by Robert Lacey
But Bradford, Brewster and their companions did not find the welcome they expected in Holland. While they were allowed to practise their religion, Dutch guild regulations prevented them from practising their trades. So they were after economic as well as religious freedom when they boarded the Mayflower in the summer of 1620, landing on Cape Cod, in modern Massachusetts, on 9 November. To govern themselves they drew up the‘Mayflower Compact’, the first written constitution in the Americas — indeed, the first written constitution in the English language, in which the authority of government was explicitly based on the consent of the governed. And having sailed from Plymouth, they named their colony Plymouth.
In the next two decades Plymouth Colony inspired more than twenty thousand settlers to create new lives for themselves in the stockaded villages of‘New England’ — and it also inspired the great American festival of Thanksgiving. Tradition dates this back to November 1621 when, after half Plymouth’s pilgrims had died of disease and famine, the local Indians came to their rescue with a feast of turkey, corn on the cob, sweet potatoes and cranberries.
The rescue of 1621 is well documented, but more than two centuries were to elapse before we find Thanksgiving being celebrated routinely on an annual basis. Not until 1863 was Abraham Lincoln encouraged by the rediscovery of William Bradford’s history Of Plymouth Plantation to reinvent the tradition and declare Thanksgiving a national holiday.
We should also, perhaps, revise our image of the Pilgrim Fathers all wearing sober black costumes with white collars and big buckles on their shoes. Shoe buckles did not come into fashion until the late 1660s, and, as for the colonists’ costumes, as inventoried on their deaths by the Plymouth plantation court, they sound more like those of pixies than pilgrims: Mayflower passenger John Howland died with two red waistcoats in his travelling chest; William Bradford also owned a red waistcoat, along with a green gown and a suit with silver buttons, while the wardrobe of William Brewster, the former postmaster of Scrooby, featured green breeches, a red cap and a fine‘Violet’ coat.
THE ARK OF THE JOHN TRADESCANTS
1622
THE JOHN TRADESCANTS, FATHER AND SON, were England’s first master gardeners. John Sr made his name in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign, and was then hired in 1609 by Robert Cecil, 1st Lord Salisbury, to beautify the gardens of his grand new home, Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. John travelled to Holland to purchase the newly fashionable flower, the tulip, and spent no less than eighty shillings of Cecil’s money (the equivalent of £440 today) on sacks of bulbs. In search of more exotic plants, he joined a trading expedition to Russia in 1618, and two years later accompanied a squadron of English warships sent to North Africa to quell the Barbary pirates. Among the spec-imens he brought home was the hardy perennial beloved of modern gardeners, tradescantia.
But John was interested in more than plants. He started collecting local artefacts and curiosities on his travels, and this passion of his received a powerful boost in 1622 when he became gardener to George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the controversial favourite of King James I. Buckingham was Lord Admiral, and it was not long before the navy was instructing all English merchants engaged in trade with the New World to be on the lookout for a lengthy list of rarities — in fact any thing that is strange — drawn up by John Tradescant.
By the 1630s, the Tradescant collection filled several rooms of the family house at Lambeth, just across the Thames from Westminster, and John decided to open his‘rarities’ to the public. Taking biblical inspiration, he called England’s first ever museum‘The Ark’. The public flocked to gaze at such novelties as the hat and lantern taken from Guy Fawkes when he was arrested under the Houses of Parliament, alongside over a thousand named varieties of plants, flowers and trees — an apparently odd but enduring combination of English enthusiasms that lives on in the popularity of such TV programmes as Gardeners’ World and Antiques Roadshow.
After John’s death in 1638, his son took over the collection, proving an even more adventurous traveller than his father. He crossed the Atlantic three times to bring back the pineapple, the yucca and the scarlet runner bean, along with the Virginia creeper whose green leaves go flame-red in autumn. In his later years John Jr joined forces with Elias Ashmole, an ambitious lawyer who had helped catalogue the collection, but after Johns death Ashmole became embroiled in a series of disputes with Tradescant s widow Hester.
One morning, in April 1678, Hester Tradescant was found dead, apparently drowned in the garden pool at her Lambeth home. Foul play was ruled out, but Ashmole took control of Tradescant’s Ark. The collection came to form the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford — where you can still see Guy Fawkes’s hat and lantern.
GOD’S LIEUTENANT IN EARTH
1629
WHEN JAMES I’S SECOND-BORN SON PRINCE Charles arrived in London at the beginning of his father’s reign, courtiers hesitated to join his retinue. The child was sickly and backward — he could easily die and his household vanish, leaving them high and dry. By his fourth birthday in November 1604 the young prince was still not walking properly, and his father was so worried by his slow speech and stutter that he‘was desirous that the string under his tongue should be cut’.
But Charles was not a quitter. The plodding prince worked hard at overcoming his disabilities, particularly after 1612 when his more obviously gifted elder brother Henry died of typhoid. By the time Charles I succeeded his father in March 1625, he was a young man of some grit, principle and piety, already displaying the taste that would make him, arguably, England’s greatest royal patron of the arts. But the admirable determination he had shown in his childhood now verged on obstinacy, which was fed by the big idea that would eventually bring disaster on his family — the Divine Right of Kings.
The notion had been planted by his writerly father, James, who quoted lengthy passages from the Bible in his pamphlet The Trew Law of Free Monarchies in support of his argument that an anointed monarch was‘God’s Lieutenant in earth’. This view was taken for granted by the absolute monarchs of early modern Europe, but the self-righteous James had turned it into a lecture directed at his‘honest and obedient subjects’. A people could no more depose their King, he told them, than sons could replace their father. I have at length prooved,’ he concluded,‘that the King is above the law.’
When it came to practical politics, James himself had never pushed his ideas to the limit, particularly when, south of the border, he found himself dealing with the touchy squires and merchants who dominated England’s House of Commons. But Charles lacked his father’s subtlety. He felt personally affronted when on his accession Parliament declined to vote him the usual supply of customs revenues for life, granting the money for one year only. Puritan MPs were suspicious of Charles’s French Catholic wife and of his personal preference for church ceremonial — and no one liked his reliance on the Duke of Buckingham, the unpopular favourite he had taken over from his father. In the govern-ment/ complained one member, there wanteth good advice/
But rather than negotiate in the style of his father — or cajole, as the imperious Queen Elizabeth would have done — Charles lost his temper. He dissolved Parliament in August 1625 and the following year started raising funds with‘forced loans’, the ancient, discredited tactic of Empson and Dudley (see p. 81) which Charles now extended from a handful of rich targets to most of the tax-paying community. When his Chief Justice, Sir Randolph Crew, questioned the legality of this non-parliamentary levy, Charles dismissed him; more than seventy non-payers were sent to prison.
These were serious issues to the MPs whose predecessors had made the laws that had helped Henry VIII break with Rome. James had written about kings being above the law — Charles was trying to put theory into practice. When a shortage of funds compelled him to summon Parliament again in 1628, an angry House of Commons wasted no time in preparing a statement of fundamental principles, the Petition of Right, which prohibited non-parliamentary taxation and arbitrary imp
risonment. After some prevarication, Charles signed the petition, but he did so with ill grace — and then, that August, his friend and confidant Buckingham was assassinated in Portsmouth.
The murder was the work of a deranged Puritan, John Felton, who had been incited by parliamentary denunciations of Buckingham as‘the grievance of all grievances’, and Charles blamed his critics in Parliament for the killing. He felt bitterly wounded by the explosion of popular joy that greeted the news of Buckingham’s death, and it turned his deepening dislike of Parliament into a grudge match that came to a head in the spring of 1629.
The issue was religion. Sir John Eliot, the eloquent Puritan MP who had led the assaults on both Buckingham and forced loans, had produced a resolution against what were known as Arminian’ church practices, so-called after the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius whose English admirers had called for a return to church ceremonial. This cause was championed by Charles’s recently appointed Bishop of London, William Laud, who was busy restoring neglected rituals to the Church of England. In what we would describe as a battle between High and Low Church, Charles sided enthusiastically with ritual, and rightly interpreted the Puritan attack on Arminianism as a snub to his royal authority. He sent orders to Westminster to halt all discussion immediately.
The Commons responded with a defiance that would become historic. Heedless of the King’s words, the debate continued. One MP, Sir Miles Hobart, locked the door against the indignant hammerings of the King’s messenger, while the burly MP for Dorchester, Denzil Holies, forcibly held down the Speaker, Sir John Finch, in his chair. The Speaker was the Commons’ servant, not the King’s, Finch was told, and Sir John Eliot took the floor to denounce’innovations in religion’ and royal interference with Parliament’s right to speak.‘None had gone about to break parliaments,’ he declared,‘but in the end parliaments had broken them.’
Cries of Aye, Aye, Aye’ rang out around the chamber, and Eliot’s resolution against‘Popery or Arminianism’ was duly acclaimed, along with a further condemnation of taxation without parliamentary assent. Anyone who disagreed or disobeyed — and this presumably included the King — shall be reputed a capital enemy to this kingdom and commonwealth… He shall likewise be reputed a betrayer of the liberties of England/
But two days later, Hobart, Holles, Eliot and six other leaders of the protest were on their way to the Tower. Charles had the dissidents arrested, then dissolved Parliament on io March. God’s Lieutenant had decided he could rule England more smoothly without it.
’ALL MY BIRDS HAVE FLOWN’
1642
CHARLES I ATTEMPTED TO RULE ENGLAND without Parliament for eleven years, from 1629 to 1640, and he started off well enough. He made peace with Spain and France and, alongside his French wife Henrietta Maria, presided over a well-ordered court where art, music and drama flourished. Under his auspices, the Church of England was stringently administered by William Laud who, as Archbishop of Canterbury after 1633, organised diocesan inspections that rested the conformity of every priest and parish. Laud’s effcient policy style came to be known as‘Thorough’, and it was matched by Sir Thomas Wentworth, a former Member of Parliament who administered first the north and then Ireland for Charles, before rising to become his principal minister, ennobled as the Earl of Strafford.
Back in 1628, as MP for Yorkshire, Wentworth had spoken out in favour of the Petition of Right, yet he came to feel that many of his fellow-parliamentarians went too far in their attacks on King and Crown — a view that was shared by many. The austere and driven Puritans whose voices rang out loudest in the Commons were even calling for the removal of bishops from the Church of England. Such extremism fortified moderate support for the King, and it was Charles’s tragedy that he would waste England’s deep-rooted conservatism and loyalty to the Crown. As his own man Laud later put it, Charles I was‘a gracious prince who neither knew how to be, nor to be made, great’.
One of the virtues of raising money through Parliament was that it minimised direct conflict between taxpayer and King. But as Charles exploited ancient and obscure sources of revenue like the duty of seaport towns to supply the King with ships, solid citizens came into head-to-head conflict with the Crown. To widespread support, the opposition to‘ship money’ was led by a prosperous Buckinghamshire landowner, John Hampden, who fought the tax in court, effectively contending that it was the King who was the lawbreaker here.
As so often, religion provoked even deeper issues of due process and fair play. When in 1634 the Puritan lawyer William Prynne denounced as immoral the court masques in which the King and his wife liked to dance, Charles’s arbitrary Court of Star Chamber (evolved from the Royal Council of earlier times) ordered that his ears be cut off. Three years later the incorrigible Prynne turned his holy criticism on the bishops — only to have what survived of his ears sliced away.
Hampden and Prynne became national heroes thanks to the printed newsletters — early versions of newspapers — that were beginning to circulate between London and the provinces. These publicised the political and religious issues at stake, usually favouring the underdog, while primitive woodcuts provided dramatic images that got the message to the two-thirds of the population who could not read. One cartoon showed a smiling Archbishop Laud dining off a dish of Prynne’s severed ears.
Feelings were running high in 1640 when Charles reluctantly resumed dealing with Parliament. His attempt to take’Thorough’ to Scotland and to impose the English Prayer Book (against Laud’s better judgement) on Scotland’s Presbyterians had led to the so-called Bishops’Wars that drained the royal treasury dry. The early months of 1640 had seen an army of rebellious Scots occupying the north of England, and the King was urgently in need of money. But his parliamentary critics were bitterly determined that he should pay a price for it.
Strafford and Laud were their first targets, both indicted for treason as Charles’s accomplices in what would later be known as the‘Eleven Years Tyranny’. Strafford was sent to trial in March 1641, charged with being the‘principal author and promoter of all those counsels which had exposed the kingdom to so much ruin’. When he defended himself so ably in court that an acquittal seemed possible, the Commons contrived another way to get him. They quickly passed a bill of attainder, a blunt instrument that baldly declared Strafford’s guilt without need of legal process, and as Charles hesitated to sign the attainder, mobs of shaven-headed apprentices roamed the London streets baying for the blood of‘Black Tom the Tyrant’.
The campaign against Thomas Strafford was directed by John Pym, the veteran MP for Calne in Wiltshire who, a dozen years earlier, had been Sir John Eliot’s principal lieutenant in the battle for the Petition of Right. Now Pym masterminded the entire parliamentary assault on royal powers, plotting with the Scottish rebels to maintain pressure on the King while also stirring up the London mobs. On to May 1641, fearing for the safety of his wife and children, Charles signed Strafford’s attainder, and two days later his faithful servant went to the block in front of a jubilant crowd over one hundred thousand strong.
Having secured one victim, Parliament’s radicals turned to the practical business of ensuring that personal rule could never be revived. In February that year the Triennial Act had held that Parliament, if not summoned by the King, must automatically reassemble after three years. Now followed an act against dissolving Parliament without its consent, another to abolish ship money, and acts to shut down the Court of Star Chamber, which had sliced off Prynne’s ears, along with the Court of High Commission through which Laud had exercised his control over the Church.
On I December came the climax — a‘Grand Remonstrance on the State of the Kingdom’, which set out no less than 204 complaints against Charles and his eleven years of personal rule. As the Commons went through their list of grievances, the debates escalated into a raucous public event to match the dragging-down of Strafford, with delegations riding in from Essex, Kent and Sussex to shout their protests outside Parliament. Many mo
derates became alarmed. They rallied to the royal cause and Pym’s Remonstrance only just scraped through the Commons, by 159 votes to 148.
One hundred and forty-eight worried MPs was a workable base on which Charles I might have moved towards compromise — and there was every possibility that the Lords would reject the Remonstrance. But God’s Lieutenant did not do compromise, and his hurt pride would not let him delay Bitterly remorseful and blaming himself for Strafford’s fate, on Monday 3 January 1642 Charles instructed his Attorney General to commence treason proceedings against his five bitterest critics in the Commons: John Pym, John Hampden, Denzil Holles, Arthur Hazelrig and William Strode, along with Viscount Mandeville, a leading reformer in the House of Lords.
Next day Charles marched to the Parliament House in Westminster with a party of guards, intending to lay hands on the culprits himself— an extraordinarily risky and melodramatic gesture into which he was tempted by Pym and his four companions, who had set themselves up as bait. Having advertised their presence in the Commons that morning, the five Members then monitored the King’s progress down Whitehall.
When Charles entered the Commons chamber, he requested the Speaker, William Lenthall, to yield him his seat and to point out Pym and the others. Falling to his knees, Lenthall replied that it was not for him to either see or speak but as the House desired. There was no precedent for this situation. No King of England had ever interrupted a session of the House of Commons. “Tis no matter,’ declared Charles,‘I think my eyes are as good as another’s’, and he cast his eyes along the benches as the MPs stood bareheaded and in silence. Through the open door they could see the royal guards, some of whom were cocking their pistols, playfully pretending to mark down their men — until melodrama turned to anticlimax.