Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Charles's attempted coup confirmed all previous suspicions that he was prepared to use violence against his English subjects. On the night of 5 January 1642 rumours flew ‘that there were horse and foot coming against the city. So that the gates were shut and the [port]cullices let down and the chains put across the corners of our streets, and every man ready in his arms’. In open defiance of the king, the London magistrates now called out the Trained Bands which escorted the ‘five members’ denounced by the king as traitors back to Westminster in triumph. Since the armed men in London loyal to Parliament now heavily outnumbered the ‘cavaliers’ (as Charles's swordsmen were known), had he remained in his capital (according to one contemporary) ‘the king had been like to have been torn in pieces by the citizens’. So on 10 January he fled with his family to Windsor Castle. Henrietta Maria fully realized the significance of this move: her husband, she told an ambassador, ‘was now worse than a duke of Venice’.90

  Charles I: A Problematic King

  In a celebrated passage of his history of the First World War, Sir Winston Churchill tried to reduce his own responsibility for the failure of an initiative by presenting the outcome as the result of a ‘sinister fatality’: a series of contingencies. ‘The terrible “Ifs” accumulate,’ he wrote, and he presented eight decisions that, ‘if only’ the protagonists had chosen differently, could have produced a positive outcome. Much the same argument has been made for the English Civil War: that it resulted from ‘“a sequence” of largely contingent events, which at a number of points might have ended in a peaceable victory for the king’.91 Like Churchill, we can easily list these ‘largely contingent events’ to create a ‘sinister fatality’. A ‘peaceable victory for the king’ might indeed have occurred if only the assault on Cádiz in 1625 had achieved even the partial success of the English attacks on the same city in 1587 and 1596; if only Charles had dismissed Buckingham and allowed other political leaders access to power and patronage; if only he had married a Protestant instead of a Catholic princess; if only he had left the liturgy of the Scots alone (or if only the government printer had not recycled the Prayer Book proofs, allowing its opponents time to mobilize); if only Charles had remained resolute at Berwick in 1639 (or if only the Scots had lacked an experienced commander like Leslie); if only Sir Phelim O'Neill had not acted a day early, so that some warning of the Catholic conspiracy could have reached the Protestant garrisons in Ulster …

  Although each link in this ‘sinister fatality’ may seem superficially plausible, they all rest upon three major ‘rewrites’ of history: a different inheritance; a different monarch; and different opponents. The newly created ‘kingdom of Great Britain’ was a composite state, and therefore had a lower political ‘boiling point’ than other polities, meaning that upheaval tended to arise sooner at times of stress (see chapter 3 above). Composite states required particularly sensitive handling when a ruler embarked on war, especially at a time of adverse climate – as Charles I did between 1625 and 1630 and again in 1639 and 1640. One can reasonably object that no sovereign could have foreseen the unusually adverse weather that would complicate military operations, but Charles could hardly plead ignorance of the fact that any war would force him to raise new taxes, and that this would inevitably cause both a clash with the House of Commons and popular resentment; yet on each occasion he decided to press ahead.92

  Charles likewise seemed oblivious to the disruptive consequences of changing traditional forms of worship at a time of economic crisis and spiritual uncertainty. As Conrad Russell perceptively remarked: ‘Measures designed to bring about unity in religion’ in more than one of the Stuart kingdoms, ‘no matter in the name of which religion they were undertaken, could unite a faction across the Border, but only at the price of the internal division and disruption of [the] countries to which it was applied’.93 Tens of thousands of Charles's subjects became involved in the political process mainly if not solely because they believed the king's policies imperilled their salvation. First in Scotland and then in England, ordinary citizens subscribed their name to public documents – the National Covenant and the Protestation, respectively – that they hoped would preserve their ancient faith, even though doing so set them on a collision course with their sovereign.

  Once again, Charles could hardly plead ignorance. As the late Kevin Sharpe noted, Charles worked hard at being king and exhibited an ‘obsession with ordering’. He regularly presided at Privy Council meetings (even convening special Sunday morning meetings to monitor the collection of Ship Money); he read and annotated incoming correspondence and scrutinized the credentials of candidates for state offices; and in matters of religion he commanded while his bishops executed. His personal intervention in the crafting and promulgation of both the Canons and the Prayer Book for Scotland did not stand alone. Charles also demanded from Laud an ‘annual account’ of his ecclesiastical province, which he read and returned with a barrage of schoolmasterly comments (‘This must be remedied one way or other; concerning which I expect a particular account of you’); demands for further information (‘I desire to know the certainty of this’); and promises to back up his archbishop's decisions with the full force of the Law (‘Informe mee of the particulars, and I shall command the judges to make them abjure’).94

  The ‘Obsessive personality’ (or, as Freud termed it, the ‘Anal personality’) is not rare among rulers, and in Charles's case it might have stemmed from his unhappy childhood, overshadowed until age 12 by his charismatic brother Henry, whose posthumous fame set a standard that Charles could never match – not least because of his diminutive stature and a life-long stammer. It is less easy to explain two other characteristics that complicated relations between the king and his subjects: inconstancy and irresolution. James I had once assured the English Parliament that ‘I will not say anything which I will not promise, nor promise anything which I will not sweare; what I sweare I will signe, and what I signe, I shall with God's grace ever performe.‘95 Charles was different: although he frequently and ostentatiously gave his ‘word as a king’, he often later reneged. Thus his policy towards the Scots in 1638–9 oscillated between implacable obstinacy (‘I would rather die than yield to those impertinent and damnable demands’) and abject capitulation at the Pacification of Berwick, with the result that his subjects gave ‘no credit’ to anything he said. Likewise, in 1641, two weeks after promising Strafford ‘upon the word of a king, you shall not suffer in lyfe, honnor, or fortune’, he signed the earl's death warrant; while the following year, after many vehement denials, he signed into law a bill depriving bishops of their right to vote in the House of Lords. Such retreats, in the words of Lord Clarendon, ‘exceedingly weakened the king's party’ strategically as well as tactically, because many of his supporters ‘never after retained any confidence that he would deny what was importunately asked’. Henrietta Maria saw inconstancy as her husband's greatest weakness and deluged him with rebukes about it. ‘Remember your own maxims, that it is better to follow out a bad resolution than to change it so often,’ she chided. ‘To begin, and then to stop, is your ruin – experience shows it you.’ Or ‘You are beginning again your old game of yielding everything'; and ‘[I hope] that you will not have passed the militia bill. If you have, I must think about retiring for the present into a convent, for you are no longer capable of protecting anyone, not even yourself.‘96

  Nevertheless, opposing Charles in the expectation that he would eventually give way was a high-risk strategy, eloquently expressed by the earl of Manchester, a parliamentary general whom Charles had earlier sought to arrest along with the ‘five members’. ‘It concerns us to be wary,’ he warned his colleagues, ‘for in fighting we venture all to nothing. If we beat the king ninety-nine times he would be king still, and his posterity, and we subjects still; but if he beats us but once we should be hanged, and our posterity be undone.‘97 Charles had often displayed both intolerance and vindictiveness. Admittedly, as Kevin Sharpe noted, he executed not a single subje
ct for treason or crimes of state (a striking contrast with both his fellow monarchs and the Republican regime that followed), but he had imprisoned and banished those who criticized him, ranging from Archie the Fool to the earl of Bedford. Moreover, in 1628 he urged his judges to torture John Felton (who had assassinated his Favourite Buckingham) and 12 years later he wrote out in his own hand the warrant authorizing the torture of a man suspected of leading the attack on Lambeth Palace after the dissolution of the Short Parliament. In 1639 and again in 1640 he led an army to ‘suppress’ his Scottish subjects, and in 1641 he almost certainly approved a plan to murder Hamilton and Argyle (the ‘Incident’). He would surely have executed Manchester and the ‘Five Members’ as traitors had Parliament passed their bills of attainder (they were, after all, guilty as charged).98

  For many of his opponents, Charles's actions not only smacked of political arbitrariness: they also raised fears of a Popish Plot. Every English parish church was supposed to have on public display a copy of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, filled with graphic examples of how in the past Catholics had tortured and killed English Protestants. A few political leaders in 1640 had witnessed Spain's attempt to invade England in 1588 (indeed, one of the 12 ‘Petitioning Peers’ had fought against the Armada), some could remember the ‘Gunpowder treason’, and almost all recalled the ‘Spanish Match’. Fear of ‘popery’ therefore formed a permanent part of opposition rhetoric in Stuart England. Its resurgence in 1641–2, in the wake of the traumatic news from Ireland served up almost daily in lurid pamphlets, was thus likewise not ‘contingent’ but entirely predictable.99

  These circumstances explain the insistence of Charles's enemies in the case of Strafford that ‘stone-dead hath no fellow’ – even though forcing the king to commit judicial murder significantly increased the risk of civil war. As Charles later wrote, ‘The failing to one friend has indeed gone very near me; wherefore I am resolved that no consideration shall ever make me do the like’ again. He refused to trust or keep faith with those responsible; and henceforth he made promises that he had no intention of keeping, because ‘I have set up my rest upon the justice of my cause, being resolved that no extremity or misfortune shall make me yield, for I will either be a glorious king or a patient martyr.’ In doing so, he plunged all his kingdoms into the most turbulent and destructive decades they would ever experience.100

  Politics, it is often said, is ‘the art of the possible’ – but what exactly was ‘possible’ in early Stuart Britain? Johnston of Wariston explicitly ruled out ‘retiring one single inch in this cause’ and he was not alone. In June 1638 Hamilton summed up Charles's Scottish dilemma with remarkable perspicacity: ‘How far your Majestie in you greatt wisdome will think itt [fit] to wink at ther madnesis, I dare not nor presume to advise,’ but ‘I dare assure you, till sume part of their madness hes left them, that they will sooner loose ther lives than leive the Covenantt, or part frome ther demands’.101 Once Charles had decided to impose a Prayer Book, come what may, nothing short of full independence for the Scottish Church would have satisfied Wariston and his associates. Likewise in Ireland, after the sudden dissolution of the Dublin Parliament in the summer of 1641, only implementation of the ‘Graces’ would have satisfied Maguire and his fellow conspirators.

  Perhaps Wariston was right: a peaceful resolution of the tension that developed in the Stuart Monarchy in the 1630s could only have been achieved through ‘the Lord's removal of Charles’ – if only he had died before January 1642, either from disease (he contracted smallpox in 1632, but in a mild form) or some accident such as a fatal fall from his horse (which would kill his grandson, William III).102 Given the temperament of the protagonists, once the Little Ice Age, combined with the ‘two great matters, religion and the reduction of the liberty of the people’, led subjects like Wariston, Maguire and Essex into opposing a monarch like Charles I, civil war became the most likely if not the inevitable outcome.

  12

  Britain and Ireland from Civil War to Revolution, 1642–89

  IN ‘THE CRUEL AND UNNATURAL WARS FOUGHT IN RECENT YEARS’

  Much innocent blood of the free people of this nation hath been spilt, many families have been undone, the publick treasure wasted and exhausted, trade obstructed and miserably decayed, vast expence and damage to the nation incurred, and many parts of this land spoiled, some of them even to desolation.

  Although this bleak assessment resembled those made about Germany during and after the Thirty Years War, it formed part of the indictment read out on 20 January 1649 by John Cook, ‘Solicitor-general for the Commonwealth’ of England at the first ‘war crimes’ trial of a sitting Head of State ever held: that of King Charles I. His execution ten days later brought about Britain's only experience thus far of Republican government, its first written Constitution, the first effective political union between all parts of the Atlantic Archipelago, and the foundation of the first British empire. It was, as Christopher Hill observed, ‘the greatest upheaval that has yet occurred in Britain’.1

  Moreover, in the words of Martyn Bennett, war ‘invaded the fields, the yards and the kitchens of the people. It took the linen off their beds and the mirrors off their walls’. It also killed about 250,000 men and women in England, Scotland and Wales, or 7 per cent of the total population (compared with some 700,000 people, fewer than 2 per cent of the total population, in the First World War and just over 300,000, not quite 1 per cent of the total population, in the Second World War). Between 1640 and 1660, several hundred thousand men and women were maimed or rendered homeless; and tens of thousands more were taken prisoner and enslaved by the conquerors in either England or America. In addition, a series of failed harvests and a plague epidemic produced in Scotland a famine of which ‘the lyke had never beine seine in this kingdome heretofor, since it was a natione'; and ‘so great a dearth of corn as Ireland has not seen in our memory, and so cruel a famine, which has already killed thousands of the poorer sort’. In 1652 an English soldier in Ireland reported that ‘You may ride twenty miles and scarce discern anything, or fix your eye upon any object, but dead men hanging on trees and gibbots'; while three years later one of his colleagues echoed that ‘a man might travel twenty or thirty miles and not see a living creature’ except for ‘very aged men with women and children’ whose skin was ‘black like an oven because of the terrible famine’. In the words of an Irish poet:

  This was the war that finished Ireland,

  And beggared thousands.

  Plague and famine ran together.

  In all, Ireland's population may have fallen in the 1640s and 1650s by one-fifth.2

  The conflict also caused unprecedented material devastation. In England and Wales, at least 150 towns and 50 villages suffered severe damage; and over 11,000 houses, 200 country houses, 30 churches and half a dozen castles were destroyed (and many more seriously damaged). The total cost of property losses exceeded £2 million.3 Moreover, to pay and deploy its armies, the central government in London extracted over £30 million in taxes and fines from the population, while the soldiers extracted many millions more directly. It is impossible to calculate a global cost for the war, but the experience of Cheshire between 1642 and 1646 offers an eloquent example: its inhabitants paid at least £100,000 in taxes and a further £120,000 in goods and services requisitioned directly by the soldiers. When sequestration, plunder and wanton destruction are included, the First Civil War cost Cheshire at least £400,000, or £100,000 a year. By contrast, the county's annual Ship Money assessment, which had featured so prominently in provoking the constitutional crisis of 1640, had been just £2,750. Moreover, like every other county, the citizens of Cheshire continued to pay huge sums to support the government and its troops for another 14 years.4

  Such precise calculations of material damage remain unavailable for Charles I's other dominions, but documents from the 1650s reveal serious depopulation in some areas of Scotland and Ireland (such as abandoned farms in the Borders and the lands of Clan Campbell in
the former, and parts of Ulster in the latter), due to deliberate damage inflicted by soldiers. In addition, the rioting in Edinburgh in 1637 began a train of events that resulted in the demise of Scotland as an independent nation for almost a decade; while the Irish troubles that began in 1641 opened social and cultural wounds that remain unhealed to this day.

  After considering these and other data, Ian Gentles observed that by any standard, Britain and Ireland paid an extremely high price ‘for overthrowing an arbitrary king, crushing the menace of popery, and conducting an 18-year experiment in republican government'; while J. H. Plumb noted that ‘By 1688 conspiracy and rebellion, treason and plot, were a part of the history and experience of at least three generations of Englishmen’. Plumb attributed this chronic instability to three defects: inadequate monarchs, badly advised; a Parliament at Westminster which the court could neither control nor ignore; and the ‘implacable hostility’ of London towards its Stuart sovereigns – a hostility graphically reflected in the decision of King Charles to abandon his capital in January 1642.5

  The Uncivil Wars

  A ‘Great Fear’ swept England in the winter of 1641–2, comparable in intensity to the ‘Great Fear’ that gripped France in 1789; but instead of reflecting the fear of famine, it arose from the perceived ‘danger from the papists and other ill-affected persons’ who stood ‘ready to act the parts of those savage blood-suckers in Ireland if they be not speedily prevented’.6 The mention of Ireland was significant, because news of the massacres that followed the uprising on 23 October 1641 – and rumours that the king himself had sanctioned the revolt – seemed to authenticate the long-standing fear of a similar atrocity in England. One-quarter of all pamphlets published in London in December 1641 carried news of Ireland, and this figure rose steadily to one-third in April 1642. None had more impact than the Remonstrance of diverse remarkable passages concerning the church and kingdom of Ireland drawn up by Dr Henry Jones, one of those who had taken down the sworn depositions of survivors of the uprising (see chapter 11 above). Having showed Parliament copies of the depositions of over 600 victims, he included lurid extracts from 78 of them in his Remonstrance.7