Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  Overwhelmingly, the king’s critics won these contests. Seemingly the entire political nation, with the exception of a few die-hard loyalists and slavish courtiers, agreed on what was wrong with the country and, for the first time, it was royal policy. What would eventually come to be called the Long Parliament first met in November 1640. Unlike previous parliaments, it was not to be dominated by privy councilors and officeholders. Rather, a group of leaders emerged whose reputations had been forged in previous disagreements with King Charles: in the Lords, the earls of Bedford (1587–1641) and Essex and William, Viscount Saye and Sele (1582–1662); in the Commons, John Hampden, Denzil Holles, Oliver St. John (ca. 1598–1673), and, above all, John Pym (1584–1643). Indeed, one of their first acts was to cut off the king from more conservative advice by having Strafford arrested. Their long-term goal was to limit the power of the king to do what he had done in the 1630s and thereby thwart what they feared was a popish–absolutist plot. The result was a sweeping legislative program confronting each of the five areas of tension described in this chapter.

  For example, one of their earliest bills addressed the sovereignty problem head on by stating that Parliament was not to be prorogued or dissolved but by its own consent. Charles’s agreement to this act ensured their permanency during the headlong race to reform. Along the same lines, they passed the Triennial Act, which required the king to summon Parliament at least once every three years. Second, they addressed the financial problem by prohibiting impositions, monopolies, Ship Money, distraint of knighthood, and the revival of the Forest Laws – that is, the whole fiscal program of the Personal Rule. As a corollary, they reaffirmed the illegality of taxation without parliamentary permission. Next, Parliament turned to the vexed matter of religion by eliminating the ecclesiastical courts and the apparatus of censorship which had so profoundly intruded upon the private lives of English men and women. Later, they would reverse many of Laud’s liturgical innovations. Parliament also abolished the prerogative legal tribunals by which the royal or episcopal will had been enforced: gone were the courts of Star Chamber, High Commission, Requests, and the Councils of Wales and the North. Finally, the House of Commons turned on Strafford, who was known to have urged the king to crush the Scots and to have pushed him toward other hardline measures. They impeached him on a charge of high treason, the first such parliamentary charges against a royal official of this rank since the Wars of the Roses. But the actual trial took place in the Lords. Strafford mounted an effective legal defense, arguing that doing the king’s bidding could be no treason, and his fellow peers were reluctant to convict him. So the Commons fell back on another old procedure to secure his death: a vote of attainder. (Later, in 1644, they would use the same expedient to condemn Laud.) Each of these measures reduced or interfered with the royal prerogative or changed the current constitution of Church or State. Thus, each had deep implications for the issue of sovereignty, as well as the more specific issues which they respectively addressed. Indeed, England, for a few brief months in 1641, might even be considered a constitutional monarchy.

  Of course, none of these measures, including the attainder of Strafford, could become law without the royal assent. After some hesitation, Charles gave it in every case. He felt that he had no choice, because he still needed the cooperation of Parliament in order, first, to pay the Scottish army and, eventually, to pay for an English army to fight them! As for the Scots themselves, they would wait and see. At some point in the early 1640s their goal became not simply to defend Presbyterianism in Scotland; it was to strike a bargain, perhaps with the king, perhaps with the parliamentary leadership, to impose Presbyterianism on England. As for Parliament, there was, in fact, little prospect of it voting the king funding for an army, for there was no trust between its leaders and the man who sat on the throne. Many members feared that, once voted, a royal army might be turned upon them, used to imprison those leaders and repeal their legislation.

  In fact, their fears were well grounded, for this is precisely what the king, the queen, and his advisers at court had in mind. Charles, in particular, believed not only that Parliament’s actions were sinful in themselves because they attacked the Great Chain of Being and his Divine Right; but that to cooperate with them would have been sinful as well. Instead, he pretended to go along, bided his time, and waited for an opening. Ironically, that opening came precisely because Pym and his supporters could not trust the king. This became obvious in May 1641 when it was learned that Charles had encouraged his army officers to rescue Strafford from the Tower in what came to be known as the Army Plot. The parliamentary leadership responded by rushing the earl to execution on May 12. As Essex so ruthlessly put it, “stone dead hath no fellow.”28 Simultaneously, Pym secretly encouraged the Scots to stand fast, so that the king would be forced to continue Parliament in being. So long as Charles was forced to do so, the parliamentary leaders could promote more and more radical legislation to reduce his power. Unfortunately for the parliamentarians, this strategy had a built-in flaw: the more radical Pym’s proposed legislation became, the less acceptable it was to moderates and conservatives in Parliament. These men might not have been happy with the king’s past policies, but they still wanted him to rule. With every measure pushing the constitutional envelope, Pym’s majority shrank while those who felt that he was going too far increased. Few would have sided with Charles in 1640; perhaps half the political nation would do so by 1642. This trend became clear in the summer and autumn of 1641, when Pym proposed a series of radical measures culminating in the Grand Remonstrance.

  The Grand Remonstrance was a rambling list of grievances against the king ranging over the whole of the reign so far. It concluded with two radical demands. The first was that the king should name as his ministers only men approved by Parliament. The second was that he should call a synod for a general reform of the Church of England. Many in the ruling elite thought that this was going too far. The first demand would establish a right of parliamentary oversight on royal appointments that is a standard feature of many constitutional governments today. But to contemporaries it was tantamount to eliminating the king’s ability to choose his own servants, making him, in effect, a figurehead. Worse, the second demand was widely taken as an attack not only on the bishops but also on the Book of Common Prayer and, thus, traditional forms of worship. Many country gentlemen loved their Prayer Book and opposed Puritan innovations in religion as staunchly as they had opposed Laud’s. Moreover, while they may have had little love for the bishops, they still associated episcopal authority with royal authority and order. Both were clearly on the ropes in the summer of 1641 as political, religious, and economic demonstrations became more common in London and the countryside. When Sir Edward Dering (1598–1644), a former anti-court MP, read with horror reports of mob iconoclasm in his home county of Kent, he spoke against the Remonstrance, lamenting: “I did not dream that we should remonstrate downward, tell stories to the people and talk of the King as of a third person.”29 Debate on the Remonstrance was spirited – swords were drawn in the House of Commons – and lasted late into the night of November 22–3. In the end, the Grand Remonstrance passed, but narrowly: 159 votes to 148. The losing 148 would form the nucleus of a Royalist bloc. Pym’s coalition had broken down as its more conservative element gravitated back toward the king. The next issue to arise in Parliament would harden those divisions and force them on the entire country. As before, the balance was to be tipped from one of Charles’s other kingdoms.

  The Crisis of Ireland

  During the autumn of 1641, as debate over the Grand Remonstrance raged in England, Ireland was, once again, gripped by rebellion. This violence was revenge for 30 years of English and Scots Presbyterian arrogance, exploitation, and religious persecution. It should be recalled that, following the last major rebellion in Ireland and the flight of the earls in 1607, the government in London had returned to the expedient of plantation: the forcible eviction of Gaelic and even “Old English” Catho
lic landowners and tenant farmers and their replacement by “New English” (actually English, Welsh, and Scottish Protestant) immigrants. The practice was carried through especially harshly in Ulster, the ancestral home of the O’Neills, now given over to Scots Presbyterians. Many Irish landowners and peasants were forcibly removed from their lands and the protection of their septs to the rocky and infertile western shore of the island. Those who remained became virtual serfs, paying exorbitant rents to often absentee Protestant landlords. Their new Protestant neighbors on the confiscated lands had nothing but disdain for their religion and culture. By the accession of Charles I, New English Protestants dominated the Irish government and parliament; yet the vast majority of the population remained Catholic, either in the form of the remaining Old English landlords or Gaelic Irish peasants.

  As in Scotland, the Crown maintained its power and some semblance of law and order in Ireland by playing each of these groups off against the other two. The most skillful and ruthless such player was Charles’s last lord deputy, Strafford, who had come to Ireland as Sir Thomas Wentworth in 1633. He had secured the cooperation of the Irish Parliament, leading to full treasuries and a powerful army, by promising the Old English to consider easing the penal laws against Catholics while at the same time promising the New English that he would enforce them! In fact, his failure to keep these promises combined with his ruthless continuation of plantation and his dedication to “Thorough” had eventually made him as hated a figure in Ireland as Laud was in England and Scotland. Nor did it help Strafford’s popularity that, in the tradition of countless early Stuart courtiers who were allowed to plunder the unfortunate island, he had enriched himself along the way. He had united Ireland, but only in opposition to himself.

  After Strafford returned to England to advise Charles in 1640, these groups went their separate ways. The New English, especially the Scots Presbyterians of Ulster, had more in common with the Scottish Covenanters and Pym’s forces in the English Parliament than with the rest of the Irish. Gaelic Irish sept leaders, feeling threatened by the success of the Scots Covenanters across the Irish Sea, began to plot rebellion in Ulster. They hoped that a weakened king might be forced to make concessions, including toleration for the Catholic Church. In the autumn of 1641, the Catholics of Ulster rose. As the Catholic Gaelic peasantry began to settle scores, the rebellion careened out of control. Some three to four thousand Protestant settlers were slaughtered outright. Others were stripped naked and forced to flee along the roads, a symbolic reminder, perhaps, that they had arrived in the plantations with nothing and would be forced to leave the same way. Symbolism aside, this was nothing short of a death sentence in a cold, wet winter: perhaps twice as many died of starvation and exposure. The Old English, repulsed by the bloodshed but fearing a Covenanter settlement in Ireland if they did not fight, and convinced that the Catholic side was actually the loyal one, joined the sept leaders in the Confederation of Kilkenny in 1642.

  The Irish Rebellion confirmed everything that English Protestants believed about Irish Catholics. By the time news of the rebellion reached London, the number of Protestant dead had been inflated to 200,000. Popular pamphlets described Catholic atrocities in lurid detail – “no quarter is given, no faith kept, all houses burnt and demolished, man, wife and child put to the sword.”30 Well into the eighteenth century, annual memorial sermons would recount this sectarian horror. More immediately, London was in an uproar. There was much sympathy for the murdered settlers; but also much fear that the Catholic Irish, no doubt assisted by the continental Catholic powers and the native English Catholic population, were about to invade, reestablish their religion, and put nonconforming Protestants to the sword. Worse, the Irish rebels claimed to be acting in the name of the king and had a forged document to prove his support. It was in this atmosphere that the Grand Remonstrance was proposed, debated, and passed.

  Obviously, another army was necessary to pacify Ireland. It was equally obvious that neither side in English politics trusted the other to command that army. In December 1641, the House of Commons introduced and passed a Militia Bill entrusting command to a lord general to be named by Parliament. At the same time, a group of Puritan merchants seized control of the civic government in London, closing off City funds to the king and putting its well-equipped trained bands at the service of Parliament. Charles could only regard these measures as an attempt to strip him of the last shreds of his prerogative: after all, even the most biased devotee of the Ancient Constitution would agree that the king’s most basic function had always been to lead the military. Worried that Parliament might move against the queen next, he responded with force. On 4 January 1642, accompanied by courtiers and royal guards with their swords drawn, the king marched into the House of Commons to arrest Pym and four other parliamentary leaders on a charge of high treason. Commandeering the speaker’s chair, his eyes surveying the membership, he called out Pym’s name, then Holles’s, but there was no response. The five MPs had got wind of their imminent arrest and fled. The king, exasperated, asked the speaker, William Lenthall, where they had gone. He replied with a ringing assertion of parliamentary privilege: “May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak in this place, but as this House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here.” In the short term, Charles was humiliated, forced to leave in a huff amid shouts of “privilege, privilege!” by his defiant Commons.31 In the long run, it was clear that there could be no peace, let alone cooperation, between king and Parliament. Nor did he feel safe in the Puritan-controlled metropolis. In February he put the queen on a ship bound for the continent and then fled with the court to York.

  By this stage, military action of some kind between king and Parliament was inevitable. That is not to say that either wanted war. Centuries of belief in the Great Chain of Being and monarchy were difficult to break. But now, with rebellion in Scotland and Ireland fueling military solutions in England, no one knew how to make peace. Each side armed itself, either in reaction to the violence abroad or out of fear of violence at home. Each could only view the other’s posture of “self-defense” as threatening war. In March, Parliament, fearing a popish plot, passed a Militia Ordinance and, acting on it without royal consent, seized all the garrisons it could and began to raise troops. In June, the king began to do the same, resorting to raising forces through a medieval precedent, the Commissions of Array. This presented local leaders with a difficult choice – whose order to obey? Finally, on August 22, 1642, King Charles raised the royal standard – tantamount to a declaration of hostilities – at Nottingham. The English Civil War had begun.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Civil War, Revolution, and the Search for Stability, 1642–1660

  A twenty-first-century tourist, visiting the battle sites of the American and British Civil Wars, might be surprised at how little the latter are commemorated today in Britain. Compare Gettysburg, littered with monuments to the combatants of both sides, to the absence of so much as a marker for most English battle sites of the 1640s before the nineteenth century, and the misplacement of both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century obelisks for the battle of Naseby! Most people in Britain have never embraced the revolutionary actions that resulted from its Civil Wars. Margaret Thatcher even claimed, during bicentenary festivities for the French Revolution in 1989, that Britain was great precisely because it had never had a revolution. If British attitudes to the events of the 1640s and 1650s are conflicted and ambiguous, it may be because, unlike the American Civil Wars, there was no clear “right” side for politically correct moderns to embrace. Rather, most participants, whether Royalists or Parliamentarians, soldiers or clergymen, sought to uphold some version of the established order. Nearly all claimed that they were defending traditional values and the core of the English constitution in Church and State. They just could not agree on what those values and core were.

  When the Long Parliament met in 1640, the political nation – nobility, gentry, and urban oliga
rchs – had been almost unanimous in their desire to undo the policies of the Personal Rule. But over the next two years, as the parliamentary leadership grew more radical in pursuit of that goal, a remarkable transformation took place. In the months following the king’s departure from London, some 236 MPs followed him, leaving 302 in the capital. What separated these two groups? While both agreed that Charles had gone too far in the 1630s, the former felt that Pym and his supporters had gone farther still in the opposite direction, and thus become the greater danger to the English constitution in Church and State. Put simply, this group of MPs worried less about royal tyranny and popery than they did about civil disorder and anarchy. They were unwilling to sanction a fundamental readjustment of the constitution in order to enhance Parliament’s power at the expense of the king’s. Nor did they want to see godly reformation of the Church if it meant tampering with beloved ceremonies and repudiating uniformity and discipline. They would go to war to defend a traditional order which they knew to be flawed but which, in their view, still represented the best interests of themselves and the nation. During the ensuing conflict, these men would come to be known as Royalists or Cavaliers.1

  Even among their opponents, there were very few in 1642 who wanted to depose the king and establish a republic. Most believed that they, too, fought for the proper balance of the English constitution and some went so far as to say that they opposed the king in order to defend him from malevolent advisers who were manipulating him into popery and tyranny. In any case, most on this side were committed so fully to the gains made by the Long Parliament, believed so fully in the existence of a Catholic–absolutist plot to subvert their religion and liberty, and distrusted Charles so completely, that they saw their only recourse in taking up arms against him. This group of MPs would come to be known as the Parliamentarians or Roundheads.2