A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  The fiscal expediencies of ship money, forest fines and fines for ‘distraint of knighthood’ were declared illegal.* Laudian innovations in the Church were condemned and parliamentary orders were issued, such as the one of 8 September 1641 against religious images in churches – orders that in many parts of the country were seen to legitimise direct action. One of the churchwardens of Woolchurch in London, it was reported to a Commons committee, had rather overzealously interpreted the order: ‘he had taken up divers brass inscriptions which tended to idolatry: and defaced some statues on tombs which were in the posture of praying and the like, and desired direction how he should raise to defray the charge with other particulars to the same effect’. The committee, though cognisant of the honesty of the man’s intentions, informed him that tombs were not included within the purview of the Commons’ order – not least because the more substantial tombs were likely to be those of the ancestors of the most wealthy members of the parish community.25

  The ‘evil counsellors’ Laud, Sir Francis Windebank, Lord Keeper Finch and Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, were arrested. In the case of Wentworth, Charles’s Lord Deputy in Ireland, when charges of treason refused to stick, Parliament resurrected the medieval device of a bill of attainder, whereby an individual could be condemned to death simply by a majority vote in favour passing through the two Houses. The vote in both was conducted in an atmosphere of outright political intimidation, with hostile mobs surrounding Parliament. Those who were accused of stirring up popular demonstrations went unpunished. The now well-known radical agitator John Lilburne was called before the Commons on 4 May 1641 to answer the charge of having said: ‘This day there are but 7,000 come to crave judgement against the Lord Strafford, without weapons, but tomorrow there will be 40 or 50,000 in arms who if they cannot have the Lord Strafford they will have the king’s person.’ Despite these inflammatory comments, Lilburne was ‘utterly and freely discharged’.26

  Fear of reprisals led the vote to be won in the Commons by 204 to 59 in favour, but the majority was less conclusive than it appeared, given that the House was half empty. While Charles would regret his assent to Strafford’s execution for the rest of his life, and view his failure to defend his trusted servant as a gross stain upon his conscience, he appears to have suffered few qualms in abandoning Laud to his fate. However, the hated Archbishop would not be executed until 1645, after a humiliating trial in which the prosecuting attorney, his old adversary William Prynne, would employ evidence from the prelate’s diary, including accounts of erotic dreams involving the Duke of Buckingham, to devastating effect.

  The dismantling of Charles I’s personal rule received almost unanimous support in both Houses of Parliament. Future Royalists such as Viscount Falkland and Edward Hyde as well as future Parliamentarians including Hampden and John Pym voted for the Triennial Bill, which established mechanisms whereby Parliament would be called every three years whether summoned by the monarch or not, and could not be dissolved without its own consent. However, while few, not even the King, attempted to defend the Laudian innovations in the Church introduced during the 1620s and 1630s, few, equally, were agreed on the form the national Church should take instead. It was here, on the issue of England’s religious settlement, that the fault lines which would finally result in the formation of two armed camps began to crack. If the constitutional changes enacted by Parliament between 1640 and 1641 could be described as fairly conservative, constituting an attempt to turn the political clock back to the Jacobean era, the same could not be said in the religious sphere, where petitions for root-and-branch reform in the Church sought not to restore the Elizabethan settlement but to dismantle it completely.

  The movement for root-and-branch reform in the Church initially gathered considerable support within Parliament. Some of this enthusiasm was fuelled by a sense that the purging of Laudian ‘Popery’ heralded the downfall of ‘Babylon’ and the establishment of a new Jerusalem. Apocalyptic enthusiasm, however, was gradually tempered by growing concern about the rise of radical sects and the threat to social order posed by this popular reformation. Some of those who initially supported reform, such as Sir Edward Dering, came under pressure from constituents worried about its consequences. Robert Abbott, Vicar of Cranbrook in Kent, on 15 March 1641 complained to Dering about the increasing number of sectarian churches in his county that would have ‘every particular congregation to be independent, and … the votes about every matter of Jurisdiction to be drawne up from the whole body of the church … both men and women … They would have none in the commission but by solemne Couenant.’27 Abbott alleged also that he was under pressure from some of his other parishioners to abandon the use of the Book of Common Prayer, bell-tolling at funerals and the churching of women – all of this, he added, was to the detriment of the incumbent’s income.

  Works that attacked English religious sects appeared, recycling scare stories about Anabaptist groups from the early Reformation in Germany. Hostile ‘news-books’ recorded the activities of ‘mechanic’ preachers – unordained, often self-educated men, including John Durant, a soap-maker, John Spencer, coachman to Lord Brooke, and John Green, a felt- or hat-maker, who took it upon themselves to preach.28 Religious radicals were accused of sexual transgressions. It was claimed some women preachers, with their male colleagues, worked ‘in a joynt labour for the procreating of young Saints to fill up the numbers of the new faith’. To many conservatives, acts of popular iconoclasm came to look indistinguishable from class-motivated rioting. In the Church of St Olave, Southwark, on 6 June 1641, members of the community disrupted a communion service, shouting, ‘Why do you suffer Baal’s priest to give you the communion and serve you so? Kick him out of the church; kneel to a pope, hang him. Baal’s priest, get you home and crum your porridge with your bread.’29 At St Thomas the Apostle, also in London, after the taking of the Protestation (an oath defending the Protestant religion against Popery, subscribed to in churches across the land), the altar rails around the communion table were torn down and set on fire, the people saying that ‘they would make them a burnt offering, and that Dagon [the idol of the Philistines] being now down, they would burn him … And further one of them said, that if the parson came to read the service in a surplice, they would burn him and the surplice with the rails.’30

  For many conservatives, monarchy, episcopacy and the social order were deeply interconnected: remove one, they believed, and the others would also soon be torn down. Sir Thomas Aston’s Remonstrance against Presbytery, presented to Parliament on 27 February 1641, stated that, for the puritans, ‘Freedom of their consciences and persons is not enough, but they must have their purses and estates free too … Nay they go higher, even to the denial of the right to proprietie in our estates.’ The root-and-branch petitioners, Aston argued, wished to get rid of ‘26 bishops and set up 9324 potential Popes’, one in each parish.31 Outbreaks of rioting against fen-drainage schemes in East Anglia and disorder in Windsor Forest, though largely unconnected with the pressure for root-and-branch reform, were also co-opted into conservative propaganda. Dr Edward Layfield, minister of All Hallows, Barking, linked the disturbances of 1640–1 to an earlier tradition of popular rebellion: ‘They are … like Jack Straw and Wat Tyler that speak against ceremonies of the church.’ One Dr Rogers of Hertfordshire recalled John Ball’s text, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ The same connection between the Long Parliament, religious reform and popular rebellion would be made in Charles I’s answer to Parliament’s Nineteen Propositions of 1642. Agreeing to Parliament’s proposals would, Charles suggested, ‘end in a dark, equal chaos of confusion, and the long line of our many noble ancestors in a Jack Cade or a Wat Tyler’.32

  Some of the most radical voices in favour of reform, such as John Milton (albeit writing anonymously), even made this connection between monarchy and prelacy explicit. In his Of Reformation, Milton, then working as a schoolmaster to the children of a London tailor, employed a corporeal
metaphor, describing episcopacy as the ‘Huge and Monstrous Wen little lesse than the Head [monarchy] itself’. Radical surgery was required upon the body politic to support the ‘floating carcase of a crazy and diseased Monarchy’.33 While he was not yet a fully fledged republican, Milton’s anti-episcopal tracts demonstrated not only hostility to the bishops but clear contempt for Charles I’s kingship.34

  Charles might have exploited the growing divisions over religious reform and dissolved this troublesome Parliament, had it not been for events outside England. In August 1641, he went north to Scotland to negotiate with the Scottish Covenanters. Had peace been successfully concluded, it would have removed the financial shackles that forced him to keep the Long Parliament in session. However, any faith that his opponents might have placed in his sincerity was dashed by the King’s complicity in a plot, called ‘the Incident’, to seize the Covenanter leaders Archibald Campbell, 8th Earl of Argyll, James, Duke of Hamilton and his brother, William, Earl of Lanark. Charles’s reputation was not further enhanced by his decision to plead his innocence, accompanied by armed men, before the Edinburgh Parliament on 12 October.

  The repercussions of ‘the Incident’ were as nothing, however, compared with the impact of the rebellion that began in Ireland that month. A reaction to the hated rule of Strafford, the revolt was sparked by economic as well as religious causes. However, as viewed through the eyes of many English pamphleteers, it was nothing less than a Catholic war against Protestants. News-sheets were filled with stories of atrocities committed by the rebels: foetuses ripped from their mothers’ wombs while still alive, wives raped and husbands murdered in the sight of their spouses – indeed, killings were reported in the tens of thousands, numbers so high that, had they been correct, exceeded the actual numbers of Irish Protestants. These scare stories generated panic across the country. The nonconformist autobiographer Joseph Lister recalled that as a teenage boy in Pudsey, Yorkshire, he was present when the church service was interrupted by a man crying, ‘Friends, we are all as good as dead men, for the Irish rebels are coming; they are come as far as Rochdale … and will be at Halifax and Bradford shortly.’ Lister recalled that the news put the congregation ‘all in confusion, some ran out, others wept’. The panic only subsided once riders were sent to Halifax and returned to confirm that the ‘Irish rebels’ were, in fact, Protestant refugees.35

  The Irish rebels claimed to be fighting under a royal commission from Charles I. Trust in the King had sunk so low that John Pym, the veteran MP who had made a political career of calling for tougher measures against Popery, could press for stronger security measures which included limitations on Charles’s powers of appointment. Pym urged that the King should employ only councillors approved by Parliament. The vote on this ‘additional instruction’ was won, but only by 151 to 110. Meanwhile, the kingdom was placed on an increasingly warlike footing. An Impressment Bill was passed, removing the King’s power to order men to serve outside their own counties. The Earl of Essex was placed in command of the trained bands south of the Trent.

  The assault on the King’s prerogative, which was drawing opposition from constitutional moderates, including Edward Hyde and Sir Symonds D’Ewes, together with the populist means by which Pym was attempting to secure his goals helped gather a party around the King. Although Pym narrowly succeeded in getting the Grand Remonstrance, a lengthy indictment of Charles I’s rule, passed through the Commons – by 159 votes to 148 – the most heated debate occurred after it had been approved, namely, over the question of whether the Remonstrance should be published. Sir Edward Dering famously complained: ‘When I first heard of a Remonstrance, I presently imagined that like faithful councillors we should hold up a glass to His Majesty … I did not dream that we should remonstrate downwards and tell stories to the people.’ The irony was that Dering’s own speech was later published with his consent. Dering, however, argued that whereas he continued to represent the true freeholders of Kent, the propertied male householders whose ‘voice’ had made him their MP, Pym stooped to appeal to the vulgar mob thronging the streets of London.36 The King’s answer to the Grand Remonstrance made clear that he felt that the appeal to popularity was providing him with the ammunition to build a Royalist party. Only he himself, the King’s declaration claimed, stood between the fundamental law and the Church and the ‘irreverence of those many schismatics and separatists, wherewith of late this kingdom and this city [London] abounds, to the great dishonour and hazard of both Church and State’.37

  The fears of the moderates were compounded when the government of the City of London effectively lost control to Pym’s ‘junto’.* On 27 December citizens and apprentices, including John Lilburne, stormed Westminster Abbey, damaging the monuments, before surging around the royal palace at Whitehall.38 On 3 January 1642, perhaps convinced by impeachment proceedings issued against twelve bishops that he was next in line, Charles chose to seize the initiative. In a repeat of ‘the Incident’, he planned to arrest his leading parliamentary opponents, including Sir Arthur Haselrig, John Hampden, Denzil Holles, John Pym and William Strode, and their principal ally among the peers, Viscount Mandeville. On the 4th, the King entered the Commons, accompanied by troops, only to find that his ‘birds’ had already flown. His actions caused the volatile City to erupt in angry demonstrations, now clearly targeted at Charles and not at his ‘evil counsellors’. The next day, after being cold-shouldered by the City government, Charles found his coach surrounded by the mob, one of whom, the future Parliamentarian journalist Henry Walker, threw into the carriage a copy of his incendiary pamphlet, To your tents, oh Israel, which praised the deposition of the biblical King Rehoboam.39

  Charles, accompanied by a pitifully small band of followers, left his capital, fearful that he would become the victim of crowd violence. England now moved into a state of low-level armed hostility as each side attempted to cajole, persuade or force the broadly neutral majority to support them in the impending civil conflict. Even before the King raised his standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642, small groups of his supporters had already begun to resort to plunder, as evidenced by a parliamentary order of the same month which permitted communities to ‘join together, to defend themselves and others from rapine and force’. New propositions for peace were presented to the King by Parliament that June, but already these appeared to be designed as propaganda for recruiting supporters to the Parliamentarian cause rather than genuine terms aimed at avoiding conflict.

  6

  ALL COMMANDED AND YET WERE UNDER COMMAND

  Following the first pitched battle of the conflict, at Edgehill on 23 October 1642, the country moved from guerrilla fighting to hot war. What has often been romanticised as a chivalrous ‘war without an enemy’ was, in fact, the bloodiest civil conflict that the British Isles has ever known. As a proportion of the adult population, more men died during England’s civil wars than during the First World War. It has been estimated that some 85,000 men fell in the fighting itself, with a further 100,000 dying from wounds or disease. In addition, some 120,000 were made prisoners of war. In Scotland and Ireland, the human costs were even higher. Incidents of atrocity where the accepted rules of war broke down were not unheard of, though they were far less frequent than in the wars in Ireland, where religious animosities and ethnic hatred fuelled the violence. On Christmas Day 1643, at Barthomley in Cheshire, Lord Byron’s troops murdered twenty captured Parliamentarian soldiers in cold blood. In February 1644 at Hopton Castle, Shropshire, surrendering troops were murdered and their bodies tossed into the moat. During the Royalist sack of Bolton that May, both combatants and non-combatants were killed by Prince Rupert’s men: estimates of the number of fatalities range from 200 to 1800. One reason for the greater violence shown at both Barthomley and Bolton may have been that the Royalist troops involved had recently returned from the much more intense fighting taking place in Ireland.1

  The impact of the civil war was felt across much of the nation. Although it is the great
pitched battles of Edgehill, Marston Moor and Naseby that are best remembered, these were uncharacteristic of most of the fighting, which mainly comprised widely dispersed, low-level skirmishes between small garrison forces. These garrisons were generally poorly supplied and forced to support themselves by resorting to plunder. It has been calculated that the cash value of goods plundered amounted to more than that taken in war taxation, and taxation itself reached levels that would not be matched again until the 1690s. The presence of soldiers within towns placed greater strains on communities’ limited resources. Garrison towns had a higher incidence of disease, mainly typhus and cholera, with the death rate in Berkshire doubling in the years 1643–4 as a result of the influx of military personnel via the important inland port of Reading. The familiar consequence of modern-day conflicts, the growth of refugee populations, was a major feature of the civil war, and individuals who had fled to temporary accommodation during the 1640s could still be found living there in the Restoration period. The war even etched itself into the English landscape. A country that, unlike its European neighbours, was remarkably unmilitarised was suddenly littered with siege fortifications. Rich grazing land was reduced to expanses of churned mud as turf was cut to shore up earthworks. Trees and houses (and in the case of Brampton Bryan, Herefordshire, even a whole town) were uprooted and flattened to remove potential cover for the besieging forces.