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

by Peter Ackroyd

  Rumours of plots and counter-plots were soon everywhere. For some weeks a vessel, chartered by Strafford’s secretary, had been moored in the Thames. The boat could easily take an escaped prisoner to France. Some of the reports proved to be true. On Sunday 2 May, Sir John Suckling, courtier and army commander, poet and gambler, called sixty men to the White Horse Tavern in Bread Street; they wore battledress of buff cloth and carried swords as well as pistols. They were supposed to gain entrance to the Tower of London, in the guise of reinforcements, where they would at once overwhelm the guard and secure Strafford’s liberty. It was a wild scheme, made all the more improbable by the sight of sixty armed men milling about in the middle of London. Their presence was quickly known and interpreted, the news passed immediately to the leaders of parliament. A tumultuous crowd of Londoners gathered about the Tower to defend it against any invasion.

  The rumours of a military rebellion, and plans for the flight of Strafford, had thoroughly alarmed the people of London. A fresh crowd gathered on Monday outside the doors of the Lords, bellowing for the execution of Strafford; some of them cried that if they could not have his life, they would take that of the king. The parliamentary journal for that day wrote of the members of the Junto that ‘they caused a multitude of tumultuous persons to come down to Westminster armed with swords and staves, to fill both the palace-yards and all the approaches to both houses with fury and clamour and to require justice, speedy justice, against the earl’. It was clear that Strafford would die. Oliver St John, one of the parliamentary leaders, had said that it was right and proper to knock wolves and foxes on the head. It was also remarked that ‘stone dead hath no fellow’.

  When the Commons assembled, Sir John Pennington spoke of Suckling’s unsuccessful gathering. Thomas Tomkins added that ‘many Papists were newly come to London’. The king had been misled by false counsellors and, as John Pym put it, ‘he that hath been most abused doth not yet perceive it’. The parliament must open the eyes of the king.

  It was now proposed that a religious manifesto should be published. The ‘Grand Remonstrance’ devised by the Commons was in a sense an English version of the Scottish covenant, binding those who signed it to an oath that they would remain loyal to ‘the true reformed Protestant religion’ against ‘popery and popish innovation’. The remonstrance claimed that during the present session of the parliament its members had ‘wrestled with great dangers and fears, the pressing miseries and calamities, the various distempers and disorders which had not only assaulted, but even overwhelmed and extinguished the liberty, peace and prosperity of this kingdom’. It was printed and circulated throughout the country, addressing and inspiring what might now be called a parliamentary party.

  On 5 May the Commons, fearful of a papist uprising, ordered the towns, cities and counties of England to ensure that their arms and ammunition were well prepared. A papist plot amounted, in this context, to a royal plot. On that day a new bill was passed allowing parliament to remain in session until it voted for its own dissolution. It has been said that this was the moment that reform turned into revolution; it deprived the monarch of his right to govern.

  The Lords themselves had directed that an armed force should take command of the Tower, thus divesting the king of responsibility for military affairs. It was another blow to his authority. The earl of Stamford proposed a motion ‘to give God thanks for our great deliverance, which is greater than that from the Gunpowder Treason [of 5 November 1605]. For by this time, had not this plot been discovered, the powder had been about our ears here in the parliament house, and we had all been made slaves.’ The threat of military force had alarmed the Lords as much as the Commons; on 8 May, the Bill of Attainder against Strafford was passed by the upper house.

  A delegation from both houses of parliament now carried the document of attainder to the Banqueting House for the king’s signature; the members were accompanied by a crowd of approximately 12,000 calling out, ‘Justice! Justice!’ The king, understandably cast down and demoralized, said that he would give his response on Monday morning; this delay did not please the crowd, who had promptly gathered again outside Palace Gate. If the king refused to sign the attainder it was predicted that the palace would be attacked, and that the king and queen would be captured.

  Charles conferred with his bishops and his privy councillors, most of whom urged him to sign the bill condemning Strafford to death. The archbishop of York told him that ‘there was a private and a public conscience; that his public conscience as a king might not only dispense with, but oblige him to do, that which was against his private conscience as a man’. Slowly and reluctantly he assented; he had promised to protect the earl’s life and fortune, but now for reasons of state he was obliged to break his word. In the process he had been humiliated and weakened almost beyond repair. Pym, on hearing the news of the king’s capitulation, raised his hands in exaltation and declared, ‘Has he given us the head of Strafford? Then he will refuse us nothing!’

  On 12 May Strafford went to his death on Tower Hill in front of what was said to be the largest multitude ever gathered in England. Crowds of 200,000 people watched his progress in an atmosphere of carnival and rejoicing. The lieutenant of the Tower asked him to make the short journey from the prison to the scaffold by coach, thus avoiding public fury; Strafford is supposed to have replied that ‘I dare look death in the face and, I hope, the people too. Have you a care that I do not escape, and I care not how I die, whether by the hand of the executioner or the madness and fury of the people.’ As he walked to his death he looked up at the window of the chamber in which Laud was confined, and saw the archbishop waiting for him there. He asked for ‘your prayers and your blessings’, but the cleric fell into a dead faint.

  In his speech from the scaffold the earl declared that ‘I wish that every man would lay his hand on his heart, and consider seriously whether the beginning of the people’s happiness should be written in letters of blood’. He knelt in prayer for half an hour, and then laid himself down on the block. It took one stroke. The spectators rushed through the streets of London waving their hats and shouting, ‘His head is off! His head is off!’ In his prison Archbishop Laud observed, a few days later, that Strafford had served ‘a mild and gracious prince who knew not how to be, or to be made, great’.

  21

  A world of change

  While the trial of Strafford continued, the Commons seemed uncertain about the direction of other public business. Parliament did nothing but, in the phrase of the time, beat the air. On one occasion, after prayers had been said, the members of the Commons lapsed into silence and simply looked at one other; they did not know where to begin. On another occasion, according to a contemporary account, the Speaker stood up and asked what question he should put to them; answer came there none. A loss of initiative in the cause of reform was one of the reasons for a public fast in April.

  Yet the death of the earl seems finally to have lent stimulus to the proceedings. The sight of blood quickened the appetite, and in July a series of fresh initiatives was debated and agreed. It seemed that the king himself had become almost an irrelevance in the business of renovating the kingdom. The familiar grant of tonnage and poundage was made to him but on the understanding that his previous exactions had been illegal; no new money was to be given to the royal household without permission of parliament. Of course parliament itself needed revenues both for work at home and for payment to the Scots. A new subsidy was imposed upon the counties and a poll tax introduced to raise additional income. This did not endear parliament to many of the people.

  The old centres of royal authority were abolished. The council of the north, the religious court of high commission and the Star Chamber were all swept away. Ship-money was condemned as contrary to the law. The limits of the royal forests were declared to be those that had obtained in the twentieth year of James I. The dissolution of the Star Chamber, in particular, lifted the final impediment to public expression. That body had decr
eed, four years before, that no book could be published without a licence; the order was now dead. Even before the chamber had been dissolved the appetite for news was fed by pamphlets and tracts eagerly passed from hand to hand, most of them predicting great innovations in Church and state. There were 900 of these publications issued in 1640, 2,000 in 1641 and 4,000 in 1642.

  The number of print shops doubled in this decade, but they were joined by what were described in one satirical pamphlet as ‘upstart booksellers, trotting mercuries and bawling hawkers’. Wandering stationers and balladmongers would call out, ‘Come buy a new book, a new book, newly come forth’. Pamphlets with titles such as ‘Appeal to Parliament’, ‘A Dream, or News from Hell’ and ‘Downfall of Temporising Poets’ abounded. It was no longer necessary to go to the bookstalls about St Paul’s or the Exchange to find newssheets. They were sold on the streets of London. Broadsheets cost a penny, eight-page pamphlets a penny or twopence. One commentator derided Pym’s ‘twopenny speeches’. A member of the congregation in Radwinter, Essex, threw a religious pamphlet to his curate, saying, ‘There is reading work for you, read that.’ The mixture of information and opinion was compounded by plays, processions, ballads, playing cards, graffiti, petitions and prints.

  The leading members of the Commons published their speeches which, according to the puritan Richard Baxter in his autobiography, were ‘greedily brought up throughout the land, which greatly increased the people’s apprehension of their danger’. The king himself was moved to write against these ‘poisoners of the minds of his weak subjects; amazed by what eyes these things are seen, and by what ears they are heard’. Yet pamphleteering was not confined to the godly men of the parliament. The sermons of the principal preachers were also distributed. From the pulpit came a multitude of declarations and denunciations; but the pulpit also acted as a distributor of news. The cleric might explain the events of the day, or the week, and comment upon them to his excited congregation. The Presbyterian minister Robert Baillie said that ‘many a sore thrust got both men and women thronging into our sermons’. The words from the church were then taken up in discussions at the taverns and the shops, the streets and the markets.

  Yet the pamphlets were not simply directed against one or other of the factions then gaining ground. They were part of a vigorous debate on the ideas and ideals of political and religious life. What were the grounds of a just monarchy? Was there in truth an ancient constitution? Were king, parliament and people uniquely joined? The publication and dissemination of these concepts materially helped to extend and to inform the political nation. The radicals used the printing presses to disseminate their own opinions of Church and state, leading John Milton to proclaim that London had become ‘the mansion house of liberty’ with its citizens ‘sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty the approaching reformation’.

  Yet the royalists fought back with their own pamphlets. Richard Carter, in ‘The Schismatic Stigmatised’, attacked the dissenting preachers who were even then crowding Westminster and its environs. ‘And instead of orthodox divines, they set up all kinds of mechanics, as shoe-makers, cobblers, tailors and glovers … these predicant mechanics and lawless lads do affect an odd kind of gesture in their pulpits, vapouring and throwing heads, hands and shoulders this way, and that way, puffing and blowing, grinning and gurning.’ A doggerel verse circulated through the streets:

  When women preach, and cobblers pray,

  The fiends in hell make holiday.

  The parishes of London were indeed filled with dissenters of any and every kind. A separatist congregation met at a house in Goat Alley, off Whitecross Street; they arrived in twos or threes, and one man stood at the door to warn of any approaching strangers. The man appointed to preach stood in the middle of the room while the others gathered in a circle about him. Among these lay preachers were, according to a political satire sold in the streets, ‘Greene the feltmaker, Spencer the horse-rubber, Quartermine the brewer’s clerk, with some few others, that are mighty sticklers in this new kind of talking trade, which many ignorant coxcombs call preaching’.

  The conventional clergy of the Church were derided in the streets and sometimes their surplices were stripped from their backs. The cry went up, ‘There goes a Jesuit, a Baal-priest, an Abbey-lubber, one of Canterbury’s whelps…’ When a bishop went up to the pulpit in St Olave’s, in Old Jewry, some hundred ‘rude rascals’ called out, ‘A Pope! A Pope! A Pope!’

  In this fevered atmosphere rumours of every kind circulated like hurricanes. It was said that a papist cavalry was concealed in caves in Surrey; it was reported that a plot had been hatched to blow up the Thames with gunpowder and thus drown the city. One of Pym’s colleagues, Sir Walter Earle, told the Commons that a conspiracy had been discovered to demolish parliament; in their excitement the members leaned forward in their seats better to hear him, and part of the floor of the gallery gave way. One member exclaimed that he smelled gunpowder and another, leaving his seat, shouted that ‘there was hot work and a great fire within’. The news soon spread, and a mob flew to Westminster. It was of course a false alarm, but the sudden panic testifies to the agitated state of the capital.

  It was a world of change; as the king had said to parliament earlier in the year, ‘You have taken the government all in pieces.’ ‘The Brothers of the Blade’, a dialogue issued in 1641, considered ‘the vicissitudes and revolutions of the states and conditions of men in these last days of the world’. ‘Revolution’ meant in conventional terms recurrence or periodic return; in these years it became associated with more earthly disorder. It was widely believed that the times were awry; anxiety and even despair were experienced by many. Brilliana Harley, a royalist letter-writer, expressed her belief that ‘things are now in such a condition that if the Lord does not put forth his helping hand his poor children will be brought low’.

  In the weeks after Strafford’s death the king seems to have become resigned to his loss of power. He signed the bill for abolishing tonnage and poundage, telling both houses of parliament that ‘I never had other design but to win the affections of my people’. He made a leading puritan, the earl of Essex, his lord chamberlain. Yet he was in fact playing for time.

  There were already the makings of a king’s party from those outraged at the pretensions of parliament in assuming executive powers; others were displeased at the idea of a puritan state Church controlled by parliamentary lay commissioners in place of bishops. The ‘root and branch’ party, which favoured such a change, was still in a minority. In this year many petitions reached Westminster from those who wished to preserve the Church and protect the Book of Common Prayer from more change. Some supported the maintenance of the episcopacy on the basis that the office was good even if the man was indifferent. From Oliver Cromwell’s own county of Huntingdon, for example, it was pleaded that ‘the form of divine service expressed and contained in the book of common prayer’ was the best. These petitioners wished to extirpate those immoderate and bitter reformers who fomented nothing but trouble and disorder in the churches of the country.

  It is hardly surprising, therefore, that those who were moderate or orthodox in their religion were beginning to take the side of the king and to believe that the political settlement imposed by parliament had gone far enough. Instead of relief and liberty, it had brought anxiety and division. The imposition of taxes had not improved the temper of the nation. One gentlewoman from Yorkshire, Margaret Eure, wrote: ‘I am in such a great rage with parliament as nothing will pacify me, for they promised us all should be well, if my lord Strafford’s head were off, and since then there is nothing better, but I think we shall be undone with taxes.’ It was agreed by many that the king should take wise counsel but few accepted that parliament had the power to choose who those counsellors should be. It was also possible that the king could still divide the Lords from the Commons; in June 1641, the peers threw out a bi
ll excluding the bishops from their number. They were not prepared to consider any ‘further reformation’.

  In the same month of June John Pym introduced what were known as the ‘ten propositions’, measures that were designed to increase parliamentary control of the king’s court and council. All priests and Jesuits were to be banished from the court and, in particular, from the queen’s entourage. Henrietta was defiant; she would obey her husband, she said, but not 400 of his subjects. Another proposition demanded that the king remove his ‘evil’ counsellors, and insisted that none in future were to be appointed unless they were such ‘as his people and Parliament may have just cause to confide in’. The armies of Scotland and of England were to be disbanded as quickly as possible. There was no reference to the king. This might be seen as a step towards a republican government, however carefully obscured by the rhetoric of loyalty.

  The ‘ten propositions’ had been in part prompted by the king’s recent and carefully resolved decision to travel to Scotland. It was feared that in fact his destination would be York, rather than Edinburgh, where he might take control of his English army garrisoned there; hence the call that the English and Scottish armies should stand down. But if he did indeed journey to Edinburgh, what then? He might, for example, enlist his native subjects in some attack upon Westminster. If he agreed to grant the Scots the ‘pure’ religion they demanded, and allowed them to resume their just liberties, they might return to their old allegiance to the Stuarts; Charles had already written to the earl of Argyll, chief of Clan Campbell, with the pledge to ‘establish the affections of my people fully to me’. If the Scottish and English armies were joined together, under the command of the king, they would represent an almost irresistible force.