Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution

by Peter Ackroyd

  The crack of doom

  After the dissolution of parliament in March 1629, the king entered upon a period of personal government that lasted for eleven years. To all intents and purposes he had begun an experiment in absolute monarchy, with the prospect of an acquiescent nation obeying his commands. He was not ill-equipped for that role. One prominent lawyer, Sir Robert Holborne, observed that ‘the king could drive a matter into a head with more sharpness than any of his privy council’. Yet in practice he delegated much of his work to various officials, preferring the pleasures of the hunt to the world of practical affairs.

  It was in certain respects a time of silence. There were no debates in parliament, and no elaborate declarations or proclamations from the throne. As in a masque, the king had no need to speak; his presence itself ensured majesty and harmony. As in a masque, also, he could command the workings of the great stage of the world. Charles had a high enough opinion of his supreme office, not unmixed with moral self-righteousness, to believe this.

  In the absence of parliament, and with a relatively tame judiciary, the freedoms of the subject were to a certain extent reliant upon the judgement and goodwill of the sovereign. The people of England were simply asked to trust his benevolent intentions. It is true that in many respects he was a gentle monarch, in the course of whose reign no political executions took place. Yet some still considered him to be a tyrant riding over the liberties of the nation and parliament. The continued detention of Sir John Eliot and two colleagues was cited as an example.

  Unparliamentary government was not in itself fruitless. It was a time of improvements in transport, with roads repaired and new canals dug; the national postal service was improved, with a regular post on the principal roads taking the place of an irregular system of carriers; in the absence of any national emergency, the administration of local government was strengthened and extended. That domestic peace, however, depended upon external tranquillity. The king could not afford war. And, as long as he could raise sufficient money for his own government by fines and taxation, there was no need to call parliament.

  The foreign policy of the nation therefore, in a sense, made itself. Peace was concluded with France in the spring of 1629 and, nineteen months later, a truce was arranged with Spain. By the treaty with France Charles was obliged to abandon the cause of the Protestant Huguenots on the understanding that the principles of his marriage treaty with Louis XIII need not be strictly applied; he need not, for example, grant freedom of worship to Roman Catholics.

  The peace with Spain made no mention of the restoration of the Palatinate to Charles’s sister and brother-in-law; the fate of the region was now the subject of promises and expressions of goodwill. In another clause of the treaty it was agreed that Spanish silver could be minted in England before being shipped to Antwerp, where the Spanish were engaged in fighting the Protestant Dutch. It was an open question whether these alliances with the Catholic powers would become a cause of dissent in England. Some believed the people to be cheerful and acquiescent; others suggested that the anger or antagonism against the king had simply been driven below the surface.

  The public reaction to both pacts, however, was subdued. Little interest was taken in the matter. Charles had no European policy as such, except for the wish that his sister might be returned to the Palatinate with her husband; but with no army or money to enforce his desires he was reduced to inaction. Money was the key. It was said that Henrietta Maria herself had been obliged to close the shutters of her private apartments in case visitors saw the ragged coverlets of her bed. There were times when, roused by Protestant appeals in Europe for assistance, the king asked his council what he might do. He was told that a new parliament would need to be called to raise the money. This was unthinkable. So nothing was done. The French ambassador remarked that lack of revenue made the English government one ‘from which its friends can hope for no assistance, and its enemies need fear no harm’.

  The king’s discomfort was compounded when a new Protestant champion arose in Europe to counter the imperialist triumphs in Poland and Bohemia, Austria and Bavaria, Flanders and the Rhineland. In 1629 the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, marched into Germany and embarked upon a military conquest as unexpected as it was unprecedented. His chancellor wrote that ‘all the harbours of the Baltic, from Kalmar to Danzig, throughout Livonia and Prussia, are in his majesty’s hands’. Gustavus Adolphus had created a new Swedish empire and thereby took on the mantle of a Protestant Messiah, the Lion of the North.

  How was the English king to treat with such a man? Gustavus Adolphus demanded men and materials from a fellow Protestant king. But if Charles entered into an alliance with the Swedish king, his important friendship with Spain would come to an end; and the trade with Spain was very important. If he refused an alliance with Gustavus Adolphus, he would lose honour and influence if the Swede was eventually victorious.

  So Charles prevaricated and tried half-measures to maintain his credit on both sides. He agreed that a private force of 6,000 Scottish soldiers, under the command of the marquis of Hamilton, could join the Swedish army; but the expedition was a disaster, made worse by epidemic disease and insubordination. The king then sent a delegation to the Swedish king ‘to enter into a league … upon emergent occasions’. This could mean anything or nothing. In practice it meant nothing. At one point Charles banned the news gazettes from reporting on the Swedish victories because they cast such an unhappy light on his own ineffectiveness.

  The fortunes of the Swedish king came to an end in a battle outside Leipzig, where his body was found among a heap of naked corpses. The king of England had done nothing to counsel or to assist him. English inaction, or inertia, had created what one anonymous pamphleteer, in ‘The Practice of Princes’, described as ‘a Hispanolized, Frenchified, Romanized or Neutralized’ policy. Yet there may have been virtue in that. One week of war can undo a decade of peace. England escaped the devastation that was inflicted upon central Europe.

  Funds still had to be raised by one means or another. The fines against the illegal enclosure of common land were more strenuously exacted. The king also raised much money from a great scheme to drain the fens of eastern England. Many articles of ordinary consumption were granted for a fee to monopolists, who could then set their own prices; the articles included iron and salt, pens and playing cards, starch and tobacco, seaweed and spectacles, combs and gunpowder, hats and hops. Patents could also be purchased for such projects as the manufacture of turf or the weighing of hay and straw, for ‘the gauging of red herring’ and the gathering of rags. In a contemporary anti-masque an actor came on stage with a bunch of carrots on his head, representing a ‘projector’ or speculator ‘who begged a patent of monopoly as the first inventor of the art to feed capons fat with carrots’. The king demanded from the Vintners’ Company a payment of £4 on every tun of wine; when they refused to pay the new tax, the Star Chamber forbade them to cook and serve meat for their customers. The loss of trade meant that they came to an ‘understanding’ with the court, amounting to £30,000 a year.

  There was also the curious case of soap. The Company of Soapmakers was in 1631 granted a monopoly to manufacture soap made out of domestic ingredients, such as vegetable oil, rather than out of imported whale oil or fish oil. The company agreed in turn to pay the king an annual tax of £20,000.

  The previous soap manufacturers were prosecuted in the Star Chamber for selling the old product; many of them were fined and some of them were imprisoned, while their pans and vats were destroyed. They were of course incensed at their loss of livelihood, but many housewives also complained that the new soap did not wash as well as the old. In seventeenth-century England even the most domestic disputes had a religious dimension. It was believed that the Company of Soapmakers was in fact controlled by the Catholic friends of Henrietta Maria; some of the new monopolists were rumoured to be financed by the Jesuits. Many Protestant households, therefore, objected to the new soap on theological
grounds. It became known as the Popish Soap.

  So the authorities put on a public demonstration of the efficacy of the new soap. In the Guildhall, under the gaze of the lord mayor, the aldermen and the lieutenant of the Tower, two washerwomen used the rival products in tubs placed beside each other. It was meant to prove that the new soap cleaned and lathered better, but the demonstration does not seem to have persuaded the London public. Eighty great ladies signed a testimonial to the effect that their maids preferred the new soap. This also had no noticeable effect. The old soap was still being sold under the counter. Another demonstration by washerwomen in Bristol was meant to prove that the new product washed ‘as white … and as sweet, or rather sweeter’ than the old. This may be considered a harbinger of modern advertising campaigns. It also made little impression. The old soap was still being manufactured and, as a result of its scarcity, sold at a much higher price.

  More personal exactions were made by the king. Individuals were summoned for taxes they had not thought to pay. In 1630, for example, a royal commission was set up to fine those gentlemen who had not taken up knighthoods at the time of the king’s coronation. It was a legal requirement that had faded out of memory through disuse. Those who were summoned were aggrieved at this unexpected imposition, and most tried to excuse themselves. Yet they were not successful. By these means the king raised the money he wished for, but at the expense of the affection and loyalty of some of his subjects.

  Other expedients were also practised. Royal rights over forest lands were resurrected; those who had encroached upon forest boundaries were charged large sums. Those who had built houses in London ‘upon new foundations’ were also fined. Mr Moor had erected forty-two new houses in the neighbourhood of St Martin-in-the-Fields, for example, and was fined £1,000 and ordered to demolish the houses; when he refused, the sheriffs took them down and sold the materials to pay the fine.

  What, then, was the king’s general attitude to the property of his subjects? Could he take it away at will? If he could impose new taxes on his people without recourse to the courts or to parliament, might he not be able to emancipate the Crown from its traditional obligations? Many suggested that the king could indeed tax without consent, and that public good took precedence over private right. Others in turn argued that the Englishman’s right to the property of his goods and estates was absolute, and could not be removed from him by any court or sovereign. Domestic peace was also unsettled by the disastrous harvest of 1630, which pushed up the price of grain from 4 shillings to 14 shillings a bushel; the prospect of starvation alarmed many communities, and food riots occurred in Kent, Hampshire and elsewhere.

  The fractious atmosphere of the time was also evident in the court’s actions against the notable antiquary Robert Cotton. His library had been sealed up, in the belief that it contained ancient tracts and pamphlets that took the side of parliament against the king. History had to be cleansed. One tract was found, according to the archbishop of York, ‘containing a project how a prince may make himself an absolute tyrant’. Cotton was taken into custody, and interrogated by the Star Chamber before being released. Yet his life of study was effectively over. He was no longer allowed to enter his library and learned men were advised to cease their visits to him. He told one friend that ‘my heart is broken’. He was so worn by anguish and grief that, according to Simonds D’Ewes, ‘his face, which had been formerly ruddy and well-coloured, such as the picture I have of him shows, was wholly changed into a grim, blackish paleness near to the resemblance and hue of a dead visage’. He expired soon after, the victim of a nervous and turbulent time.

  At the end of 1629 William Laud had, with the assent of the king, composed a ‘Declaration on the Articles of Religion’. It was designed to impose order and uniformity upon the English Church by prescribing the forms of worship, the words of the prayers and even the gestures of the clergy. It was ordained that all clerics must accept to the letter the Thirty-Nine Articles, a demand which would in effect prohibit any discussion by Calvinists on such matters as predestination; these were condemned by the bishop of Chichester as ‘deep and dark points which of late have so distracted and engarboyled the world’. The declaration was conceived thoroughly in the spirit of the monarch, who believed in order above all things. Certain observers thereby concluded that Church and nation were to be reduced to uniformity.

  Laud was, in the capital, considered to be little more than a papist in love with ritual and with ceremony. A paper was scattered about the streets of London declaring ‘Laud, look to thyself, be assured thy life is sought. As thou art the fountain of all wickedness, repent thee of thy monstrous sins, before thou be taken out of the earth.’ Laud was not discomfited. ‘Lord,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘I am a grievous sinner; but I beseech thee, deliver my soul from them that hate me without cause.’ An opponent of Laud by the name of Alexander Leighton, having written an appeal to parliament entitled ‘Sion’s Plea against the Prelacy’, was condemned to the Fleet Prison for life; he was also to be taken to the pillory at Westminster and whipped before one of his ears was cut off, one side of his nose slit, and his face branded with the mark of ‘S.S.’ for ‘Sower of Sedition’. He was then to be returned to prison for a period of recuperation before being whipped again and his other ear removed. He was afterwards ‘to be shut up in close prison, for the remainder of his life’. Part of this sentence was remitted, for the sake of decency, but he was not released from prison until 1641 by which time he could not see, hear, or walk.

  His wife was also briefly committed ‘for her disordered tongue’, according to a news-writer of March 1630, ‘and a button maker for putting his mouth to the keyhole of the prison door where he lay, and crying aloud “Stand to it, doctor, and shrink not” and such like words’. In the following month an oatmeal-maker was brought before a religious commission for his unorthodox opinions. He was condemned by the bishop of Winchester, another ally of Laud, as a ‘frantic, foolish fellow’. The maker of oatmeal replied, ‘Hold thy peace, thou tail of the beast that sittest at the lower end of the table.’

  The king expressed his appreciation of Laud’s work, however, by appointing him as chancellor of Oxford University in the spring of 1630. Laud worked at once to re-establish order and decorum in the ancient university. The students had previously venerated Bacchus and Venus who were, as Laud wrote, ‘the cause of all our ills in church and state’. Discipline was to be restored, thus promoting order and harmony; extravagant dress and long hair were not to be permitted, and alehouses were to be regulated. In the course of Laud’s chancellorship, new buildings were erected and new studies were placed upon the curriculum with learned clerics to expound them. The city was refurbished, as it were, in glowing vestments.

  The glory of Charles I was also celebrated. In 1630 the lord treasurer, Richard Weston, commissioned a statue of the king on horseback; it was a noble decoration for the garden of his country house in Roehampton. It soon became the abiding image of Charles’s rule. In 1633 Van Dyck portrayed the king riding through a triumphal arch in the classical style; the king becomes a Roman conqueror. Two years later the same artist composed Charles I on Horseback, in which the king calmly and effortlessly directs the steed on which he rides. Images of chivalry, and of the Christian knight, are conflated with the representation of order.

  It is also an image of the sovereign controlling animal nature, bringing the strength and energy of the horse into harness with his own will and desire. The Spanish ambassador, in the same spirit, had once flattered Charles by noting that the horses upon which he was mounted ‘laid down all their natural and brutish fierceness in his presence’. The equestrian portraits are thereby a depiction of the manner in which reason must be able to control passion. This is of a piece with Charles’s own conception of his rule and of his evident belief that he must control his own nature, by restraint and formality, before he could properly govern the entire kingdom. Art was for the king one of the great emblems of power. Yet it was more tha
n that.

  Lucy Hutchinson observed that ‘men of learning and ingenuity in all the arts were in esteem and received encouragement from the king, who was a most excellent judge and great lover of paintings, carvings, gravings and many other ingenuities…’ Charles had seen the artistic wealth of the royal court in Madrid and wished to cultivate a similar state of magnificence. He was in addition an adept and instinctive judge of painting and sculpture; if he had not been a king, he would have been a connoisseur. He was able to recognize the identity of an artist at first glance; this was known as a ‘knowledge of hands’. He knew where ‘gusto’, passion or taste, was to be found. He commissioned Rubens, Mytens, Inigo Jones and Van Dyck; by the end of his reign he had collected some 500 paintings and tapestries, among them nine Correggios, thirteen Raphaels and forty-five Titians. The Dutch once sent him five paintings to persuade him to resolve a dispute about herring fisheries; the city of Nuremberg gave him two Dürers. He also collected coins and medals; he enjoyed composing music. His love of order was everywhere apparent. When a collection of the busts of senators and emperors of ancient Rome reached Whitehall, he himself took pains to arrange them in chronological order.

  A papal emissary to England recalled the occasion when the king, in the company of Inigo Jones, was informed that a consignment of paintings had arrived from the Vatican; he ‘rushed to see them, calling to him Jones … the very moment Jones saw the pictures he greatly approved of them, and in order to study them better threw off his coat, put on his eyeglasses, took a candle, and together with the king, began to examine them very closely, admiring them very much…’ The gift included works by Leonardo and Andrea del Sarto. This excitement reveals a sovereign very different from the conventional image of his coldness and reserve. Rubens was to say of Charles’s court that it was remarkable ‘not only for the splendour of the outward culture’ but for ‘the incredible quality of excellent pictures, statues and ancient inscriptions which are to be found in this court … I confess I have never seen anything in the world more rare.’