The king had thus surrendered a significant part of his prerogative – the power to make war and peace – and the Peace Commissioners used their new-found authority to conclude the treaty of Ripon, which made three crucial concessions to the Scots. First, it left them in control of the Tyneside collieries, on which London depended both for its manufactures and for heating – a measure that gave them critical leverage over their English allies because, until Parliament authorized the taxes necessary to buy them off, and thus allow the colliers to start supplying London again, the capital would both starve and freeze. Second, it stipulated that negotiations for a final settlement would take place at Westminster, which offered the Petitioner Peers and their allies in Parliament and in Scotland a unique opportunity to reshape the entire political structure of Charles I's monarchy. Third, it guaranteed that the Scots would receive the enormous sum of £850 a day to maintain their soldiers in England until a permanent settlement could be arranged – a requirement that not only compelled Charles to feed and pay his own army in Yorkshire, despite the fact that ‘these great rains that have fallen have made an ill harvest, and corn is likely to prove very dear’, but also prevented him from dissolving the new Parliament until it had voted sufficient funds to disband both of the armies in England and also Strafford's army in Ulster.51
In his opening speech to Parliament on 3 November 1640, Charles could not refrain from blaming his audience for his predicament. Had the previous assembly believed him, he chided, ‘I sincerely think that things had not fallen out as now we see’, and he called for the immediate vote of funds for a new campaign to expel the invaders. His belligerent stance did not lack supporters: a number of MPs felt either bound to obey the king, right or wrong, or insulted by the Scots’ success (‘if the Scots should be too refractory, [let us] bring them by force of true English courage to reason'; ‘We should get them out by fair means or foul’).52 The number of MPs sympathetic to the king's argument soon became apparent. Both the Petition and the treaty of Ripon had called for the ‘legal trial and condign punishment’ of those responsible for the unpopular policies of the previous decade, Strafford chief among them. His opponents hoped to decide his fate in a small committee, but by a vote of 165 to 152 the king's supporters ensured that the whole House, which was more sympathetic, would make the decision.
This emboldened Charles to summon Strafford (still commander of the royal armies in both England and Ireland and still the strongest advocate of resuming the war against the Scots) back to London, where he immediately started to strengthen the Tower's defences. As if that were not enough to alarm the king's critics in Parliament, rumours spread that Strafford and the king were preparing charges of treason against those whom they now knew had maintained seditious contact with the Scots. On 11 November the fearful MPs therefore decided to act first, accusing the earl himself of high treason. He was therefore immediately taken into custody. This halted not only plans for a third campaign against the Scots, but also the transaction of most other public business, while Parliament collected the ‘particular accusations and articles’ of treason ready for Strafford's impeachment.
The trial took place in March 1641 in Westminster Hall, the ‘largest secular covered space in England’, so that as many members of the public as possible could look on and listen. Although Parliament sold entrance tickets, the demand for seats far exceeded supply and vast crowds hovered around the doors to catch a glimpse and hear a few words – it was, as John Adamson wittily observed, ‘perhaps the first exercise in broadcasting the proceedings of Parliament’ (Plate 15).53 The earl expertly rebutted all the charges, but his enemies could not afford to let him go because, in the words of a popular pamphlet of the day: just as ‘the madde Bull wounded and let loose doth more mischief, so if the earle shall get out of the net he will be more savage then before’. The Commons therefore prepared a Bill of Attainder (a procedure that denied the accused a hearing), pinning their hopes on the hasty notes taken by Sir Henry Vane at the meeting of the Committee of War on 5 May 1640. These, it may be recalled, recorded Strafford's advice to the king that since he was now ‘loose and absolved from all rules of government … everythinge is to be done as power might admitt'; and, even more damaging, that ‘You have an army in Ireland, which you may imploy here to reduce this kingdome’. Strafford's enemies argued that ‘here’ and ‘this kingdome’ referred to England, so that the earl had not only counselled arbitrary rule but also urged the king to use foreign (Irish) troops to crush his domestic critics.54 Furious at this turn of events, the king decided both to dissolve Parliament and to summon some officers serving with his army in Yorkshire to rescue Strafford from the Tower; but news of his plans leaked, and thousands of Londoners rushed to Westminster to form a human shield while the Commons finalized the articles of Attainder. The Bill passed by 204 votes to 59, revealing how far Charles's actions had shifted opinion against the earl. The House of Lords prepared to try him.
Once again, contingency intervened. Since not even the king could pardon a person found guilty by the process of Attainder, Charles pinned his hopes of saving Strafford on persuading moderates in the House of Lords, such as the earl of Bedford, to bring in a verdict of banishment or imprisonment but not death. On 23 April, believing his efforts had succeeded, the king wrote an affectionate letter (signed ‘Your constant faithful frend’) informing Strafford that ‘upon the word of a king, you shall not suffer in lyfe, honnor, or fortune’ – but no sooner had he given this solemn promise than Bedford, the most influential moderate, went down with smallpox, and so lost his ability to influence the peers’ discussions.55
On 1 May 1641 the king therefore paid another visit to Parliament to repeat what he had told Bedford. Explaining that he did not believe Strafford to be guilty of high treason, he expressed the hope that the two Houses would vote for the lesser charge of misdemeanours. His audience remained unmoved. As the earl of Essex (whose own father had been executed for treason) put it, if the earl lived, Charles would restore him to his former offices ‘as soon as the Parliament should be ended’, and then the ‘madde bulle wounded’ would seek his revenge. By contrast, said Essex, shaking his head as he uttered his most memorable phrase: ‘Stone-dead hath no fellow’.56
Perhaps realizing that his speech to Parliament had missed its mark, Charles now set in motion another plot to seize control of the Tower and free his faithful minister. Yet again news leaked out, and by nightfall on 2 May 1641 a crowd of about 1,000 had gathered near the Tower to make sure that the plotters stayed outside while Strafford stayed inside. The following day, some 15,000 people assembled at Westminster, both to protect Parliament and to protest the king's attempted coup. ‘Surely,’ the craftsman Nehemiah Wallington wrote in his diary, ‘I never did see so many together in all my life. And when they did see any Lords coming they all cried out with one voice “Justice! Justice!”’ One of the lords claimed that someone in the crowd warned him that ‘if they had not justice tomorrow, they would either take [i.e. lynch] the king or my Lord Strafford’ – the first recorded public suggestion of regicide as a solution to England's political problems.57 Meanwhile, in the House of Lords, Lord Stamford proposed that the peers ‘Give God thanks for our great deliverance, which is greater than that from the Gunpowder-treason’. The comparison quickly spread. The Dutch ambassadors in London averred that the recently discovered ‘conspiracy was much more widespread and horrible than the Gunpowder Plot’, while John Pym convinced the House of Commons that they faced another ‘popish conspiracy’ that aimed ‘to subvert and overthrow this kingdome’. Pym also exploited the general panic to rush through a document entitled ‘The Protestation’, with authorization to print enough copies for every parish in the kingdom.58
Like the Scottish National Covenant (which probably served as its model), the Protestation required a universal public pledge to defend the Established Church against its enemies, and to seek punishment for all who had endeavoured ‘to subvert the fundamental laws of England and
Ireland, and to introduce the exercise of an arbitrary and tyrannical government’. Again as in Scotland, the clergy read the document aloud to their congregations from the pulpit before subscribing their names; and then they called upon ‘all masters of families, their sons and men-servants’ to ‘subscribe his name, with his own hand or mark’ in a special register. Tens of thousands, including apprentices and servants, duly swore the oath and affixed their signatures or marks, and then flocked ‘in troops to the Parliament house with the Protestation on the top of their swords’, while the city militia swaggered through the streets with the ‘Protestation fastened to their pikes or hats’. Over 3,000 of the Protestation returns survive today, bearing the names of over 37,000 individuals. ‘Never before,’ writes David Cressy, ‘had so many subjects been invited to act as citizens, regardless of rank.‘59
On Friday, 7 May the House of Lords approved Strafford's Bill of Attainder and a delegation from both Houses set out to present it to Charles, along with another bill that forbade the dissolution of Parliament without its own consent. A crowd estimated at 12,000 escorted the delegation to Whitehall Palace, which they then blockaded for 36 hours, shouting slogans, until Charles – having consulted both his bishops and his ministers to try and find a way to keep ‘the word of a king’ to his minister, and having wept at the council table when he could not – finally signed both documents. As William Sanderson, an eyewitness, wrote in his Compleat history of the life and raigne of King Charles from his cradle to his grave, ‘at one time, the same instant, the same pen and ink, the king lost his prerogative and Strafford's life also’. A crowd perhaps 200,000 strong immediately gathered around the scaffold on Tower Hill to gloat over the earl's execution, and afterwards those who had come from afar to see the spectacle ‘rode in triumph back, waving their hatts, and with all expressions of joy, thro’ every town they went, crying “His head is off, his head if off!” … and breaking the windowes of those persons who would not solemnize this festival with a bonfire’.60
The ‘Long Parliament’ had already earned its epithet – it had sat continuously for longer than any previous assembly – and, having gained the upper hand, it now made the most of its advantage. The day after Charles signed Strafford's death warrant, Parliament approved a draft peace treaty with the Scots; and the day after the earl's execution, it voted the funds required to demobilize the English and Scottish armies in the north. Nevertheless, until those funds arrived, in the anguished words of Secretary Vane, ‘We are here still in the labyrinth and cannot get out.’ Soon after it assembled in November 1640, the Long Parliament printed and distributed a pamphlet urging ‘persons in every county of the kingdom’ to exploit ‘the present opportunity, by giving true information’ to document cases of royal misrule during the previous decade. Almost all of England's 40 counties obliged, presenting petitions that bore over half a million signatures. Some were printed in multiple copies; others were presented by thousands of petitioners – 3,000 arrived from Buckinghamshire on horseback ‘riding three and three’, 10,000 from Kent, and so on – forcing the House of Commons to appoint marshals to ‘regulate and prevent such disorders as are committed by the disorderly multitudes that press in’.61 England had seen nothing like this exercise in direct democracy, and Parliament used the information to prepare for the king's signature a stream of legislation designed to destroy both the agents and the apparatus that had enabled him to govern England for 11 years without their participation. By September 1641, when the two Houses finally went into recess, they had brought impeachment proceedings against no fewer than 53 of the king's senior appointees, including Archbishop Laud, 12 bishops and almost half the judges, many of whom languished in the Tower pending trial; and approved bills that declared Ship Money illegal, restricted forest laws, abolished knighthood fines, Star Chamber and High Commission, and outlawed Tonnage and Poundage. Between 7 and 10 August, Charles grudgingly gave his assent to all these measures and also approved a peace treaty that ended the ‘late troubles’ with his Scottish subjects, one of whose clauses forbade the king to make ‘war with foreigners without consent of both Parliaments’. He was now, in effect, a king in name only.62
On 11 August, Charles left London, first to oversee the demobilization of the Scots and English armies and then to ensure the acceptance of the peace treaty by his northern kingdom. At first, all went well: the Scottish Parliament demobilized its troops and ratified the treaty. When this news arrived in London, Parliament held a public thanksgiving ‘for the peace concluded between England and Scotland’ during which the preacher Stephen Marshall gave a sermon that compared the situation in ‘the three Nations of England, Scotland and Ireland’ with that in Germany, which ‘remains a field of blood, when their Cities and Towns are desolate, their wives ravished, their children kill'd, when many of them eat their dead carcasses, and die for want of food’. Although it had sometimes looked as if England might become ‘a wonder to all the world in our desolations’, instead ‘God hath made us a wonder to the world in our preservation.‘63
It was indeed a remarkable achievement, and if the king's opponents had been able to stop there, they might have retained the upper hand. Instead, the composite nature of the Stuart Monarchy – which had previously been such an asset for them – turned into an asset for the king. The Scots insisted on immediate compliance with their demand for ‘one confession of faith, one form of catechism … and one form of church government in all the churches of His Majesty's dominions’ – modelled, of course, on Scotland's Presbyterian system. It could not be done. Ireland's Catholic majority was invincibly opposed, and few of Charles's English opponents were Presbyterians. Moreover, unlike the Scots, England lacked a single rallying point: instead of the National Covenant, there were two rival documents, the Protestation and the Book of Common Prayer. Choosing between them would divide communities and even families throughout the kingdom. However, Charles decided to build up a royalist faction in both Scotland and Ireland capable of defeating his opponents. The result was what Conrad Russell called a ‘billiard-ball effect’.64
The ‘Incident’: Scotland on Edge
Charles spent the summer of 1641 in Edinburgh, where he did his best to win over the Covenanters by attending Presbyterian church services, and by showering rewards on their leaders (Leslie became earl of Leven, Argyll became a marquis, Wariston became a knight). These gestures did not prevent his opponents from demanding yet more concessions, notably the right of veto over all major appointments (councillors, judges, great officers of state). Charles reluctantly granted this on 16 September – but in so doing, he created at last a royalist faction, composed of men whom the Covenanters would surely veto, and who therefore faced permanent exclusion from office. Over the next four weeks William Murray, Groom of the Bedchamber and Charles's intimate companion since boyhood, put together a plot to eliminate those whom he perceived as the king's leading Scottish enemies. One evening, in the king's bedchamber – a highly unusual location for a meeting – Colonel John Cochrane, a royal sympathizer in the Covenanting army, proposed to Charles a plot to lure Hamilton and Argyle into the royal apartments in Holyrood Palace, at a time when ‘the king were out of the way’. There he would arrest them both and take them under guard to Edinburgh Castle. Should their followers attempt to rescue them, then (in the words of one of the conspirators) ‘I would have the traittors’ throats cut’.65
The plot was thwarted because two of the soldiers charged with the arrests (and if necessary murder) revealed the plan to their potential victims, who fled Edinburgh on 12 October, leaving Charles to explain the ‘Incident’ to the Scots Parliament. Although the king denied all knowledge, three pieces of evidence incriminate him. First, during their interrogation by the Scots Parliament, Murray and the other plotters expressly stated that they had acted with his knowledge and consent. Second, it is hard to explain either the bedtime meeting with Cochrane or the plan to stage the coup in his private apartments, unless Charles was complicit. Finally, the
king gave himself away when on 5 October he annotated a letter from Sir Edward Nicholas, his Secretary of State in London. Next to Nicholas's news that the English parliamentary leaders were in high spirits because they believed events in Scotland favoured them, the king (in Edinburgh) wrote in the margin ‘I belive before all be done that they will not have such great cause of joy'; and that ‘when ye shall see littell Will: Murray’, Nicholas would know ‘how all will end heer’ – ‘littell Will: Murray’ being none other than the architect of the plot to arrest Hamilton and Argyll, as well as the confidential courier to whom the king often entrusted his secret letters.66 Nicholas immediately realized the significance of this message: the same day that he received the king's cryptic comments he observed to a colleague: ‘I wish that those who have been the cause of these miserable distraccons in his Majestie's dominions may feele the weight of punishment they deserve,’ adding ‘I doubt not that they will doe [so] in due time.‘67
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