The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only)

by Diane Purkiss

  Since the fall of Strafford, events stood on a knife edge, and were served by rumour, gossip, personal contacts. It is said to have been Henrietta herself who, Lady Macbeth-like, urged her husband to aggression. She is supposed to have told him, ‘Go, you coward, and pull those rogues out by the ears, or never see my face more.’ And Henrietta may have had reason to fear that Parliament was preparing to move against her, personally. It had removed Strafford; it had attacked Laud. Of its great enemies, only she was left. And Charles may have seen himself in nightmares reluctantly signing her death warrant too.

  Charles became convinced that strong action against a tiny band was all that was needed to give him back his life, his court, his rule. He was a knight-errant. He was, it turned out, Don Quixote, living in a world that did not exist. Like other mildly stupid people, he gave no thought to what would happen if his plans went awry and the bold action failed. He only saw the dazzling sun of success.

  On 4 January 1642, the king set off at about three o’clock for Westminster. He had decided to arrest his five worst enemies, those wretched fellows, Pym and his junto. He had identified the men he thought most dangerous – Pym; John Hampden, his old foe, who had spoken so stoutly for the Remonstrance; Denzil Holles, another Ship Money refuser; young Arthur Haselrig, who had suggested the plan to attaint Strafford, and (unexpectedly) William Strode. They were all men with a history of opposing him, but his shortlist of ringleaders omitted many key figures, including all Pym’s supporters in the Lords. Even if his expedition had been successful it would not have silenced all his critics.

  Charles knew he could find his quarries in the Commons. Accounts differ as to whether the king advanced on Parliament with his guards, or on his own, but it seems unlikely that even Charles would have set out to face a defiant House with only Prince Rupert for company. Bulstrode Whitelocke says ‘the King came, guarded with his pensioners, and followed by about two hundred of his courtiers and soldiers of fortune, most of them armed with swords and pistols’. Whoever he took with him, he was too late. The birds had flown, as he himself later quipped. The phrase shows that he saw himself as a hunter, a role in which he felt at home.

  For a moment he could not believe his failure. Charles looked desperately around the chamber for the men he wanted. He called their names, unable to give up hope that they were there. Then he asked the Speaker for his chair, with careful courtesy. It was like Charles to say ‘By your leave, Mr Speaker, I must borrow your chair’; the politeness and deference of his words emphasized rather than concealed the gross disregard of the Commons’ independence implied in his entry with armed guards. He knew how they might feel: ‘I must declare’, he said carefully, ‘that no king that ever was in England shall be more careful of your privileges’, but he went on, ‘yet you must know that in cases of Treason no person has a privilege’.

  The House was not impressed. As Charles left, in defeat, the Commons roared ‘Privilege! Privilege!’ The cry was echoed by the London crowds next day.

  Historians do not quite like the idea that it was Lucy Hay who warned the Five Members, but this is no mere fantasy invented by romantic lady novelists. There are contemporary voices who believed it to be true. Philip Warwick saw Charles’s plans frustrated by the countess personally: ‘Yet his coming to the Lower House, being betrayed by that busy stateswoman, the Countess of Carlisle, who has now changed her gallant from Strafford to Mr Pym, and was become such a she-saint, that she frequented their sermons, and took notes, he lost the opportunity of seizing their persons.’ Thomas Burton, for example, in his diary of Cromwell’s Parliament, quotes Haselrig himself as the source for Lucy’s intervention:

  The King demanded five members, by his Attorney-General. He then came personally to the House, with five hundred men at his heels, and sat in your [the Speaker’s] chair. It pleased God to hide those members. I shall never forget the kindness of that great lady, the Lady Carlisle, that gave timely notice. Yet some of them were in the house, after the notice came. It was questioned if, for the safety of the house, they should be gone; but the debate was shortened, and it was thought fit for them, in discretion, to withdraw. Mr Hampden and myself being then in the House, withdrew. Away we went. The King immediately came in, and was in the house before we got to the water. The queen, on the King’s return, raged and gave him an unhandsome name, ‘poltroon’, for that he did not take others out, and certainly if he had, they would have been killed at the door.

  Similarly, the poet John Dryden remarks that ‘Mr Waller used to say that he would raze any Line out of his Poems, which did not imply some Motive to virtue, but he was unhappy in the choice of subject of his admirable vein in poetry. The Countess of C. was the Helen of her country’ – as if the war had been fought over Lucy herself. Bishop Warburton called her ‘the Erinnys of that time’, and claimed that she was the source of information and intelligence ‘on his majesty’s intentions’.

  It was not only Restoration writers who saw Lucy as the chief instrument of knowledge. Henry Neville, republican intellectual, portrayed her as Pym’s lover in 1647: ‘first charged in the fore-deck by Master [Denzil] Hollis, in the Poop by Master Pym, while she clapped my Lord of Holland under hatches’. Astrologer William Lilly, though he names another party as the direct source of Pym’s warning, provides information about leakages from the king’s secret councils via the queen’s circle: ‘All this Christmas, 1641, there was nothing but private whispering at court, and secret councils held by the Queen and her party, with whom the King sat in council very late many nights.’

  Lucy was certainly still a visible member of the queen’s party, but events show that her heart by now lay elsewhere. Lucy liked and embraced change. While her sister, equally ambitious, married a staid aristocrat of whom her father thoroughly approved, Lucy had married a young man of fashion. Tiring of him, she fell in love with an authoritative statesman of pronounced political philosophy. Neither choice was remotely snobbish; if anything, Lucy seemed particularly attracted by men with more than a touch of the people in their makeup. When her statesman fell, Lucy seems to have fallen in turn for his intelligent foe, John Pym, another change for her. Here was a man who was like her previous lovers in intelligence and power, but who was capable of showing her quite another world, a world to which she was attracted by its very difference.

  It is also quite possible that Lucy – just like the rest of Pym’s followers, and a strong minority of the nation – was outraged by Charles’s behaviour. No Catholic, she disliked the influence exerted by Laud on the Church. Her personal attraction to Strafford may have been strong, but she may not necessarily have sided with him on questions of absolutism, and his fall and the king’s willingness to sign his death warrant may have done something to put her off the absolute power of monarchy, as well as forcing her to realize that it was not in fact absolute. This may not have been a matter of direct personal vengeance either. Lucy had just seen a great self-made man struck down by the king. To a woman who had spent years trying to advance herself and her family in the eyes of a monarch, this cannot have been very reassuring. It might have reminded her of her father’s fate, or even of the entire history of the Percys, a family struggling to maintain a powerful aristocratic position without monarchic interference, which had seen several members executed for treason. Strafford’s death confirmed in Lucy Hay an ideology of monarchy limited by strong Protestantism and aristocratic counsel, an ideology she was to adhere to throughout the Civil War years. And odd as it may have seemed, Pym and the saints offered a more rational path to that goal than did any of those remaining about the king.

  Self-preservation, too, was always a central plank in Lucy’s motivation. If Lucy knew anything of Pym’s plans to impeach the queen, she may have become anxious that she would herself be implicated.

  Strafford’s death was a warning that no one could escape by virtue of position or rank. It may have seemed sensible to have a foot in both camps. And since she was almost certainly not the only one who
disclosed the king’s plans, it was sensible. Strafford’s fall from power was a warning. It might have looked like the beginning of the end for everyone in the king’s and queen’s immediate circle.

  Ironically, too, if Lucy did send a message to Pym, it may suggest that he was more circumspect with her than others had been, for some historians think that Pym lured Charles into the rash invasion of the House, that the whole attempted arrest was a trap. If so, Pym may have been making use of Lucy, knowing only too well that she had a foot in both camps and an eye on the winning side. If Lucy was lurking in Pym’s camp to gather information, then he may have used her to leak unreliable information to the queen’s circle, even to bait the trap he was setting for the king. Is it significant that it was Henrietta’s urgings which sent the king to the House, her interests which prompted him to act so rashly? Perhaps Lucy Hay betrayed her friend the queen not by giving away her plans, but by unwittingly giving her false information. Who was using whom?

  Somewhere, Pym and the other members hid while Charles and his men burst into the Commons. Rumour said that they took refuge in the Puritan stronghold of St Stephen’s Coleman Street, very near the Guildhall. It was ominous that the new state wrapped itself protectively in the folds of the church, ominous and predictive of what would become a Parliamentarian theocracy of sorts. They were able to enter the Guildhall the next day, to cheers.

  These events left Charles and Henrietta thoroughly scared, and after a failed bid to persuade the London aldermen to give up the errant members, on 10 January 1642 they packed their bags and abandoned Whitehall for Hampton Court. It was Charles’s second disastrous mistake in under a week. The king and queen knew that when the House reconvened it might go on to impeach the queen as the one who had invited the ‘Jesuited papists’ who threatened the nation into the country in the first place. They had sensed the mood of London when Charles rode to the Tower the day after his disastrous invasion of the Commons. ‘Sir, let us have our liberties,’ cried someone in the crowd, ‘we desire no more.’ The Christmas holidays meant that London’s apprentices, always volatile, were available to demonstrate. On 6 January there was a panic in the City as vast crowds thronged public spaces; a fight broke out between the king’s supporters and demonstrators at Westminster Abbey, and Sir Richard Wiseman was killed. The demonstrators took up a collection to pay for Wiseman’s funeral, though, and the French ambassador commented on how calm the crowds were in comparison with crowds in Paris.

  In the Guildhall it was the same. ‘Parliament, Privileges of Parliament’, shouted some. Others shouted back ‘God bless the king’. But there were not enough of them, and – with no military effort at all, without even a show of real opposition – Charles’s opponents achieved the tremendous victory of persuading him to vacate London.

  In doing so, Charles lost prestige. He lost credibility as the inevitable, the unconsidered government. And he lost the Tower, with its mint and its armoury, and the London militia. Perhaps the capital had become peripheral to him. He had had dreams of a new London that would reflect the order and ceremonial he loved, but it had failed to materialize from the mongrel old city, crowded with unregulated houses of worryingly diverse and muddled shapes. Early in his reign, Charles had grandiose schemes for London; he issued proclamations to regulate new building, enforce the use of better materials, and impose some semblance of town planning. He wanted to rebuild and beautify Whitehall itself, but also the great cathedral of St Paul’s, so tumbledown and so given up to profane activities that Charles felt it was unworthy of his capital. He wanted to demolish the existing jerry-built medieval housing to forward these schemes. He wanted London to reflect his own ordered family, his well-regulated court. He disliked the continued residence in London of those who, he felt, should be in the provinces looking after their tenants; the gentry were strictly prohibited from neglecting their estates in the country and the duties they should be performing there by residing in London all year round.

  The problem with all this was that the London corporation was unenthusiastic. And as often, when Charles couldn’t realize his fantasies, he turned his back. During the period of his personal rule, Whitehall had become just another palace, like Hampton and Oakley and Greenwich. He knew nothing first-hand of the vast activity that surrounded his court – the trade, law, business, finance, the sheer human pressure of what was in a few short years to become the greatest city in Europe. He had always avoided it. He hated the London crowds that reached out to him, hoping his touch would heal their sores. He had not visited the great shipyards at Poplar that had loomed over Anna Trapnel’s childhood, nor seen the first ships of the East India Company dropping anchor in Poplar docks laden with luxuries. He had seen only the luxuries. Now this city, invisible to Charles, was to be his downfall. He had refused to see it, and London, not the city to take a slight lightly, never forgave him.

  Like all wars, the Civil War was expensive, and the money to pay Parliament’s army came from the public. London alone provided between a quarter and a third of all the money spent by Parliament. And yet at the same time business was down; with the court gone the trade in luxuries, which had been booming, collapsed. And with the king away, Parliament at once acted to alter the social fabric of the city. The theatres were closed, the traditional holidays abolished: this threw still more people out of work.

  Not everyone was miserable as the conflict deepened. Woodturner Nehemiah Wallington was happy, because his London was a godly city once more. For him, all events were a rich source of moral lessons. This was a man who, when his house was burgled in August 1641, tried to see in it the correcting hand of God’s providence: ‘because the Lord doth see the world is ready to steal away my heart, therefore, he doth it in love to wean me from the world’. But Wallington, like other godly folk in London, lived in terror that his bounty of spiritual surroundings might be taken from him. He was also a workaholic who adjured himself to wake at 1 a.m. to write, and who decided to miss a spring expedition across the fields to Peckham with his wife and daughter in order to stay at home and worry about ‘the sadness of the times’.

  Even before the war, London had outgrown law and order – the king’s palace at Whitehall, like some manor surrounded by new estates, was now at the heart of a troublespot. The Middlesex suburbs contained a high proportion of the disorderly poor – to the north and west, as well as to the east. The large number of apprentices and other migrants – young, poor, male and single – meant that turbulence within the city was endemic; the rallying cry ‘prentices and clubs’ symbolizes that threat. London was huge. It was constantly growing. And it was noisy: its streets resounded with pealing bells, the cries of street traders, the songs of buskers, the news cries of ballad-singers. Some traders made sure they were noticed with bells, horns and clappers. Every time you sat down in a tavern a fiddler and a flautist or two would appear, and expect to be given a fee for cacophonous playing. Alehouses were noisy. But almost all houses in London except the very grandest were right on the street. The clatter of carts, and of water-carriers on cobbles was almost constant. Dogs barked and howled. There were more and noisier birds: rooks and jackdaws were once common in the city. And London talked; from the upper storeys Londoners could eavesdrop on neighbours or shout abuse at them.

  It wasn’t just the noise of London that a countryman might have found surprising. London was also smelly. If we could travel back in time and sniff the London air, we would be suffocated not by the smell of sewage, but the pervasive acrid reek of coal fires. As the seventeenth century progressed, industry moved into the East End and Southwark, and the smells it produced lessened. When slaughterhouses were moved out in the 1620s and 1630s, the city lost the noise and mess of pigs, cows and sheep driven through the centre. There was also less noise from smithies, tanneries and the like, but the shouts of those advertising bear-baiting and prize-fights went on. So did town-criers, shouting the time, the news, the dead, the ‘For Sale’ notices. The noise did have a term: there was a cur
few, and the nights were much quieter.

  In the period of personal rule, Charles had relied on the London money market as well as on his subjects for forced loans, and in the crisis of 1640, when the royal forces’ defeat in war coincided with a widespread refusal to pay outstanding taxation, the City’s financiers declined to continue to support the regime. Some rich men were ruined in Charles’s fall, which may have made the others less keen to bail him out. Once the Scots were seen successfully to resist the king, some of the discontent that had been bubbling beneath the surface in London, repressed by Laud, became visible. After all, in 1637 John Lilburne had been whipped at the cart’s tail for publishing an attack on the bishops, and in the ‘liberties’ outside the jurisdiction of the City, there were separated congregations, church groups that had declared their independence of bishops and priests. Cheaper, open-air theatres staged plays openly critical of the court.