The White King

by Leanda de Lisle

  To pay for their army the Covenanters were raising taxes on a scale that far outstripped what Charles had ever asked of his Scottish subjects. Battle-hardened Scottish veterans were recalled from Europe, where the Dutch and the Swedes allowed Scottish merchants to buy munitions and ship them home. The Covenanters also sought the support of fellow Calvinists in England. At the forefront of those ready and most able to help were Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, along with his fellow colonising aristocrats and their allies. If their treasonous dealing with the Scottish rebels were discovered, they intended that Puritan New England would be their safe refuge. A fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River was being reinforced, just in case they needed to defend themselves there from royal attack.12

  Meanwhile, in London, Mme de Chevreuse and Marie de’ Medici had persuaded Henrietta Maria of the benefits of a Spanish alliance against Louis. Lucy Carlisle was the first to report that she had ‘heard the queen use strong violent persuasions to the king such as must presently make us ill with France’. The French ambassador was so concerned he encouraged Louis to ‘foment the war in Scotland’, just as Charles believed he was doing already.13 With the French, the Swedes and the Dutch now lining up alongside the Covenanters, and the queen–and possibly the king–with Spain, the rebellion in Scotland risked bringing the Thirty Years War to England. Yet this was to be a fight not of Catholic against Protestant, but for the kind of Protestantism that would be practised in Scotland–and ultimately in England too.

  It was in this tense environment that, on 20 January 1639, Henrietta Maria delivered a daughter at Whitehall. The baby, named Catherine, lived only a few hours, but was no less loved for that. Just as today parents keep mementos of babies that have died, so the king and queen commissioned elegies and verse to memorialise her.14 Over the next days Charles moved, distracted, from his traumatised wife’s bedroom to his councils of war. The campaigning season would begin when the roads were dry enough to move large numbers of horses and heavy equipment. He planned to lead his own army, and as Henrietta Maria struggled to recover from the death of her baby, she did her best to contribute to the war effort. She began a fundraising campaign amongst English Catholics and organised a weekly fast in her household, asking all Catholics to follow suit. It was supposed to offer a demonstration of the English Catholic community’s moral and practical support for their king against rebels. But away from the court, English Catholics were terrified to now find themselves in the spotlight.

  However powerful the Habsburg cause in Europe, at home English Catholics belonged to a small and threatened minority. They had survived, rubbing along with their Protestant neighbours by keeping a low profile. The fundraising and fasts raised that profile and encouraged suspicions that Catholics had a vested interest in the defeat of the Calvinist Scottish rebels.

  Not only Catholics were viewed in England with suspicion, however. So were the Church of England’s bishops, many of whom were also raising funds for the king’s campaign. Archbishop Laud was said to have personally given the king £3,000. These actions were seen less as a mark of patriotic loyalty than as offering support for authoritarianism, since the money raised for the royal army helped–if only in a modest way–to ensure Charles did not have to call Parliament to pay for it. England had not gone to war without a parliament being called since 1323.

  As the Rubens ceiling glorifying the divine right of monarchy and the riches of peace was being installed at the Banqueting House, in March 1639, the rebels struck. A Covenanter army of over 15,000 seized the royal castles of Edinburgh and Dumbarton. Despite the historic contempt the English had for the Scots, many English Puritans celebrated their victories. The Venetian ambassador judged that London was ‘entirely favourable to the constancy and interests of the Scots’. This was, however, an exaggeration. There were plenty of non-Puritans who agreed with the Yorkshireman Henry Slingsby that the Scots were making ‘religion a pretence and cloak for wickedness’: that their true goals were to take power from the king for themselves.15

  Slingsby marched north for Scotland with the king’s army in a troop under Henry Holland’s command. Holland had advised Charles against the war, but had nevertheless lobbied for his commission as second in command of the royal forces. Other peers had responded well to Charles’s personal call to arms, bringing followers with them, ‘some ten, some twenty, some more’.16 The county militias, which constituted England’s only peacetime army, had also been raised, ensuring the royal army was a match for the Scots in terms of numbers. Yet their equipment was poor and many of the troops were pressed men. ‘I dare say there was never so raw, so unskilful and so unwilling an army brought to fight,’ one officer commented: ‘they are as like to kill their fellows as the enemy’.17

  Charles still hoped that battle might be avoided. If he appeared in Edinburgh as King of Scots, and ‘show myself, like myself’, it would surely be enough to end the rebels’ ‘follies’, ‘impertinencies’ and ‘mad acts’, he asserted.18 Indeed the Scots were fearful of war. They had seen defeat at English hands many times in past centuries.

  On 4 June Charles, camped with his army near Berwick, received intelligence that a Covenanter force was by the border town of Kelso. He gave Holland orders to reconnoitre the Scots’ position and to drive them out. Holland duly came upon an army 10,000 strong. The enemy was strung out in a shallow formation that made their numbers look still more impressive. He beat a swift retreat and passed on an exaggerated estimate of the Covenanter strength. It may be that Holland had seen what he wanted to see–a reason to give Charles pause. By the following evening, when the same Covenanter army appeared within sight of the king’s pavilion, there were rumours they had 45,000 in their ranks. The royal army stood to arms for three hours, the responsibility of decision weighing on the king.

  If Charles defeated the Scots decisively, it would shut down sedition in Scotland and weaken his critics in England. On the other hand the consequences of engaging in battle and then losing were unthinkable. Charles sent a page to start negotiations. A treaty was signed the same month. It was tragic for Charles to then discover that the Covenanters had had logistical and financial problems. His campaign might well have succeeded had he accepted battle. Instead all he had gained was time.19

  In the New Year of 1640 Charles took part in the first court masque to be performed at the Banqueting House under the Rubens ceiling. The drama began with the arrival of the Fury named Discord, stating her intention to put the whole world into chaos. In response Charles appeared as King Philogenes, the lover of the people. Discord was put to flight and the king was rewarded by the appearance of his queen and her ladies. The last scene in the masque depicted London beneath a cloud-filled heaven from where a chorus sang, ‘All that are harsh, all that are rude / Are by your harmony subdued.’20

  This was the dream.

  The reality was that both Covenanters and king were already preparing for a second ‘Bishops’ War’. Holland was to be demoted and Charles brought in his principal hard man to take charge of the coming campaign: the tall, forty-six-year-old Lord Deputy of Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, who Charles raised that January 1640 to the rank of Earl of Strafford as a mark of royal confidence.21

  Strafford was judged a man with a ‘cold brain’, ‘of great observation and a piercing judgement into both things and persons’. He was, however, ‘stooped at the neck’, a sign of mental stress, and even in repose his ‘countenance was cloudy’.22

  Strafford had been the king’s servant in Ireland for the past seven years, ruling the colony with a rod of iron. Three-quarters of the population were native Catholic Irish, persecuted for their religion and despised for their ethnicity. The next largest group was the Anglo-Normans, who had settled in Ireland during the Middle Ages. Most of them were also Catholic. As such they had lost the high office they had held until the mid-Tudor period in favour of more recent Protestant settlers from England and Scotland. Both James and Charles had encouraged these colonists by permitting them to exp
ropriate Catholic land, especially in Ulster and Munster. Strafford supported the policy vigorously, seeing it as a means of further controlling the Catholic Irish, ‘with their habitual hatred of the English government’.23

  Strafford also argued that the king should seek to have a large standing army in the kingdom, supported from Irish revenues. In the longer term, and with Ireland tamed, Strafford intended that Charles could use this army ‘in any part of Christendom’, or, indeed, against rebels at home.24 Meanwhile, Strafford had imposed royal control not only on Catholics in Ireland, but also on dissident Protestants, in terms of both the economy (ensuring Ireland paid for itself) and religious orthodoxy (he was a close friend of Laud). It was a policy he described as ‘thorough’ and it had earned him the thorough dislike of almost everyone in Ireland. In England, meanwhile, Strafford was regarded no better. He had thwarted courtiers used to enriching themselves at the king’s expense and his ‘sour and haughty temper’ alienated many others.25 Holland, in particular, detested him.

  Strafford was rumoured to have once suggested to the king that he execute Holland after the flamboyant earl had got involved in a near duel. Holland now told the queen that Strafford was insane. When Strafford complained, Holland explained that he was referring to Strafford’s constant illnesses. He had ‘hypochondriac humour’, Holland observed, and sniffed, ‘If I mistake not the English’, that meant ‘civilly and silently maddish’.26 Strafford, however, had at least one friend at court, and one whom Holland also admired: Lucy Carlisle. The hard man and the court beauty had even exchanged full-length portraits.

  Strafford backed Lucy’s financial interests in Ireland and helped promote her relatives into ever-higher office.27 Lucy, in turn, provided him with information and contacts. Her sister, the Countess of Leicester, reported that Lucy was currently ‘more in favour [with the queen] than she has been in a long time’.28 This was, perhaps, because Lucy and Henrietta Maria’s friend Mme de Chevreuse were now constantly together. Although they were certainly not natural allies, given Lucy’s Calvinist Protestantism, Lucy was pivotal in brokering meetings between Strafford and Mme de Chevreuse.

  Charles not only needed money to pay for an army to take on the Scots. Sooner or later England would have to fight the Dutch. The previous October they had attacked a Spanish fleet in full view of the castles of Dover, Deal and Walmer, thereby destroying Charles’s claim to sovereignty over the English Channel. Mme de Chevreuse assured Strafford that Philip IV would supply Charles with a loan of £100,000 and ‘on very favourable terms’.29 Strafford believed that in the meantime, however, Charles would also need the money he could gain from parliamentary subsidies. To this end he encouraged Charles to call a new parliament, pointing to his own recent success in Ireland. In March 1640 MPs in Dublin had granted subsidies totalling £90,000 for an army. Strafford was certain he could pull off a similar coup in London. With Strafford’s impressive record for getting things done Charles was convinced. In April 1640 he called his first parliament in eleven years.

  There were many new faces in the Commons when it assembled on 15 April 1640. But, unfortunately for Charles, the MPs also included some of his most long-standing opponents: Warwick in the Lords, and Pym in the Commons, amongst them. The grievances were similarly old and had only been sharpened by time. There was anger at the loss of liberty represented by eleven years of personal rule and taxes raised without parliamentary consent. Charles had also given them fresh reasons to fear a ‘popish’ Counter-Reformation conspiracy. Charles had entered into diplomatic relations with the papacy to support his picture-buying. He had allowed Catholic aristocrats to practise their religion in the queen’s chapels. Now he was prepared to use Spanish gold and an Irish army (containing Catholic as well as Protestant troops) against fellow Calvinists in Scotland.

  Warwick and Pym intended to use Parliament to force Charles to turn his policies upside down. Abroad, they wanted friendship with his Scottish Covenanter enemies and an aggressive anti-Spanish war, focused on taking Spain’s colonies in the West Indies. At home, they wanted Charles’s religious reforms reversed in favour of a more thoroughgoing Calvinism and the king to be stripped of many of his prerogative powers. Pym’s long experience as an MP ensured he ‘understood the affections and temper of the kingdom… had observed the errors and mistakes in government, and knew well how to make them appear greater than they were’.30 A majority of MPs were therefore prepared to withhold subsidies until Charles had reformed the kingdom’s ‘abuses’. Pym stretched these to produce a list of thirty-six and demanded they be examined at length. This was intended to undermine the war effort, ensuring a long delay before any possible monies would be voted for an army to fight the Scots.

  On 4 May 1640 Charles promised to give up Ship Money–the most hated of all the arbitrary taxes–in exchange for twelve subsidies worth £650,000. The offer was refused, even though the subsidies proposed were less valuable than the tax. Strafford, who had met with Philip IV’s envoys only five days earlier, was now confident, however, that Charles would have enough aid from Spain to dispense with any need for the MPs’ subsidies. Holland counselled Charles against dissolving Parliament, as did Lucy Carlisle’s powerful brother, Northumberland.31 Strafford advised otherwise. ‘Go vigorously on,’ he urged the king. Parliament had not met its responsibilities, so the king was ‘absolved from all rules of government being reduced to extreme necessity’. ‘You have an army in Ireland you may employ here to reduce this kingdom. [I am] as confident of anything under heaven the Scots shall not hold out five months.’32

  Charles dissolved what became known as the ‘Short Parliament’ on 5 May. Against all precedent, he insisted that the deliberative body of the Church of England, known as Convocation, nevertheless continue sitting. He wanted his actions backed by the bishops and they duly gave him their support. Requirements were issued for clergy to make regular pronouncements from the pulpit on the divine right of kings and for them to swear loyalty to the Church of England’s ‘archbishops, bishops, deans, and archdeacons etc’. Puritan troublemakers suggested the ‘etc’ might even include an oath to the Pope.33

  In May it emerged that there was to be no aid from Spain. A major rebellion in Catalonia had broken out, and Philip IV needed every penny he had. This meant Charles could no longer afford to offend France. Mme de Chevreuse was encouraged to leave court. She departed for Flanders in June ‘accompanied by the royal coaches and the Spanish ambassadors’ as well as a parting gift from Henrietta Maria of a ‘rich jewel worth 12,000 crowns’.34 This was particularly generous, given that Charles was now forced to rely on voluntary contributions, loans, sales and the further exploitation of his prerogative rights to pay for his army. Pro-royal forces in the City, including the elite merchant companies, lent Charles £250,000 and also engineered a loan which provided a further £50,000 in ready cash.

  Many of Charles’s subjects were, nevertheless, deeply troubled that Parliament had not supported the war effort against the Scots. The institution was an integral part of English political culture in a way that the Scottish-born Stuarts had never understood. In Dorset, when troops learned Parliament had been dissolved, they went home.35 Rumours, meanwhile, were spreading that dark forces were behind the king’s actions–a conspiracy linked to Spain that would see the overthrow of Protestantism. Mob attacks began on altar rails and images in churches and soon turned more violent. Two officers suspected of popery were murdered at the hands of their own men, and London, in particular, became a dangerous place for anyone perceived as Catholic, or even a supporter of Charles’s religious reforms.

  Warwick and other dissident aristocrats with links to the American colonies were galvanising radical support amongst London’s small traders, the ‘new merchant’ class and the Puritan clergy, with whom they had worked for years. The English nobility might no longer have had the great feudal following they had enjoyed in the Middle Ages, but they were now set to ride the tiger of a popular mass movement.

  On 10 May
notices were pinned up at prominent places across London calling people to defend their liberties, and to assassinate Laud and Strafford. The lynch mob, last seen in the death of Dr Lambe in 1628, was back.36

  The next day several hundred youths stormed Lambeth Palace looking for the archbishop, ‘with the purpose of slaying him’. Most were apprentices who had come out ‘with the connivance of their masters, Puritans for the most part’.37 There was an element of spontaneity in these riots, but they were also planned events, like the stool-throwing Edinburgh riot against the Scottish prayer book in 1637. Where the Scots had led, the English opposition was following, but to deadlier effect.

  As Laud fled the mob across the river to Whitehall, several signs were put up outside the royal palaces. They warned that the king himself could not save Laud or Strafford from being killed. Charles was forced to react.

  On 12 May it was reported that the Earl of Warwick, Viscount Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, John Pym and the Ship Money martyr John Hampden had all been arrested and their papers searched. Charles was looking for evidence of treasonous collusion with the Scottish rebels so they might be put in prison. Nothing was found beyond a discourse by a New England minister against the Church of England’s liturgy, and the men were released.38 Charles’s suspicions remained, however–and with good reason. The dissident peers had invited the noble Scottish Covenanter leadership to invade their homeland.