A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  But for the most visible, audible and energetic group – Pym, Oliver St John, Sir Arthur Haselrig from Leicestershire, Brooke, Saye and Sele – who took control of the parliamentary agenda from the beginning, this was not, and would never be, enough. Only Zion sufficed. The destruction of Laud would be a pyrrhic victory unless it got rid of the institution of the episcopacy altogether and replaced it by a godly Presbyterian Church, much as the Scots, whom they now treated openly as allies, had done. (When the king at the opening of parliament rashly referred to them as ‘rebels’ he was forced to retract the forbidden word a week later.) On 11 December a petition (petitioning having become a major weapon in the mobilization of opinion) on behalf of the City of London demanding the abolition of the episcopacy, ‘root and branch’, was presented to parliament. Pym was much too astute to press the issue on the Commons, knowing how divisive it would be and wanting to protect a tactical majority for Strafford’s impeachment. The radical controlling minority also had something much more far reaching in mind when they considered the restructuring of the constitutional relationship between Crown and parliament, in effect, a Scottish programme for England – beginning with a triennial act, requiring the summoning of parliament every three years. When Charles signed the triennial act on 15 February 1641, he completed a circle of pure political futility. The war he had launched to suppress the Covenant and its works had succeeded only in transplanting it to England. Pym and his like-minded colleagues also wanted to make membership of the government not merely subject to parliamentary veto but directly accountable before the Lords and Commons and incapable of acting contrary to the expressed will of its majority. No longer would parliament be little more than a tax-sanctioning or denying body. Henceforth the Lords and Commons, as much as the king, would set the agenda. Henceforth it would be a legislator. No one was pretending yet that it could legislate without the king, but no one imagined that the king could legislate or choose his councillors in defiance of parliament. Pym was being spoken of (if Charles had any sense) as a possible future member of the Privy Council.

  Huge amounts of ink and paper have been used to insist that this kind of alteration was no revolution at all. But to treat it as a mere adjustment absurdly short-changes its overwhelming novelty. It’s quite possible, as a fresh generation of historians has bravely reminded us, to be so frightened of committing Whiggery, of reading history backwards that we fail to give disruption its due. The fact that the authors and instruments of these profound changes had, until the last minute, little inkling of their long-term consequences does not for a minute dilute their significance. Revolutions invariably begin by sounding conservative and nostalgic, their protagonists convinced that they are suppressing, not unloosing, innovation. There’s nothing so inflammatory as a call for the return of an imagined realm of virtue and justice.

  To look at the doings and utterances of the Long Parliament, and at the immense political upheaval unfolding in the streets of London and on its printing presses, is to be convinced that its protagonists were correct in their belief that they were engaged in a battle of principles over both Church and state and that the outcome would be as momentous as the crisis that produced Magna Carta, a document often on their lips. This was not, of course, the birth of parliamentary democracy (not even the most Whiggish of the Victorian historians ever supposed so), but it was, unquestionably, the demolition of absolute monarchy in Britain. And it was the prospect of this that filled the hearts of men such as the Earl of Warwick, Sir Robert Harley, Oliver St John and Oliver Cromwell MP with racing excitement.

  This revolution had no manifesto until the Grand Remonstrance of November 1641. Instead, it had a trial. Almost invariably great political upheavals require an arch-malefactor against whom the righteous can define themselves in the new community, and the Scottish peace negotiators, received warmly by the parliamentary leaders even though their armies were occupying much of northern England, made it quite clear that they wanted Strafford’s head for threatening their own revolution with an invasion of Irish Catholics. Robert Baillie, a relatively moderate Scots Calvinist, had no hesitation in referring to Laud and Strafford as ‘incendiaries’ who, if left at liberty or even alive, would never stop until they had reduced the country to a papist despotism. And Pym himself had enough respect for Strafford’s formidable abilities to know that his own reconstruction of English politics could move safely ahead only when the earl was permanently out of the way. Moreover, Strafford’s peculiar success in impartially alienating each of the three Irish communities (something he was rather proud of) now left him with no friends.

  All the same, he would not be an obliging scapegoat. To stereotype Strafford as ‘Black Tom Tyrant’, the thuggish bully of the personal rule, was to make a terrible mistake. This was, after all, still the Thomas Wentworth who in the late 1620s had mounted a passionate attack against the forced loan, a man who had at least as deep an understanding of the law as the barrister John Pym. Strafford knew that Pym needed a full public show trial, duly observant of the procedures of the law, to uphold the superiority of justice over force, and he also knew that his prosecutors would have the greatest difficulty in turning criticisms of his administration in Ireland into acts of treason. Alone in the Tower, pondering his chances, Strafford nursed precisely the touching faith in the impartiality of the law and of English justice that his vilifiers claimed he had so consistently abused. How could he possibly be condemned, he must have asked himself, for violations of laws not yet passed when the alleged violations were committed, for acts of state that, at the time, were perfectly in keeping with the king’s expressed will?

  Through the seven weeks of the trial in the House of Lords, from March to April 1641, Strafford, not looking at all the part of Tom Tyrant, grey-whiskered and obviously sick, his head covered in a fur-lined cap, conducted his own defence with compelling logic, tearing apart all the inconsistencies and weaknesses in the evidence presented by his prosecutors. It was easy enough to demonstrate that he had walked roughshod over all kinds of persons and interests in Ireland – the Irish Catholics, by continuing to dispossess their lands (not that anyone in the English parliament minded that); the Old English, by seeking to expand the plantations into Connacht and trespass on the Pale; most damagingly, the Ulster-Presbyterian Scots and English, by strengthening the episcopal Church of Ireland and regulating their trade – but none of it amounted to treason. On the contrary, it had all been done to maintain the king’s authority as loyally, impartially and firmly as was within his legitimate power as Lord Deputy. The only count among the twenty-eight charges remotely capable of making the case for treason was number twenty-three, which rested on a remark, said to have been uttered by Strafford, that he would send an Irish army to ‘reduce this kingdom’. It had never been a secret that this had been part of the strategy to achieve victory over the Scots, and Strafford reasonably argued that at the time, in the spring and summer of 1640, the two nations had still been at war. The gravamen of the charge, suggested by the New English planter from Antrim, Sir John Clotworthy, was that by ‘this kingdom’ Strafford had actually meant England, not Scotland, and that he had sought to destroy parliament and the liberties of the people through an armed coup d’état. That would, indeed, have constituted treason. Strafford continued to deny that he had ever intended such a thing for England and to attack the credibility of verbal testimony, at which point a written note containing the same ominous phrase was introduced in evidence by Harry Vane the younger, who had discovered in the papers of his father, the Secretary to the Council, the records of the meeting in which Strafford had suggested bringing over the Irish army. But it was not in Strafford’s hand, merely a note claimed to be a verbatim, contemporary record, and by mid-April it was far from clear that the Vane note, by itself, would be enough to convict as long as the trial continued to be conducted according to the regular conventions of impeachment.

  But Strafford’s trial was, of course, not at all a normal judicial event, more
a public theatre of disgrace and retribution. Every day the House of Lords and the streets and courtyards around it in Westminster were packed with huge crowds, hungry for news of the day’s events. Handbills, broadsides and improvised petitions created a sea of paper for the crowd to wade through. Ballads were sung; sermons were preached against the pope-friendly Strafford. Nehemiah Wallington, who was among an immense throng flocking to the House of Lords at the beginning of May to petition for the death of the earl, said he had never seen so many people in all his life, ‘and when they did see any lord coming they all cried with one voice, “Justice! Justice!”’ What Wallington was witnessing, again without knowing it, was another element of modern politics, the fever of the crowd, beginning to make itself felt.

  Without any precocious understanding of the concept, Pym, St John, Haselrig and the rest intuitively understood the need for ‘revolutionary justice’, that baleful euphemism for crowd-pleasing demonstrations of political annihilation. So in mid-April, Pym changed the form of prosecution from an impeachment, a judicial process that required a decisive burden of proof, to an act of attainder, which was passed in a legislative process and needed no more than a body of suspicious evidence to constitute a presumption of guilt. Attainder effectively converted a trial into a hearing on the security of the state. Oddly enough, an act of attainder actually solved the problem of conscience for some like Viscount Falkland who, while unable to agree that the evidence against Strafford rose to the severe standards required for a conviction for treason, was prepared to vote for attainder by the weight of suspicion. Falkland and those like him believed that Strafford had, in fact, become a conspirator against the liberties of the country, and they were happy to be relieved of the bother of worrying precisely how this came to happen.

  The only problem with an act of attainder was that it required the king to sign it. A day after it went through the Commons by 204 to 59 votes, Charles had written to Strafford. promising that he would not abandon him or repay his loyalty by allowing his loss of life, honour and fortune. And on 1 May 1641 Charles, who had been ostentatiously cordial and friendly towards Strafford throughout the proceedings, told the Lords that his conscience would not allow him to sign. Once again the king had managed to act directly against his own best interests. The whole point of the proceedings had been to deflect popular hatred and rage from the king himself (and from the queen, whose Catholic circle was becoming a daily target for the anti-popery lobby) and to safeguard the constitutional possibility of a new beginning. But Charles, and especially Henrietta Maria, believed they had other cards to play: a soft-line strategy, suggested by the Earl of Bedford, which involved bringing Pym in to the Privy Council, and a hard-line strategy, which involved getting his own loyal troops to the Tower and encouraging a move by some officers in the army to free Strafford, if necessary by force. In the end, it was Strafford himself who saw clearly where this was heading – towards chaos and bloodshed – and who decided on an extraordinary act of pre-emptive self-sacrifice. On 4 May he wrote to the king asking him to sign the act.

  May it please your Sacred Majesty . . . I understand the minds of Men are more and more incensed against me, notwithstanding Your Majesty hath Declared that in Your Princely opinion I am not Guilty of Treason, and that You are not satisfied in Your Conscience, to pass the Bill.

  This bringeth me in a very great streight, there is before me the ruine of my Children and Family, hitherto untouch’d . . . with any foul crime: Here before me are the many ills, which may befall Your Sacred Person and the whole Kingdom, should Your Self and parliament part less satisfied one with the other, than is necessary for the preservation both of King and People; Here are before me the things most valued, most feared by mortal men, Life and Death.

  To say Sir, that there hath not been strife in me, were to make me less man, than, God knoweth, my Infirmities make me; and to call a destruction upon my self and my young Children . . . will find no easy consent from Flesh and Blood . . . So now to set Your Majesties Conscience at liberty, I do most humbly beseech Your Majesty for prevention of evils, which may happen by Your refusal, to pass this Bill.

  On 10 May Charles signed the act, it’s said with teary eyes, and almost without noticing what he was doing signed another, much more revolutionary bill presented to him, which prohibited the dissolution of parliament without its own consent. At the same time he wrote a letter to the House of Lords urging clemency, ‘mercy being as inherent and inseparable to a King as Justice’, and for Strafford to remain in prison for the rest of his life. ‘This if it may be done without the discontentment of my People, would be an unspeakable contentment to me.’ The Prince of Wales delivered the letter the following day, and on the day after that, 12 May, Strafford went to the block, protesting: ‘In all the honour I had to serve His Majesty, I had not any intention in my heart, but what did aim at the joint and individual prosperity of the King and his People.’ From his window in the Tower, Laud watched the execution. He never forgave Charles the betrayal, noting in his diary that the king ‘knew not how to be, or to be made, great’. But then Charles never forgave himself. He truly believed that his own execution, eight years later, was God’s proper judgement on him for consenting to the death of a loyal servant.

  Strafford was right to think that his death would be a national catharsis: a chance for the country to vent its anger on a convenient scapegoat but also an opportunity for the king, if he was shrewd, to cut his losses and stabilize his position. There was no doubt that the brutal business of the attainder had made some who were originally among the government’s fiercest critics profoundly uneasy. Was one kind of arbitrary power to be exchanged for another?

  Once both the earl and the institutional symbols of the old regime – the prerogative courts, ship money, communion rails – had been swept away in the summer of 1641, many on the benches of both the Lords and the Commons, and many more among the county communities of gentry and justices, began to ask themselves why the self-appointed tribunes like Pym continued to bang on relentlessly about tyranny and conspiracy. Although the Root and Branch Petition to abolish the episcopacy was steered through two readings in the Commons by Sir Robert Harley (to the proud delight of Lady Brilliana), it stalled badly in the Lords. Harley had to content himself with becoming the new Thomas Cromwell, overseeing a survey of the condition of parish churches (an ominous inquiry) and in Herefordshire pulling down the cross at the local Wigmore church in September 1641, causing it ‘to be beaten to pieces, even in the dust, with a sledge and then laid . . . in the footpath to be trodden on in the churchyard’. To overcome the opposition of the Lords, compromises were made, disappointing the more intensely Calvinist Scots. If this were Presbyterianism, it was a very English kind: committees of nine laymen to replace the bishops, Church government by the hunting classes. Even so, there were many among the hunting classes who wanted none of it, who were prepared to see an end to the surplices and kneeling, and perhaps even see crucifixes trodden in the churchyard, but who thought bishops – plain and modest bishops, not the lofty, over-ornamental, theologically obscure, philosophically grandiose, Laudian bishops – were a proper part of the Church of England.

  Others reacted to the outbreak of iconoclasm with deep horror. It was in the summer of 1641 that William Dugdale, the Warwickshire antiquary and genealogist, became convinced that there would shortly be a great and terrible obliteration. As he wrote in the introduction to his wonderful history of St Paul’s Cathedral: ‘Prudently foreseeing the sad effects thereof which by woeful experience were soon after miserably felt often and earnestly incited me to a speedy view of what Monuments I could find – the Principal Churches of the Realm, to the end that by Ink and Paper, the Shadows of them with their Inscriptions might be preserved for Posterity, the Things themselves being so near to Destruction.’ And off Dugdale went, sketching and transcribing, poring through muniments and cartularies, spending furtive mornings in front of tomb effigies and stained-glass windows, working just as fast
as he could to outpace the image-breakers, haunted by Lord Brooke’s threat to St Paul’s that he hoped ‘to see no one stone left upon another of that building’.

  Not everyone was quite so frantic. Noticing the backlash against the anti-bishop campaign, which by December included a decision to impeach twelve of them, a group of more moderate reformers, among them Edward Hyde, saw that Charles had a precious opportunity to exploit the divisions. It was their instinct (borne out by events twenty years later) that a non-absolutist but non-emasculated monarchy, the governor of the Church and the army, still possessed of legitimate prerogatives, including the right to choose its own government and to summon and dismiss parliaments, truly represented the wishes of the majority of the political nation. And it was from the clarity and strength of their convictions that constitutional royalism – hitherto a Stuart oxymoron – was born.