As week followed week, and their arrears of pay steadily mounted, officers of the humiliated and disparaged army around York viewed events in London with increasing dismay and irritation. As the Treasurer at Wars, Sir William Uvedale, complained to his deputy: ‘we are all now so busy about the Earl of Strafford … as we cannot tend anything else’.21 ‘Anything else’ included finding money with which to pay the king’s army. With a triumphant Scottish army in occupation of two English counties to their north and a Parliament and administration apparently totally unsympathetic to their needs and grievances to their south, the officers in their uncomfortable billets around York were understandably in a condition of restive discontent. The event that finally caused the simmering sense of grievance to boil over was the decision by the Commons early in March to divert £10,000 originally intended for the English to the Scottish army instead, for the Scots were threatening to resume their southern advance if their financial demands were not met immediately.22
The English army’s attempt to have its various grievances remedied was complicated by the particular interests, objectives and ambitions of individual officers. This diversity of objectives among particular officers created an atmosphere of confusion and mystery that baffled many contemporaries and has puzzled historians ever since. The ‘plots’ – it is possible to identify at least three distinct but overlapping designs – ranged from a relatively unexceptionable plan to petition the MPs for a redress of grievances, but with the threat in the background of military pressure to be exerted if necessary, to far more desperate proposals that the army should march on London, intimidate and over-awe Parliament, seize the Tower and free Strafford. These plans by the army to intervene decisively in political developments in London, but with a wide divergence of opinion among the officers as to exactly how this intervention should be handled, were further complicated by the private ambitions of particular plotters. For example, Colonel George Goring, the Governor of Portsmouth, another hard-drinking Cavalier swordsman and a favourite of the queen, was ambitious to be appointed Lieutenant General of the army, while Daniel O’Neill hoped to confirm and strengthen his position at court by being rewarded for his services with a place in the royal bedchamber.23
This diversity of intentions and ambitions reflects the differences of character and personality among the plotters. They were certainly not acting with the approval or even the knowledge of their commanders, Northumberland, Conway, Conyers and Astley. Most of them had court connections; placeholders like Goring or hangers-on like O’Neill, they mainly belonged to the circle around the queen. Although forever transformed by the genius of Van Dyck into an image of grace and elegance, by 1641 Henrietta Maria was a scrawny little woman of strong feelings but little understanding of political realities. She was certainly not prepared to be a passive observer of the unravelling of the fabric of her husband’s sovereignty. Instead, she favoured decisive action. Consequently, the loyalty and allegiance of officers who were involved in the plots were more to the queen, and the rewards they believed she was in a position to offer, than to their own generals. Northumberland’s younger brother Henry Percy; the court wits and poets Sir John Suckling and Sir William Davenant; the veterans of the wars in the Low Countries, Goring, Wilmot and O’Neill; Henrietta Maria’s Master of the Horse and ‘the Queen’s great favourite’ Henry Jermyn, and his friend, the diplomat and soldier Sir John Berkeley: in so far as the army plots had a centre it was with the queen’s entourage in the royal palaces of Whitehall and Somerset House and not in the army high command at York.
The plotters, of course, were drawn together by other bonds as well as their positions at court and their membership of the circle around Henrietta Maria. Most of them had contributed to that courtly but vigorous Cavalier culture of the 1630s, a culture composed of so many apparently contradictory elements. Writing poetry and fighting duels, combining philandering ‘with Bridget and with Nell’ with romantic protestations of undying love to Celia or Lucasta, the future royalist plotters had succeeded in uniting a lifestyle characterised by the enthusiastic enjoyment of wine, women and song with a deep commitment to high ideals of chivalric honour and loyalty.24 Most of them were members of several small but overlapping worlds: of the court at Whitehall, of plays and masques, of bowling greens and card tables, of taverns and brothels. Many of them belonged to the same obscure and largely forgotten clubs and societies like, for example, the Order of the Fancy.25 As we have seen, several were also united by the shared experience of military service abroad in defence of the ‘Protestant Cause’. There was also the Parliament. Although the court interest had been decimated in the elections, some officers with court connections, like Goring, Wilmot, William Ashburnham and Hugh Pollard, still had seats in the Commons, and so had a particular reason to be ‘much discontented’ at the decision to divert £10,000 from the English to the Scottish army. These men believed they were well placed to exploit the shifting and unstable moods at Whitehall, in Westminster, in the City and in the army camps and billets around York.26
Despite these common elements of background and experience, the plotters’ objectives were neither consistent nor agreed upon. The traditional vices of the Cavalier stereotype were very much in evidence. What began in March as a fairly straightforward petition to the Lord General Northumberland for redress of grievances, drawn up by a group of officers and brought to London by a Captain James Chudleigh, rapidly became more complicated and far-reaching. Chudleigh was no intriguing courtly plotter. On the contrary, his father, a baronet with extensive estates in Devon, according to Clarendon was ‘notoriously disaffected to the king’, while his uncle, William Strode, was one of John Pym’s closest colleagues.27 Chudleigh was never more than an innocent courier but he soon found himself in the company of men who were anything but innocent.
Having arrived in London, Chudleigh made contact with some of his fellow officers. Indeed, one of the many intriguing aspects of the army plots is the apparent ease with which officers were able to absent themselves from their military responsibilities in the north in order to spend time in London. The drawn-out and dramatic trial of Strafford, of course, was an event not, if possible, to be missed. Chudleigh seems first to have made contact with William Davenant and Suckling, the court wits and poets who were close friends. Henry Jermyn, the ‘Queen’s great favourite’, also joined his fellow courtiers in applying pressure on Chudleigh, which he resisted, to inform the queen personally of matters which he considered to be the responsibility of Lord General Northumberland. From Suckling, Chudleigh learned of the plan to replace the army’s commanders, to recruit the support of William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, a great territorial magnate and prominent courtier, and to appoint Goring Lieutenant General in place of Conway. By early April the scheme to impose Goring on the army was known to the existing commanders, who reacted with horror and derision. ‘It is certainly reported that Holland, Goring and Percy are to be our chiefs,’ reported Conyers to Conway, ‘and not one of all three that knows aught.’ According to Conyers, if Goring were appointed, ‘Sir Jacob Astley will not stay’; as for himself, he would develop a diplomatic illness, becoming conveniently ‘sick or lame’.28
Conyers was probably wrong about Henry Percy’s military ambitions at this time, for Percy had another project on hand. In a series of meetings, which involved the participants taking what Parliament was to call ‘a wicked and unlawful oath’, but whose secrecy was none the less imperfectly preserved, the MPs Wilmot and Pollard, and their fellow officers Percy, Berkeley, O’Neill and Colonel William Ashburnham, whose brother John was a groom of the bedchamber to the king, discussed presenting a petition to Parliament. The petition, the text of which was prepared principally by Percy, requested that the bishops’ functions be preserved, that the Irish army raised by Strafford should only be disbanded when the Scots army was too, and that the king’s revenue should be preserved, or even improved.29 At a time when Parliament was being flooded with petitions from one source or anothe
r, these were hardly indications of imminent insurrection. What was a much more disturbing development was not so much Percy’s petition, but the formulation at about the same time by another group of courtier officers of a desperate plan to bring the army south, to seize control of the Tower and to rescue Strafford. Responsibility for this scheme seems to have lain with Jermyn, the two poets Davenant and Suckling, and probably Goring, all members of the queen’s circle. To impose Goring on the army as its Lieutenant General was not just a matter of satisfying a personal ambition, it would also make it easier to ensure that the army co-operated with the conspirators’ plans.
The army plots, as they were hastily and fairly haphazardly cobbled together during March and April, therefore consisted of several inherently different but tangled-together strands. There were petitions to Lord General Northumberland to use his influence to remedy the officers’ grievances, particularly the fear that the army would be suddenly disbanded with arrears of pay still owing. There was the plot to reshape the high command, in particular by replacing Conway with Goring as Lieutenant General. There was Percy’s plan to present Parliament with a petition containing various requests that purported to originate with the officers but that closely matched major concerns of the king. Finally, there were the more extreme schemes of the Jermyn-Suckling-Davenant group, who were in close contact with the queen, to bring the army south, intimidate Parliament, seize the Tower and rescue Strafford. It is no wonder that as these various schemes progressively unravelled, contemporaries remained confused as to what exactly was intended by whom. Letters written by observers of the political scene in London during the tense and disturbed spring and early summer of 1641 refer vaguely but uneasily to ‘some plot or other’ in which the truth of the matter, ‘whatsoever it hath been’, was difficult to determine as ‘it does not yet clearly appear’.30
The puzzled references in correspondence to ‘some plot or other’ reflect the tense and confused political atmosphere of the time. There were constant comings and goings of army officers to and from the queen’s apartments in Whitehall or in Somerset House, night meetings over pipes of tobacco and bottles of wine in courtiers’ rooms, horsemen clattering up and down the Great North Road between London and York. Rumours abounded, of an imminent landing by French troops or of a rising by English papists. Dark fears were expressed about the intentions of Strafford’s army in Ireland, which the king seemed suspiciously reluctant to disband. Conyers, frustrated and anxious up in York and bitterly regretting that he had ever left Breda, wrote frequently to Northumberland and Conway in London, reporting his fears of ‘some disorder’ by discontented officers who were holding secret meetings outside York in the village of Boroughbridge, ‘but what their business was or what they agreed upon’, he confessed that he could not discover. Rumours did not circulate only in London. Contributing to the tension among the soldiers and officers were fears that the army would be suddenly disbanded or that the Scots shall ‘seek to pass the Tees’ and advance south into Yorkshire.31
Early in April, while the various schemes of the plotters were germinating in an atmosphere charged with rumours and tensions, Goring betrayed them. For reasons which have never been properly disclosed, either personal pique, a realisation that the plots were certain to be discovered at any day in any case, or even, as has been suggested, on the king’s orders, he divulged the details of the conspiracies to his brother-in-law, Lord Dungarvon, and to the Earl of Newport, a devious nobleman always prepared to adjust his principles to match those of whatever seemed to be the winning side at any particular moment.32 Either from Dungarvon or from Newport, the information was passed on to three lords, Bedford, Saye and Sele and Mandeville, all principal colleagues and friends of John Pym. With the trial of Strafford approaching a critical phase, Pym for the time being delayed making use of his knowledge of the plots until it could be released with maximum effect to discredit those who were seen as the Lord Deputy’s supporters.33
Although Pym and his colleagues were as fully aware as anyone could be of what was going on, the officers in the conspiracy were themselves divided over their objectives. Although their commanders clearly had no intention of supporting their schemes, for the time being the plotters carried on regardless. But even before Pym denounced the army plots in the Commons, these schemes were foundering. In April, Northumberland, who was ill with malaria, was replaced as Lord General by the militarily incompetent Holland. Although at one time an important member of the circle around the queen, the devious and self-important Holland was no friend of the more hot-headed conspirators like Suckling and Davenant. Unlike so many of the army plotters, Holland tempered his ambitions with a cautious wariness. Indeed, it is ironic to compare the loyalty to their commissions of the king’s generals in 1641 with that of Parliament’s only a few years later. In striking contrast to the correct behaviour in the spring of 1641 of Northumberland, Conway, Conyers and Astley, the parliamentary generals Fairfax, Cromwell and Ireton, after they had won the Civil War, were to overcome any scruples they might have had about marching on London, occupying the capital and intimidating their employers.
As the plot to bring the army south to intimidate Parliament was in serious trouble by the middle of April, the scheme to seize control of the Tower and rescue Strafford was forced to undergo last-minute changes. This desperate project illustrates the divisions among the officers, several of whom had no particular desire to preserve Strafford’s life, and in Percy’s words, considered the plan as ‘not having limits either of honour or law’.34 According to Clarendon, at least two of the plotters, Wilmot and O’Neill, ‘were incensed against the earl of Strafford, towards whom they were both very indevoted’. It is certainly extremely unlikely that O’Neill would have supported any plan to rescue the man whom he believed had consistently blocked over several years all his attempts to recover some of his lost patrimony in Ulster. In fact, O’Neill, who sometimes attended the drawn-out and dramatic trial, expressed his fear to his friend, the ordnance officer William Legge, that Strafford would ‘escape the House, for all the Privy Council, except Essex and honest Mandeville, were most vehemently for him’.35 One of the many bizarre features of the army plots is that O’Neill was involved in a conspiracy with fellow officers, some of whom were trying to save Strafford, while at the same time expressing his admiration for those parliamentary peers who were working to bring the Lord Deputy to the block.
So the plan to seize the Tower and rescue Strafford was left to a hard core of conspirators, acting quite certainly with the knowledge and approval of Charles, who was becoming increasingly desperate to save the life of his loyal and devoted servant. During the tense last days of April, while the Bill of Attainder against Strafford was being debated in the Lords, a Captain Billingsley, an officer in Strafford’s Irish army, successfully recruited about a hundred men, ostensibly as reinforcements for the garrison of the Tower.36 Billingsley was taking his orders from Suckling, and the men he had raised, who were quartered in houses just outside the fortress walls, considerably outnumbered the normal garrison of 40 Yeoman Warders. Not surprisingly, Sir William Balfour, the Lieutenant of the Tower, was extremely reluctant to admit them, and instead appealed to Parliament for advice. Despite two separate deputations from the Lords, requesting the king to order that Billingsley’s men be discharged, Charles still stalled for time. Their patience finally exhausted, at the beginning of May the Lords ordered the Constable, Lord Newport, to take command of the Tower personally. ‘Suckling and his designs are discovered,’ reported Newport from the Tower, characteristically taking the credit for uncovering a plot the details of which had been a common talking point in London for weeks. ‘I am assured he will pay for it if he stay by it,’ he concluded.37 In fact, Suckling had no intention of remaining in London to pay for anything, including his now mountainous pile of debts. For the failure of this last desperate attempt to get Billingsley’s men into the Tower, overpower the garrison and free Strafford meant almost, but not quite, the ig
nominious end of the army plots.
On Monday 3 May, while the drama at the Tower was still unfolding, Pym at last acted, announcing to the Commons that he ‘was persuaded that there was some great design in hand by the papists to subvert and overthrow this kingdom’. Pym then proceeded to inflate some of the information from Goring that he had been sitting on for weeks into a monstrous ‘popish plot’ to destroy the liberties and the true religion of good Englishmen. In the atmosphere of fear and distrust intensified by Pym’s lurid allegations, a select committee was hastily established to investigate the plot, the ports were ordered to be closed and alleged plotters were summoned before Parliament to be questioned. Goring appeared before the Commons, only too willing to make ‘an ample relation of all he knew concerning the last plot’.38
The army officers incriminated in the first instalment of Goring’s revelations that Pym chose to disclose were summoned for examination by Parliament, an ordeal that stimulated a precipitate flight. ‘We hear of a lord and five gentlemen that are fled,’ wrote Conyers to Conway from York on 14 May. The lord was Robert Dormer, the young Earl of Carnarvon, an army officer, but a very peripheral figure in the conspiracy. ‘One of them, I hear,’ Conyers added sarcastically, referring to Percy, ‘stood to have been my General.’39 Percy, Davenant and Carnarvon fled to Gravesend, where the veteran diplomat and staunch upholder of the Protestant Cause, Sir Thomas Roe, was waiting for a favourable wind to take him across the Channel on his way to the Imperial Diet at Ratisbon (Regensburg). Rather grumpily, Roe vacated his great cabin to the fugitives, and The Hope, a king’s ship on the king’s business, was able to ignore the closure of the ports and to carry the discomfited plotters safely to France. Suckling and Jermyn also fled from London at the same time, but in their case to Portsmouth, where Goring remained in command. Still hunting with the parliamentary hounds while conniving at the escape of royalist hares, Goring provided for the fugitives The Roebuck, a royal pinnace that sailed for Dieppe on 6 May.40
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