireland. He even failed to mention the riots that three months earlier had shaken Edinburgh, starting a chain of events that would lead Charles into war, produce a formidable cadre of English ‘leaders’ and create ‘prolonged disasters and upheavals’ far more damaging than ‘the Barons’ Wars’ against Henry III.17

  The Scottish Revolution

  Charles had offended the Scots ever since his accession in 1625, when as part of his mobilization plans for the war with Spain he resolved to create among his kingdoms ‘a strict union and obligation each to [the] other for their mutual defence’: a ‘Union of Arms’ modelled on Spain's ill-fated scheme (see chapter 9 above). To obtain funds for the Scottish contingent of the Union army, the new king announced a ‘Revocation’, a device traditionally used by Scottish monarchs at their accession to reclaim lands usurped from their immediate predecessor; yet despite numerous precedents, the manner in which Charles presented his initiative provoked widespread opposition. Although the king eventually made some grudging concessions, the final version (put into effect in 1629) still required those who had obtained church and crown lands to surrender them to him, before receiving them back under less favourable terms. Just like the Edict of Restitution promulgated in Germany that same year (see page 222 above), the Act of Revocation subsequently appeared even to loyalists as the ‘root of all evils’. Looking back in the 1640s, the historian Sir James Balfour saw in the Revocation ‘the groundstone of all the mischief that followed after, both to this king's government and family’, and believed that it ‘laid open a way to rebellion’.18

  The resentment generated by the Revocation had scarcely abated before Charles took steps to create a single ‘form of public worship’, so that just as his Monarchy ‘has but one Lord and one faith, so it has but one heart and one mouth … in the churches that are under the protection of one sovereign prince’. Above all, the king wished to end the ‘diversity, nay deformity’ of worship he observed when he returned to Scotland in 1633 because ‘no set or public form of prayer was used, but preachers or readers or ignorant schoolmasters prayed in the church’ extemporaneously. He charged the energetic but inflexible Archbishop William Laud with devising a remedy.19

  Archie the Fool, the Scottish jester who entertained Charles I and his courtiers with droll remarks, immediately saw the danger. On hearing of the plan to impose a new liturgy on his homeland by royal proclamation, Archie turned to Archbishop Laud and asked: ‘Who's the Fool now?’ Laud responded by banishing the jester from court and instead prepared a ‘Code of Canons’ for Scotland that prohibited extempore prayer and other ancient liturgical customs. Charles published them by virtue of ‘our prerogative royal, and supreme authority in causes ecclesiastical’ – apparently forgetting that the Church of Scotland recognized no such ‘supreme authority’. The king also ordered every church to buy and use a Prayer Book and, when reminded that no Scottish Prayer Book existed, he instructed Laud to prepare one that contained set prayers and responses based on (albeit not identical to) English practice. Then, using ‘Our royall authority, as king of Scotland’, Charles enjoined the exclusive use of the new Prayer Book, with effect from Sunday, 23 July 1637. Ministers who failed to acquire a copy, and to use it on that date, would be declared rebels and outlaws.20

  The king had chosen a dangerous moment to innovate because Scotland suffered from more extreme weather than England. In June 1637 the Privy Council in Edinburgh issued emergency legislation to deal with a plague epidemic, an acute shortage of coins, and a universal ‘scarcity of victuals’ because of the poor harvest. According to the earl of Lothian, one of Scotland's worried landowners:

  The earth has been iron in this land … and the heavens brass this summer, till now in the harvest there have been such inundations and floods and winds, as no man living remembers the like. This has shaken and rotted and carried away the little corn [that] came up, [so] that certainly they that are not blind may see a judgment come on this land. Besides there is no kind of coin in it, [so] that men that are in debt can not get their own to give their creditors, and the few that have money keep it for themselves for the[ir] great advantage in this penury and necessity.

  Small wonder, then, that imposing the new Prayer Book, derisively known as ‘Laud's liturgy’, unleashed a revolution – especially since its opponents were already well prepared.21

  In April 1637 a group of ministers led by Alexander Henderson (a man of obscure origins whose abilities as a preacher and organizer would soon catapult him to international prominence) met secretly in Edinburgh with some ‘matrons of the kirk’ (the wives of prominent Presbyterians) and warned them that the king aimed to abolish Scotland's traditional forms of worship, in which spontaneous prayer formed a central part, and thus imperil their chances of salvation. A strange accident provided irrefutable confirmation of Henderson's claim: once the government's printer had corrected the proof sheets of ‘Laud's Liturgy’, he discarded them – but, since good paper was valuable, the sheets were promptly recycled by ‘the shops of Edinburgh to cover spice and tobacco’ and so became public knowledge, convincing everyone that ‘the life of the Gospel’ would be ‘stolen away by enforcing on the kirk a dead service book’. The ‘matrons of the kirk’ therefore authorized their maidservants to stage a riot whenever it was first used.22

  The maidservants obliged. No sooner had the dean of Edinburgh begun to read the new set prayers at the morning service on Sunday, 23 July in St Giles Cathedral, in the presence of the king's judges and the city magistrates, than the young women sitting on their folding stools at the front ‘with clapping of their hands, cursings and outcries, raised such a barbarous hubbub in that sacred place that not any one could either hear or be heard’. The young women then ‘threw the stools they sate on at the preacher’ and then ‘did rive [rip] all the service bouk[s] a peisses’. The dean, judges and magistrates ran for their lives, and when they tried to use the new Prayer Book in the afternoon, the crowd threw stones at them (Plate 14).23

  Charles responded by commanding the Scottish Privy Council to punish all ‘authors or ac
tors’, and to enforce use of the new Prayer Book forthwith. The Council duly summoned the leading members of the Edinburgh clergy – but instead of decreeing punishments, they determined that ‘the service books cannot be orderly used in the kirks’, and therefore authorized the ministers to continue to preach in the traditional form. They also freed those imprisoned for involvement in the riots.24 Henderson and his colleagues used their reprieve to draw up a ‘supplication’ against religious innovations, to be presented to the king in the name of the godly nobles, burgesses and ministers. Charles regarded this collective act as sedition and ordered the committee to disperse; but instead Henderson, ably assisted by Archibald Johnston of Wariston, a determined and devout Edinburgh lawyer, drafted a formal protest that they called ‘The National Covenant’ to solidify popular support. Although the Covenant claimed to safeguard ‘the true worship of God, the majesty of our king, the peace of the kingdom, for the common happiness of ourselves, and the posterity’, its content was profoundly subversive since it condemned all innovations in ecclesiastical and secular government made since the Union of 1603. Moreover, it obliged every Scottish householder to take a solemn and public oath that they would ‘to the uttermost of our powers, with our means and lives’ defend ‘the foresaid true religion, liberties and laws of the kingdom against all sorts of persons whatsoever’ – a formula that could be used to justify rebellion.25

  On the third Sunday in March 1638, a day named by Henderson and his colleagues as ‘a solemn fast day appointed for subscription’, in each Scottish parish the congregation rose to its feet and, with right hands raised, repeated in unison the oath to uphold the Covenant ‘against all sorts of persons whatsoever’. They then signed their names, after which (Wariston reported) ‘such a yell’ came from the throats of the assembled crowd ‘as the like was never seen or heard of’.26 Wariston was right: Scotland – perhaps the world – had never seen such an exercise in popular democracy. After more sermonizing, a messenger set forth for London bearing both the Covenant and a list of eight demands (composed by Wariston) ‘containing the least of our necessary desires to settle this church and kingdom in peace’ to present to the king. Wariston then ‘prayed the Lord to preserve us from that great sin of retiring one single inch in this cause of God out of diffidence and worldly fears’. For Wariston, at least, there would be no surrender and no compromise.27

  The marquis of Hamilton, who arrived in Scotland as Charles's personal representative in June 1638, immediately recognized the danger posed by such intractability. ‘The conquering totally of this kingdom [Scotland] will be a difficult work,’ he warned the king, even if ‘you were certain of what assistance England can give you'; but, the marquis continued presciently,

  It fears me that [the English] will not be so forward in this as they ought, nay that there are so many malicious spirits amongst them that no sooner will your back be turned but they will be ready to do as we have done here, which I will never call by another name than rebellion. England [lacks] not its own discontents.

  Charles took no notice. Since he believed that ‘not only now my crown but my reputation for ever lies at stake’ in Scotland, he informed Hamilton that nothing ‘can reduce that people to their obedience, but only force’. Therefore, he added imperiously, ‘I would rather die than yield to those impertinent and damnable demands’ because ‘it is all one, as to yield, to be no king in a very short time’. Returning to the theme in another letter, he repeated: ‘So long as this covenant is in force, I have no more power in Scotland than as a Duke of Venice, which I will rather die than suffer.’ He therefore reiterated his determination to use overwhelming force ‘to suppress rebellion’ there.28

  It was, once again, a dangerous moment to make such ambitious plans. On the one hand, whereas Scotland had seen ‘such inundations and floods and winds as no man living remembers the like’ in 1637, the following year proved to be the driest year that some parts of Scotland had experienced in a century. On the other hand, a new Venetian ambassador saw clearly that Charles's Personal Rule was doomed. He perceived ‘a disposition to revolution in England also, to force the king to obey the laws’ according to ‘the example of the Scots'; while ‘the people of Ireland also are discontented and ill-treated by the Viceroy there [Thomas Wentworth] without regard for their privileges or anything else. As their outcry makes no impression on His Majesty they complain bitterly.’ In short, the ambassador concluded, ‘the king has no friends in England, less in Ireland and none in Scotland, and if he does not change the nature of his rule one foresees some irremediable disaster’.29

  For the time being, Charles cynically authorized Hamilton to make concessions to the Covenanters: ‘Flatter them with what hopes you please,’ he wrote, ‘your chief end being now to win time … untill I be ready to suppress them’. In October 1638, since it was too late for military intervention, Charles even gave his consent for the General Assembly of the Scottish Church to convene for the first time in 20 years, and hundreds of ministers and pious laymen (many of them heavily armed) attended its opening session. ‘It is more than probable that these people have somewhat else in their thoughts than religion,’ warned Hamilton (who presided over the Assembly in the king's name): rather, religion ‘must serve for a cloak to rebellion’, and to ‘bring them again to a dutiful obedience’. He, too, now saw no alternative to a full-scale invasion.30

  Wariston could think of only two avenues by which Scotland might escape this fate: the outbreak of troubles in England itself (‘either by a mutiny of the Protestant people’ or ‘by the king of France's invasion’); or else ‘the Lord's removal of Charles’ – the first known reference to the king's death as a solution to the problems of the Stuart Monarchy (a full decade before it happened). Realizing that these convenient scenarios were improbable, and knowing that insistence on ‘the absolute rooting out of bishops’ would mean ‘taking up arms’ to oppose an English invasion, Wariston and his colleagues began to study the theories of political resistance advanced by continental writers.31 Thus enlightened, they spread their views through pamphlets and preaching; they cultivated links with known opponents of Charles's policies in England (in the hope of provoking a ‘mutiny’ that might divert Charles from attacking Scotland); and they persuaded the Swedish government both to allow Scottish soldiers in their service to return home and to provide arms and munitions. Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, who equated Scotland's cause with Sweden's war of independence over a century before, eventually sent almost 30 heavy guns, 4,000 muskets and 4,000 suits of armour, and released over 300 Scottish officers in Swedish service, including General Alexander Leslie, a veteran with 30 years’ experience of continental warfare.

  The Tipping Point

  In 1639 these reinforcements gave the Scots a critical advantage in opposing the king, who had decided to lead 20,000 men to the Scottish border in person, while Hamilton with the Royal Navy both blockaded the east coast of Scotland and landed troops to assist opponents of the Covenant in the northeast, and an Irish army invaded the southwest. It was a promising strategy (four years later an invasion of Scotland from Ireland would prove devastatingly effective), but three flaws ruined it. First, the joint commanders of the Irish army (the earls of Strafford and Antrim) refused to cooperate with each other. Their sole achievement was to alienate the leading landowner in southwest Scotland, Archibald Campbell, earl of Argyll, who now threw in his lot with the Covenanters. Second, the royalists in the northeast surrendered before English reinforcements arrived. Third, extreme weather delayed the mobilization of Charles's English army. Spring 1639 saw a ‘most grievous tempest of wind, thunder, lightning and rain’ followed by a ten-week drought, followed by ‘the greatest wind that ever I heard blow’, and finally ‘aboundance of raine [which] made foule travelling’ and ‘two of the coaldest dayes’ that ‘ever I felt’. ‘I feare,’ a royalist commander fretted, that if the cold ‘continues, it will kill our men’.32

  When the royal recruits mustered at York, their numbers
‘came farr short of the king's expectacion’ and many men lacked weapons. According to an officer who watched the king's troops advance through Newcastle, ‘I dare saye ther was never soe raw, soe unskillfull, and soe unwilling an army brought to fight … They are as like to kill theyr fellowes as the enimye’. A solar eclipse three weeks later, which many in the army ‘construed’ as ‘an ominous presage of bad successe to the king's affaires’, did nothing to improve morale – especially since, according to John Aston, a member of the royal entourage, ‘the greatest enemy’ was ‘hunger, which had soe assaulted the campe’ that ‘there was a mutinie in the army for want of bread’.33 Nevertheless, at the end of May 1639, King Charles reached the river Tweed, the border between the two kingdoms, at the head of 20,000 soldiers, where they pitched their tents and fortified their camp facing the army of the Covenant, entrenched just across the river.

  Charles I's 1639 campaign fully vindicated the warning of Louis XIV's preceptor: ‘One of the great maxims of politics is that a king must wage war in person, because someone who is only king in his palace runs the risk of finding his master on the battlefield.’ The naivety of the king, and of the commanders whose advice he sought, allowed Alexander Leslie, drawing on his lifetime of military sacrifice, to trick them. According to John Aston, ‘the great bruite [rumour] of the ennemye's strength, and their able commanders, did beget a distrust in most, and a murmure in others’. They did not discover until later that General Leslie had drawn up his troops expressly ‘to beguile men's view’ and prevent the English from realizing either that they faced scarcely 12,000 men, many of them poorly armed, or that the Royal Navy's blockade had deprived the Scots of ‘any natural means or ordinary way either of our convening or subsisting together, remaining or retiring or going on, for want of victuals, money or horses’. So instead of leading his far larger army in an attack, on 18 June 1639 Charles signed a ceasefire and opened negotiations with his rebellious Scottish subjects.34