by Allan Massie
Charles was distraught, overcome by grief. Hitherto his relations with his young queen, Henrietta Maria, had been bad. She loathed Buckingham, and there were religious differences, for the Queen was a devout Roman Catholic. Charles was infuriated by her French servants, and, without consulting her, had dismissed most of them and sent them back to France. She made scenes and stormed and raved, and Charles was embarrassed and at a loss; he had no idea how to deal with an angry and passionate woman, or how to appease her. He took refuge in cold reserve and silence. But Buckingham’s murder changed everything. In his grief he turned to his wife. She consoled him and he fell in love with her. He would remain in love, never looking at another woman; there was to be not even a rumour of infidelity. He now depended on Henrietta Maria even more completely than he had on Buckingham. She was everything to him. He was guided by her in all matters except his own religion; and it was unfortunate that her advice was nearly always bad. She had no understanding of England, English people or English politics; not only no understanding, but little sympathy for them either.
The first four years of Charles’s reign were marked by recurrent quarrels with Parliament. The King and those elected to the House of Commons had different views of Parliament’s function. For Charles, the main purpose in summoning a parliament was to obtain grants of money, and if Parliament did not oblige, he was ready to seek other means of raising funds from his subjects, by forced – that is, compulsory – loans or by the revival of feudal rights, many of which had withered from disuse. The Commons on the other hand saw itself as the guarantor of the liberties of the subject and increasingly claimed to be entitled to press policies on the monarch, especially in the field of foreign affairs. Charles’s third Parliament, summoned in 1628, presented him with a document called the Petition of Right, which declared taxation without parliamentary consent to be illegal, and protested against imprisonment without trial, martial law, forced loans and conscription – this for the French war that the same House of Commons had demanded. The question, one member said, was whether the King was above the law or subject to it. That question would run like a sore throughout the reign, and Charles’s refusal to recognise its validity would eventually destroy him. Equally ominously, another member, by name John Pym, raised the question of religion, expressing disapproval of the doctrine that went by the name of Arminianism, and which, he said, was infesting the English Church. Arminius was a Dutch theologian who, as John Milton would put it, ‘set up free will as against free grace’, challenging the Puritan belief in predestination; it was, they thought, one step on the downward path that led to popery. Charles determined to bring the parliament to an end, but in defiance of all precedent, for there could be no doubt that the monarch was entitled to dissolve Parliament at will, the Speaker was held down in his chair while the Commons voted that innovators in religion (as they considered the so-called Arminians to be) were enemies of the kingdom, as surely as those who levied taxes without the approval of Parliament. The stormy session was at last concluded. The King dissolved Parliament in 1629 and did without it for eleven years. Parliaments, he said, were ‘like cats; they grow crabbit with age’.
Henceforth Charles governed, as the Tudors had governed, through his Privy Council. This was not in itself unconstitutional. Elizabeth, in her reign of forty-five years, had summoned only nine parliaments.1 Moreover she had been firm in declaring certain subjects – such as foreign policy and the question of her own marriage – to be beyond the remit of the Commons. Others might be discussed only with her express permission. Charles, taking no heed of the changing temper of the political class, saw no reason why he should govern differently, and it was indeed possible to govern without Parliament so long as he had no need to raise revenue additional to that provided by the Crown Estates, customs duties, the profits of justice and traditional feudal dues, though these last were now unpopular and thought by many to be out of date. The King incurred further unpopularity by stretching the power to exact these dues beyond what was thought to be their proper limit. The most notable case was that of ship money. This was a levy raised from maritime counties to be spent on the navy. Charles extended it to inland counties also. In 1635, a former MP, John Hampden, refused to pay the sum demanded of him. The matter went to the courts, and though the judges obediently found in the King’s favour, the imposition was regarded by many as unconstitutional, indeed tyrannical.
Two men were particularly associated with Charles in these years of personal rule. The first was Sir Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Strafford. He was a Yorkshireman who had been an MP in the difficult parliaments of the first years of the reign. A critic of Buckingham, he had later tried to have the presentation of the Petition of Right postponed. His failure, and the mood of the Commons, persuaded him, like Charles himself, that parliaments were an obstacle to good government, for their frame of mind was oppositional. In coming to this conclusion Wentworth was right, and had indeed identified a problem that would persist throughout the seventeenth century, and which would not be solved till Parliament, by encroaching on matters previously believed to belong properly to the royal prerogative, made itself an essential partner in government, and so acquired a sense of responsibility it had hitherto lacked. Wentworth, approving Charles’s decision to dispense with parliaments – for the meanwhile, that is – was made first president of the Council of the North, an offshoot of the Privy Council responsible for the administration of the northern counties of England. (There was also a Council of Wales and a Council of the (Anglo-Welsh) Marches.) His efficiency there commended him to the King, and he was then appointed Lord Deputy in Ireland.
Charles was King of Ireland as well as England and Scotland, but Ireland was in a sense a dependency, a species of colony. There was an Anglo-Irish upper class, many the descendants of Norman adventurers who had seized land and settled in Ireland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These were now mostly Protestants, members of the Anglican Church of Ireland. But the native Irish remained Catholic and Gaelic speakers, and had engaged throughout the last twenty years of Elizabeth’s reign in sporadic rebellion, sometimes with help from Spain. The heartland of the rebellion was Ulster, but with its defeat and the ‘Flight of the (Gaelic) Earls’ to Catholic Spain soon after James’s accession, a new policy had been devised by the Scottish king. This was the Plantation of Ulster, colonised for the most part by Lowland Scots Presbyterians. Wentworth introduced stern and effective government, but disaffection remained rife, and Ireland was a tinderbox waiting to explode.
The King’s other chief associate was William Laud, Bishop of London from 1628 to 1633 and then Archbishop of Canterbury. Laud was a devout man whose view of the Church of England was the same as the King’s. Believing in ‘the beauty of holiness’, he sought to introduce order and more ceremony to Church services. Like the King, he took no account of the range of opinion within the Church, and his persecution of preachers who offended him by too free an expression of opinion provoked many and contributed to the spread of disaffection. Indeed, his hostility to Puritanism, and the close censorship of opinion he tried to enforce in both speech and writing, strengthened the opposition he was determined to suppress. He had no political sense, no understanding of what was possible, confusing this with what he thought desirable; and it was unfortunate that the King he served suffered from the same deficiency. Laud’s narrowness of outlook, and sharpness of temper, and especially his use of the Prerogative Court of High Commission to punish dissidents and subversives, contributed to the gathering unpopularity of the royal government. Many thought him likely to convert to Catholicism, which he was far from doing, but confusing his love of ceremony with popery, his critics feared and detested him, thinking him a quasi-papist. His unpopularity was extreme, but Charles trusted him, implicitly, disastrously. Even mockery of the Archbishop was forbidden, though mockery of the powerful is an expression of humanity’s good sense. King James had, in the old fashion, kept a court fool or jester, called Archie Armstrong.
Now Charles dismissed him for showing disrespect to the Archbishop by calling out ‘All praise to God, and little laud to the devil.’
Charles’s eleven years of personal rule led, with what seems inexorable logic, to civil war and the fall of the monarchy. Yet, marked though they were by folly and blindness to realities, they were to be remembered by many as a golden age, rather as the Belle Epoque and the long Edwardian afternoon were to be gilded in the memories of those who survived the catastrophe of the First World War. Men as different from each other as the eccentric John Aubrey and Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, historian and Charles II’s first minister, looked back on the 1630s nostalgically, as a time of peace and plenty when old habits and customs prevailed – even though Hyde entered politics as an opponent of the King. There was this to be said for their opinion: in comparison with the horrors of the long war in Germany, Caroline England might indeed have seemed a paradisal land.2
Charles maintained a court very different from his father’s. All was polite, decorous, seemly, well ordered. Very early in his reign the King drew up a list of instructions as to proper conduct, and a copy of His Majesty’s Rules might be read in the antechambers of Whitehall, Windsor and Hampton Court. Whereas anyone might have accosted James as he ambled around his palaces, with his arm round the neck of a handsome young man, now audiences with the new King were by appointment only. James had loved an argument and been ready to engage with all and sundry on almost any subject, talking for victory like the university don he might happily, in another life, have been, but Charles detested discussion, replying to an assertion of which he disapproved with a chilly ‘Sir, I am not of your opinion’ or ‘By your favour, I think otherwise.’3 Alternatively he might take refuge in a cold silence, which was capable of dismaying or abashing all around him. James had been careless of his dignity; for Charles, dignity was a defence that must not be breached. James was often tipsy; Charles was abstemious: he is said never to have been drunk in his life.
His domestic life was likewise a model of decorum. Henrietta Maria was a silly woman, whose political judgement was lamentable, but she gave him the confidence he had lacked. Soon they were the happy parents of a brood of children. Nine were born altogether, six of whom lived to be adults: Charles, born 1630; Mary in 1632; James, their mother’s favourite, a beautiful blond blue-eyed boy, in 1633; Elizabeth in 1635; Henry in 1640; and last Henriette-Anne, the child of the war years and known in the family as Minette. There had not been such a family of royal children in England since the days of Edward III. In private, with his family, Charles was gentle and friendly; in case of difficulty the children were more likely to turn to their father than to their excitable, unpredictable mother. But his public image was very different. Shy beneath an icy demeanour, he shrank from encounters with the common people, even though, through his Council, he sought to regulate their conduct, not only in religion but in the ordinary affairs of their daily life. His government was paternalist, but, lacking the common touch, his paternalism was more likely to irritate than please. He had little sympathy for human frailties, though in so many respects frail himself. Seeing ‘a great lover of pretty girls’ at a race meeting, he called out, according to the story related by John Aubrey, ‘Let that ugly rascal, that whoremaster, be gone out of the park; else I shall not see the sport.’4 In time his domestic virtues might have commended him to his people and gained him their love, but his public policy, narrow, self-righteous, meddling, and in so many ways thought to be first oppressive, then tyrannical, made this impossible. The years of his personal rule raised up a majority of the politically conscious in both England and Scotland against him. This required no small degree of incompetence and folly. Charles never grasped the truth of his father’s observation that ‘the prerogative is a secret which ryves [tears] with the stretching of it’. In these eleven years Charles stretched it beyond what was found tolerable, and the fabric tore apart.
The trouble first flared up in Scotland. Though born a Scot (in Dunfermline), Charles had little knowledge of his native land or its politics, and less sympathy with its people and their preoccupations. He began badly, issuing within a few weeks of his accession an Edict of Revocation. This measure, employed by various of his predecessors in Scotland, asserted his right to revoke all grants of land made by the Crown since 1540. At first thought only to refer to what had been Crown lands, it soon emerged that the Revocation might be applied to abbey lands and other properties of the pre-Reformation Church. This threatened the interests of all those nobles whose families had acquired what had been Church property; that is, most of the Scottish political class. So the King’s natural supporters, those on whom he relied as partners in government, were alienated.
Second, Charles delayed coming to Scotland. The natural loyalty to a Stuart was undermined by his evident disinclination to visit his northern kingdom and be crowned there. In fact he delayed his first visit to Scotland till 1633, eight years after his accession. When at last he came north, he offended many by insisting on Church of England services in the royal chapel.
Indeed, it was his religious policy that stirred up opposition. James had moved cannily, and had contrived to reassert a degree of royal control over the Kirk. Even bishops had been accepted, however reluctantly. Admittedly the old King’s last venture – the Five Articles of Perth (1617), prescribing practices in the form of worship that offended Presbyterian sentiment – had been ill judged, and had provoked a dissident underground movement that held conventicles – services where the more obnoxious requirements of the Five Articles, such as kneeling to receive communion, were flouted. But Charles went further, without consideration being given to the feelings and opinions of the Kirk.
There were mutterings in Edinburgh and throughout Lowland Scotland, but for the moment they were no more than mutterings, and Charles and Laud pressed on regardless. Their aim was clear: to bring the Church of Scotland into conformity with the Church of England, though conformity within the Anglican Church was itself a matter of dispute. Orders were given for the preparation of a new liturgy, ‘as near as can be to this of England’. Charles, sure of his own rectitude and confident that his divine right to rule not only empowered but obliged him to order the affairs of the Church in his three kingdoms, was not a man capable of reading danger signals. It was the duty of his subjects to obey him; therefore he would be obeyed.
It was not only the King’s ecclesiastical policy that irritated Scotland. An increase in taxation, which saw Edinburgh paying more in tax in the first two years of Charles’s reign than in the last twenty of his father’s, coincided with a downturn in the economy, and one of the taxes levied on interest payments led to a shortage of credit that brought many nobles to the brink of bankruptcy.
In short, Scotland was a simmering pot ready to boil over, but Charles, sitting on a dais and taking notes when the Scots parliament met in 1633, was determined that his northern kingdom should be brought to heel. He was already removed from reality, for he could not enter into the feelings of others and found it beneath his royal dignity to examine the merits of opinions that ran counter to his own.
Throughout these years of personal rule he had shaped a life that satisfied his refined and private taste. His court was a work of art: dignified, elegant, ceremonious, beautifully ordered. He persuaded the Dutch artist Anthony Van Dyck to settle in England, and Van Dyck’s portraits of the royal family and various courtiers testify to the image of perfection Charles had made for himself. Van Dyck was knighted and anglicised his name to Vandyke. Rubens was also given a knighthood and commissioned to paint the ceiling for the banqueting hall that Inigo Jones had designed for the Palace of Whitehall. There has never been a king in England, still less in Scotland, of such exquisite taste as Charles, and his aesthetic pleasure was not confined to painting or the court masques. He was a lover of literature too; indeed, the Puritan John Milton complained, perhaps jealously, that he spent too much time reading Shakespeare. Had Charles been a mere figurehead, a
monarch of a later age that had seen the Crown’s political power so reduced that it was, in Bagehot’s formula, a decorative rather than effective part of the constitution, he might be remembered as among the most splendid of kings.
But that time was far off, and Scotland was near. On 23 July 1637, members of the Scottish Privy Council, the two archbishops and eight other bishops, and most of the senators of the College of Justice assembled in the High Kirk of St Giles for a service which for the first time would follow the form prescribed by the new prayer book, as approved by Charles and Laud. Scarcely had the Dean of St Giles begun to read than a hostile demonstration broke out. A stool was thrown at the Dean, and a large part of the congregation ostentatiously marched out of the church. There were similar demonstrations in the other three churches of the city, and rioting in the streets. The Dean took refuge in an upper room, and the Bishop of Edinburgh’s coach was stoned as he trundled down the high street and Canongate to the safety of Holyroodhouse. It was not a mere riot, but a revolution, comparable to the storming of the Bastille in Paris another July day a century and a half later, even if few that day understood the full significance of their actions.
To what extent the riot in St Giles was spontaneous is a matter of opinion. One minister, Henry Guthrie, who disapproved of the new prayer book, though himself an Episcopalian, was sure it had been well prepared. ‘This tumult,’ he wrote in his memoirs,