Global Crisis
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It is almost impossible to exaggerate the impact of this information. When, in 1659, the Puritan preacher Richard Baxter recalled by ‘what reasons I was moved to engage myself in the Parliament's warre’, he stressed above all ‘the odious Irish rebellion’, with ‘so many thousands barbarously murdered, no less (by a credible testimony) than a hundred and fifty thousand murdered in the one province of Ulster’. ‘If you say “What was all this to England”?’ Baxter continued, ‘I answer: We knew how great a progress the same party had made in England’, and therefore feared ‘to have been butchered by thousands, or fall into such hands as Ireland did. … Of all my acquaintances, I remember few that went into the Parliament Army but such as by their fears upon the Irish Massacre did seem and be moved to it, thinking that there was no other way to safety’ in England. The Irish events of October 1641, and the fear that Charles would allow the same to occur in England, was ‘the main matter that so satisfied so many of the intelligent part to side with the Parliament when the Civil War began’.8 Baxter's recollection is amply confirmed by the decision in February 1642 of the House of Commons, shamed and shaken by the depositions, to offer 2.5 million acres of land, to be confiscated from the Irish rebels, as security to those who would ‘adventure’ funds to raise troops to restore Protestant control, and to authorize an emergency tax of £400,000, to be assessed and collected by Parliament, not by the king.
Ireland was not, of course, the only pressing issue that required urgent attention from Charles and Parliament. Petitions poured in demanding action to end the recession. One from Essex, allegedly signed by 30,000 people, highlighted the crisis in the textile and farming sectors, where ‘many thousands are like to grow to sudden want’ – but it, too, came linked to sectarian demands: ‘Nor can we expect any redress thereof unless the bishops and popish lords be removed out of the House of Peers’. Outside Parliament, mobs of angry men and women ‘tumultuously demanded the exclusion of the bishops and of the Catholic lords also, and that the goods of both shall be distributed for the relief of their present needs, otherwise they threaten orally and in writing that necessity will compel them to take more violent measures’.9 The Lords succumbed, agreeing to exclude the bishops, and then also approved the Impressment Bill, which allowed Parliament to use duress to raise soldiers for the defence of Ireland. Charles grudgingly assented to both bills in March 1642, and then he left for northern England.
The parliamentary leaders continued to usurp the crown's executive functions – appointing men whom they trusted to take charge of the Tower of London, the arsenals of Hull and Portsmouth, and the Royal Navy – which so demoralized the king that when he arrived at York in April 1642 with only 39 gentlemen and 17 guards, even to one of his loyal supporters he ‘appeared almost abandoned by all his subjects’.10 Two months later a parliamentary committee charged with finding ‘how to prevent a Civil War’ presented him with ‘The Nineteen Propositions’, a document that sought to curtail yet more of the crown's executive powers: privy councillors, ministers, judges, fortress commanders and even the tutors for the king's children could henceforth take office only after parliamentary approval; there must be no more Catholic queens; Parliament must approve in advance the marriage of any member of the royal family; above all, the king must accept Parliament's right to raise soldiers when it chose.
Charles, now at York, warned that if his opponents persisted in demanding such radical concessions, then ‘at last the common people’ would discover ‘that all this was done by them, but not for them'; and then it would only be a matter of time before they ‘set up for themselves; call parity and independence “liberty”’. It would inevitably end with ‘a Jack Cade or a Wat Tyler’ (the leaders of popular revolts in 1450 and 1381 respectively). If he accepted the Nineteen Propositions, the king continued, ‘we shall have nothing left for us but to look on’ while Parliament ‘destroy all rights and properties, all distinctions of families and merit’ until ‘this splendid and excellently distinguished form of government end in a dark, equal chaos of confusion’. He therefore rejected the document.11
The Nineteen Propositions thus allowed the king to present himself as the champion of English tradition. He could now credibly claim that he stood for law and order against the ‘dark, equal chaos of confusion’, and his rhetoric soon gained widespread support. In July a pamphlet (originally delivered as a sermon) warned that in war ‘there is no distinction betweene the magistrate and the people, but Cade, and Straw and Tyler will beard the king, and give all judgements out of their lawlesse lips'; while a few weeks later a royalist peer wished that ‘my children had never been borne, to live under the dominion of soe many Cades and Ketts, as threaten by their multitudes and insurrections to drowne all memory of monarchy, nobility, gentry in this land’.12 The king also reminded his subjects that ‘I am constant for the doctrine and discipline of the church of England as it was established by Queen Elizabeth and my father, and resolved (by the grace of God) to live and die in the maintenance of it.’ His firm stand ‘caused much rejoicing, the people crying out “God bless His Majesty, we shall have our old religion settled again!”’; while several counties presented petitions to Parliament in support of episcopacy and the traditional liturgy. Moreover, since the king had brought a printing press with him, he now made full use of it both to issue orders and to stress that only the king could enact the measures ‘whereby the good and quiet people of our kingdom’ – what today would be called ‘the silent majority’ – ‘may be secured and the wicked and licentious may be suppressed’.13
King Charles's political instincts proved sound. The collapse of censorship had allowed radical religious groups to spring up, above all in London, which alarmed many ordinary English men and women. Moreover, Parliament proved powerless to end the widespread economic dislocation. The cloth merchants of Suffolk complained that they had sold virtually no wares for 18 months, while in Essex textile production fell by more than half, reaching the lowest level of the century. ‘The cries of the poor for work and their curses and threats’ spread fear that the unemployed ‘are now like to be reduced to extreme want and misery as they will be enforced to take some violent course for the relief of themselves and to spoil the richer and abler sort’. In August 1642 large gangs of unemployed workers in Essex and Suffolk began to attack and sack the houses of both local Catholics and prominent Protestant royalists.14
Both developments worked to the king's advantage. Those who dreaded either a collapse of public order or a religious free-for-all now made their way to York, where they joined high-profile courtiers terrified that they might share the fate of Strafford, Romans Catholics alarmed by Parliament's blood-curdling rhetoric and those who considered that, right or wrong, ‘majesty is sacred’. By July 1642 the House of Commons, which had once contained almost 600 Members, rarely saw even one-third of them turn up to vote, while the House of Lords numbered only 30 peers (one-quarter of the total). Many of the rest had rallied to the king.
The migration of ‘royalists’ (as they would soon be called) allowed those who remained at Westminster to take more radical steps. ‘King Pym’ and his dwindling group of supporters lashed out at anyone who spoke against them: scores of ‘scandalous ministers’ and discontented laymen joined half the bench of bishops and half the judges in prison. They also created a ‘Committee of Safety’, which levied forced loans on pain of confiscation (something expressly prohibited by the Petition of Right (page 330 above)); and, conscious that a successful English challenge to Charles still required Scottish involvement, they pushed through a religious programme expressly aimed at winning the support of the Covenanters – thereby further alienating those Englishmen who stood by the Book of Common Prayer.
Meanwhile Parliament's opposition to freedom of conscience in Ireland, along with rumours that it planned to send troops to ‘destroy and extirpate all that is there Irish and Catholic’, alienated many in Ireland; while the permission granted by the Lords Justices to its military officers
to ‘execute to death or otherwise by martial law any pillager, or any rebel or traitor’, and their resolution to target Catholic women, ‘being manifestly very deep in the guilt of this rebellion’, suggested what might happen when the reinforcements arrived.15 Therefore in June 1642, just as the king read and rejected the Nineteen Propositions, Ireland's Catholic leaders drafted an Oath of Association for their own defence. They also created a formal ‘confederation’ with its own General Assembly and Supreme Council headquartered in Kilkenny, which for the next seven years governed Catholic Ireland and pursued an active foreign policy, sending diplomatic representatives abroad and receiving accredited envoys from continental Catholic powers. The Confederation also raised and maintained its own army and navy to repel an English invasion.
They need not have worried. In August 1642, Parliament resolved to use the funds levied for Ireland to raise instead an army of 10,000 volunteers for its own defence, and named the earl of Essex its Lord General. Charles responded with a proclamation ‘for the suppressing of the present rebellion under the command of Robert earl of Essex’, and issued commissions authorizing his supporters to raise troops – an unequivocal declaration of war. Once he had gathered some 14,000 volunteers, the king embarked on his third campaign in three years and advanced on London, while Essex led his volunteers to stop them. On 23 October 1642, the first anniversary of the Irish rebellion, the two armies fought a pitched battle at Edgehill – the first on English soil for well over a century. Both sides suffered serious losses and disengaged, but instead of making a dash for London, Charles marched to Oxford, which he fortified and made his ‘temporary capital’. His choice gave Parliament time to organize the defence of London, and by the time the king's army reached the western outskirts it was outnumbered and had to withdraw to winter quarters.
By the end of 1642, Charles's supporters held Wales, the west of England and most of the Midlands and the north, while Parliament controlled the southeast, a few enclaves (many of them ports) elsewhere, and the navy. To win the war, Charles needed only to take London whereas his opponents could declare victory only after they had forced the king to surrender and secured control of the whole country. Scotland's leaders, exploiting the leverage provided by this unequal equation, offered to send Parliament military assistance on condition that every Englishman over the age of 18 swore to accept the Covenant and that the English Parliament took an oath to impose Presbyterianism in both Ireland and England. This programme enjoyed limited appeal in England and virtually none in Ireland; but the parliamentary leaders had little choice. In the despairing words of one observer in December 1643, ‘Our country makes as much haste as it can towards the miserable state of Germany, contrary parties having been all this winter in many counties still acting hostilities against one another, to the undoing of the inhabitants.‘16 The Westminster Parliament therefore accepted the divisive demands of the Scottish Covenanters, and in January 1644 the latter's well-trained troops entered England and joined Parliament's field army. The allies now far outnumbered the royalists when they met in July on Marston Moor, near York, in the biggest battle ever fought on English soil. In just two hours, the royalists lost 5,500 soldiers and control of northern England.
Nevertheless, Marston Moor did not end the war. First, Charles persuaded the Irish Catholic Confederates to send an expeditionary force to Scotland, compelling the Covenanters to recall most of their forces from England to defend their homeland. Next, the king lured Essex with the main parliamentary army deep into Cornwall, where in September 1644 he forced their surrender. Finally, the following month, Charles almost defeated the earl of Manchester, commanding the rest of Parliament's field army. These signal failures outraged many Members of Parliament including Oliver Cromwell, one of the architects of victory at Marston Moor. ‘The members of both Houses have got great places and commands,’ Cromwell warned the Commons in December 1644, and they will ‘not permit the war to speedily end, lest their own power should determine with it’. He therefore proposed (in effect) the dismissal of both Essex and Manchester and the creation of a new ‘national army’.17
Although Cromwell and his associates got their way in the Commons, the Lords refused to humiliate their colleagues. This paralysis encouraged the moderates on both sides to propose negotiations aimed at resolving differences on three contentious issues: religion, control of the armed forces, and Ireland. Although Charles agreed to the talks, he had already made up his mind on the first two issues. As he wrote in a secret letter to his wife (a strong opponent of negotiating with rebels), even before the talks began: ‘The settling of religion and the militia are the first to be treated on: and bee confident that I will neither quit episcopacy nor that sword which God hath given into my hands.‘18 The failure of the peace talks led the House of Lords to agree (albeit by only one vote) to appoint Sir Thomas Fairfax as Lord General of a ‘New Model Army’, to number 22,000 men, with Cromwell as his second-in-command, and in June 1645 they brought the king to battle at Naseby. Although this engagement, like Marston Moor, was soon over, the victory of the New Model troops proved decisive, for they captured most of the royalists’ infantry, artillery and baggage. They also captured Charles's coach, in which they found his personal archive.
The King ‘uncloath'd’
‘The king's letters taken at the late fight at Naseby’ proved (in the words of a London newspaper) ‘of as much concernment as all the wealthe and souldiours that we tooke’. After John Wallis, a young mathematician, had deciphered them, the House of Commons arranged a public reading of a selection of the secret correspondence between Charles and his wife and trusted ministers, notably the marquis of Ormond in Ireland. The audience greeted them with a combination of hissing (‘exhibilations’) and ‘a shout, as loud as that which the people gave Herod’ (a telling image). Parliament then commissioned a pamphlet, The king's cabinet opened, that included some of the letters together with a devastating commentary. Not only did the pamphlet sell well: it ‘sparked more controversy, measured in terms of other publications it prompted, than almost every other work of those prolific Civil War years’.19 Almost all of London's dozen or so newspapers reported it and one serialized it. A host of royalist pamphlets argued that the letters were forged (though obviously they were not); that they had been incorrectly decoded (hard to sustain); or that they should not be read because they had been written as private documents (too late to enforce). Two years later, a royalist writer admitted that publishing the letters had ‘uncloath'd the king’, and (as Derek Hirst has argued) helped ‘bring Charles to his trial, and to the executioner's block’.20
How could a pamphlet with fewer than 50 pages achieve so much? Some recent changes had created an unprecedented public interest in political developments both at home and abroad. First, thanks to the proliferation of schools in England and Wales, by 1640 a significant part of the population could read about the political and religious affairs of the kingdom directly. Second, due to the collapse of royal censorship, there was an unprecedented number of publications for them to read, many of them about politics: over 2,000 printed works appeared in England in 1641, more than in any previous year, and the number doubled in 1642 – an annual total unequalled for almost a century. By spring 1642 a London craftsman found ‘so many of these little pamphlets of weekly news about my house I thought they were so many thieves that had stole away my money before I was aware of them’.21 Third, although only one newspaper appeared in England in 1639, over 60 came out in 1642 (Figs 36 and 37). Each issue carried foreign and domestic news, including accounts of sermons and speeches taken down in shorthand by paid ‘reporters’ (another innovation), so that those who thirsted for political news could now ‘feel how the pulse of the king and kingdom beats’ on a regular basis. Thanks to these three innovations, England in the 1640s boasted the most animated ‘public sphere’ in the early modern world, ‘where claims and counter-claims could be asserted and negotiated, and where the range of princely and imperial power could be
questioned and contested’.22
Few pamphlets or newspaper articles packed the punch of The king's cabinet opened, however. As the preface promised, the ‘curtain is drawn, and the king writing to Ormond and the queen, what they must not disclose, is presented upon a stage’. Charles's secret letters complained about the stultifying dullness of his entourage in Oxford, ridiculed the peers and MPs who had rallied to him in Oxford as ‘our mungrell parliament here’, and made fun of the ambition of his ministers. In addition, the correspondence revealed that the king transacted ‘nothing great or small’ without his wife's ‘privity and consent’, even though (in the sanctimonious language of the editors) ‘she be of the weaker sexe, borne an alien, bred up in a contrary religion’. There was more to this charge than meets the modern eye: most people in the seventeenth century saw uxoriousness as a weakness. In the words of the best-selling manual A godlie forme of householde government (1612): ‘It is impossible for a man to understand how to govern the commonwealth, that doth not know how to rule his own house.’ The deference that pervaded Charles's letters to his ‘dear heart’, Henrietta Maria, would thus have led most readers to doubt his fitness to rule.23 Even more compromising were the king's attempts to solicit foreign military assistance; his promises to repeal the penal laws against English Catholics in England ‘as soon as God shall inable me to do it'; and, worst of all, his promise to grant full toleration to the Irish Catholics provided ‘they engage themselves in my assistance against my rebels of England and Scotland’. The last pages of the pamphlet contained a devastating selection of Charles's public statements that his private letters flatly contradicted. In the words of the editors: ‘The king will declare nothing in favour of his Parliament so long as he can finde a party to maintaine him in this opposition; nor performe anything which he hath declared, so long as he can finde a sufficient party to excuse him from it.’ The king's cabinet thus robbed the king not only of his ‘cloathes’ but also of his credibility.24