The White King

by Leanda de Lisle

  Henry VIII, Mary I and Elizabeth I had each introduced dramatic religious change. But they had used Parliament to give their actions legal force with MPs both seduced and terrorised into giving their support. History was to label the period that Charles ruled without Parliament as the ‘Eleven Years’ Tyranny’. But it had seen no political or religious executions. To some contemporaries it seemed rather that Charles’s Eleven Years’ Tyranny had not been nearly tyrannical enough. In England ‘a prince’s awful reputation’ had always been ‘of much more defence to him, than his regal, nay legal, edicts’.39 Charles had been merciful. Now he faced emboldened traitors not only in Scotland, but also in England.

  In the middle of August 1640 word reached Charles’s council in London that the Scots were poised to cross the border. Charles immediately announced that he would place himself at the head of his threatened people. On 20 August he left for York. The Scots crossed the river Tweed on the same day. The English commander, the Earl of Northumberland, claimed he was too ill to fight and the army, betrayed by Warwick and his allies, proved able to muster only limited resistance. On 28 August, following a brief skirmish, the Scots took Newcastle, ending the second Bishops’ War in the king’s defeat. Strafford summed up the full gravity of the situation: ‘The country from Berwick to York [is] in the power of the Scots to the universal affright of us all.’40

  With Charles in York, his council in London ordered out the royal bodyguard to protect his wife and children from the traitors in their midst. Henrietta Maria had a new baby–Henry–not yet two months old. Days later a petition was being widely circulated in manuscript in London bearing the names of twelve peers.41 The signatories included Warwick, Saye and Sele, Brooke, Essex, and Essex’s brother-in-law, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford.42 It listed a ‘heap of complaints’ concerning religion and the personal rule. There was also a sinister demand for ‘evil’ councillors to be given up to a new parliament for ‘condign’ punishment. That meant probable death for Strafford, and perhaps Laud as well.

  Only Parliament could now raise the money necessary to pay for another army to fight the Scots or to pay them off, so they would go home. Charles was the victim of a coup in the north and in London–and he knew it.

  10

  ‘A BROKEN GLASS’

  IT WAS DUSK WHEN CHARLES APPROACHED LONDON FROM YORK ON 31 October 1640. A humiliating armistice had been signed with the Scots. Under its terms the Covenanters had been promised £850 a day to maintain their armies on English soil. Newcastle, and the northern counties of Northumberland and County Durham, remained in enemy hands, along with the Tyneside collieries. This meant the Scots controlled the coal Londoners needed to heat their homes, and winter was now upon them.

  Charles’s Privy Council had fortified Whitehall Palace and artillery pieces covered the landward approaches. Behind the palace gates, meanwhile, in the Great Court, caballeros or ‘Cavaliers’, as they were coming to be known, awaited the king, dressed in wide-brimmed hats and tall leather boots.* Some of his bodyguard were on horse, others on foot, ready to protect the king from his own subjects.1

  The opposition’s latest political weapon was the mass petition. Charles had been brought a document in York which expanded on the ‘heap of complaints’ offered by the twelve-peers petition and bore the signatures of 10,000 London citizens. Not all the signatures represented the genuinely aggrieved. Bully-boy tactics also got names on paper. It would become commonplace to be called to the houses of powerful neighbours late at night, and those who would not sign the latest petition were told that they were ‘neither good Christians nor honest men’, and could be ostracised–or worse.2

  Charles, too, knew what it was like to have his hand forced.

  Although the king had announced in York, ‘I have of myself resolved to call a parliament,’ the truth was he had had little choice. What would become known as the Long Parliament was due to open on Tuesday 3 November 1640. Warwick gave friends the news, crowing that ‘the Game was well begun!’3 The opposition’s next move in their power play was to provoke fears of an internal Catholic threat. This would encourage MPs to help them take power from the king. Spreading fear and slander was not difficult–the opposition could speak to thousands through print and pulpit–but sometimes actions spoke even louder than words.

  On the night of 2 November Catholic homes in London were searched for arms. The message this sent was that Catholics were about to rise up and turn hidden weapons on sleeping Protestants. A story spread like wildfire that Marie de’ Medici had ‘secretly given the king advice against the liberty and religion of the realm’: that the king himself could not be trusted.4 Charles did not therefore dare risk the usual grand procession through the streets to Parliament for its opening. Instead, he arrived at Westminster on 3 November by barge, unseen by his people: a small victory for his enemies.

  But Charles had friends here, as well as foes. One nobleman had written in advance to a fellow peer instructing him to come to Parliament armed ‘with zeal and with the sword of eloquence’ so they might ‘cut in two the Puritans and chop off the heads of the anti-Monarchists’.5 Another called the petitioner peers ‘traitors and Covenanters’ who ‘deserved to be hanged’.6 Such men awaited Charles’s lead.

  The Lords Chamber was filled with MPs and peers, while Lucy Carlisle stood with other courtiers who had come to watch the proceedings. The king sat on the throne dressed in ermine robes with his ten-year-old heir at his right hand. He had a sensitive face. In several portraits, a favourite baroque pearl earring hangs by his cheek like a falling tear. But his melancholic eyes could also reveal determination: ‘if fair means will not [achieve my aims], power must redress it,’ he had once said.7

  Addressing the gathered MPs Charles asked that they consider their fellow countrymen living under the heel of the Scottish enemy. A third campaign against the Scots was necessary to free the north. Charles did not go on to allude to those who had betrayed the English army to the Scots, but he planned to act against them. Strafford had been summoned from York to discuss how to use the royal armies in the north and in Ireland also, to crush both the Scots and their English allies.

  Strafford reached London on 10 November. The next morning he proposed to Charles that those who had invited the Scots into England now be accused publicly of high treason. Just a short walk from Whitehall, in Parliament, Strafford’s impeachment had, however, been launched and John Pym was already summarising the accusations in the Commons Chamber. Strafford and the king had taken their decision too late.

  Pym had a ‘grave and very comely way of expressing himself, with great volubility of words, natural and proper’.8 MPs listened intently as he exposed Strafford as a secret papal agent provocateur. Strafford’s plan was ‘to provoke the king to make a war between us and the Scots that thereby we might consume one another’. With England at war with Scotland, Strafford would then bring over the Irish army and, with the help of English Catholics and foreign powers, he would subdue England entirely and ‘bring in the papist party’.9

  To counter this threat a parliamentary committee had already begun to draw up plans to constrain Catholics more tightly. Pym would go so far as to suggest Catholics be forced to wear distinctive clothes, an idea inspired by the badge of shame worn by Jews in medieval Europe.10

  The truth was that Strafford was an orthodox Protestant whose wife came from a Puritan family. The accusation that he sought a Catholic takeover was absurd, but in the fevered atmosphere Pym’s alternative truth was believed.

  That evening, still innocent of the proceedings against him, Strafford arrived in the Lords. Holland was amongst those present.11 It was said that if Warwick was the visible head of the Puritans, Holland was now the ‘invisible’ head ‘not because he means to do either hurt or good’ but because he thought it ‘gallantry’ to act as the opposition’s future go-between with the king.12 The debates on the impeachment charges were still in progress and Strafford was greeted as he entered by shouts of ‘With
draw! Withdraw!’ He duly left, shocked, only returning when the debates had concluded. He was then informed he was to be placed in custody while the charges were further investigated.

  Henrietta Maria later recalled that Strafford had the most beautiful hands she had ever seen. Did they tremble as he gave up his sword? He was escorted from the Chamber under guard, ‘all gazing’, their hats on in a mark of contempt, ‘to him whom before that morning the greatest in England would have stood’.13

  Strafford had recovered his composure by the time Lucy Carlisle visited him in the Tower. She told everyone he was ‘very confident of his overcoming all these accusations’ and ‘I never saw him for one minute discomposed.’14 But those who had conspired with the Scots knew they had to destroy Strafford if their lives were ever to be safe. They could not trust Charles to grant them amnesty for their treason unless they had control over him. That meant not only stripping Charles of power, but also taking the roles of his senior councillors for themselves, and making sure any royal servant capable of fighting back on the king’s behalf was incapacitated by ruin, imprisonment or death.

  Charles’s Secretary of State, Sir Francis Windebank, fled to France, rather than risk his own arrest. The Lord Chancellor, John Finch, would also do so. Laud stayed. His radical vision of an empowered Church of England would have changed the face of English society. He understood better than Charles that for the landowning classes, who had benefited from the land released by the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, it looked like a potential reversal of their fortunes, as well as a threat to the Reformation itself. He had long expected their revenge.

  On 18 December Laud was impeached in the Commons for high treason. The charges laid against him were of endeavouring to bring in arbitrary government, alienating the king from his English subjects, hindering justice, bringing about the war with Scotland, altering the true religion, persecuting godly preachers and working secretly to reconcile with Rome.

  Laud was not yet locked in the Tower. He was instead placed in the custody of the Gentleman Usher to be sent for trial in due course. The diminutive and grey-haired archbishop was not a man to raise or lead armies. He did not pose the same sort of threat to the opposition as did Strafford–the leading advocate of force.

  The queen was, however, now also at risk. The opposition’s narrative of popish threat had a part for her too. A verbal assault against that ‘popish brat of France’ was unleashed in Puritan pulpits and violence then followed. A Puritan mob came to ‘my own house’, she wrote to a friend, attacking people emerging from Mass in her chapel, ‘furiously with stones and weapons’.15 There was no respite for Henrietta Maria even when the death of the three-year-old Princess Anne was announced on 16 December 1640. The heartbroken king and queen had known the deaths of infants, but never of a child whose growth they had measured, and with whom they had played. It had been but ‘a brief sickness’ and the Venetian ambassador described their ‘intense grief’.16

  Just at the time they had lost one child, however, they had to plan to send another away: nine-year-old Mary, the little girl who had refused to stand still for Van Dyck’s portraits. Charles needed money and allies. Marie de’ Medici had suggested a marriage for Mary that would gain both, while also pleasing his kingdoms: a Protestant marriage to the fourteen-year-old William of Orange, heir to the ruling house of Holland. He was Calvinist–so there could be no accusations of popery–and he was rich. Indeed, Marie argued, he could help provide Charles with an army of 20,000 men.17

  Already power in England was slipping from Charles’s grasp. The majority of Parliament’s electorate had been troubled by his authoritarianism. They wanted Parliament to reassert its place in the ‘ancient constitution’ and MPs to ensure that the ‘liberties of the subject’ were secured. Similarly many wished to see the Calvinist character of the Elizabethan church renewed, and its growing political power stripped back. These aims were conservative, but to achieve them, the majority of MPs were prepared to back those who were leading the way in imposing new ways of constraining the king.

  A new law was passed that Parliament must be called every three years. There could be no further eleven years of personal rule. Charles was also denied his right to raise customs revenues under the royal prerogative. There would be no further taxation without representation, and Charles was left fiscally dependent on Parliament. No longer would Puritan gentlemen have their ears cropped, or Puritan ministers be punished for opposing the anti-Calvinist changes in the Church of England. Parliamentary committees were appointed to abolish any court that did not adhere to common law. These included the Star Chamber (used in trials for sedition) and the ecclesiastic Court of High Commission (used against dissident clergy), as well as the regional judiciaries of the Council of the North and the Council of the Marches of Wales.

  Yet there remained a dark undercurrent to this return to a functioning ‘mixed monarchy’ and Puritan liberation. Despite tougher penal laws being introduced against Catholics and Charles ordering the expulsion from England of Catholic priests, attacks on innocent Catholics in general, and on Henrietta Maria in particular, continued. In one of the lost royal letters preserved in the archives of Belvoir Castle’s secret rooms, Henrietta Maria feared she faced her ‘utter ruin’. Written to the French Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the Comte de Chavigny, this letter prepared the ground for her possible flight to Paris.18

  Charles’s leading opponents and their allies were now so powerful they were being called the ‘Junto’. And this too was troubling for many. The Junto had the appearance of an emerging oligarchy with its own radical agenda. Warwick’s London house was serving as the kingdom’s new exchequer, and channelling money to the Scottish occupiers. His Scottish friends now intended to use their victory to impose their religious views throughout Britain and Ireland. Like their allies in England, the Covenanters needed to secure themselves against any future trial for treason. If episcopacy was not acknowledged to be intrinsically wrong then they too would never be secure from Charles’s future revenge. They therefore had demanded that episcopacy be abolished across the three kingdoms. But in doing so they had asked something of Charles that he would never give them.

  In his coronation oath, Charles had sworn to defend the rights granted to the clergy by Edward the Confessor, ‘according to the laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel established in this kingdom’.19 He was not a man to break such an oath, nor to deny his sacral kingship, as God’s lieutenant on earth. When he learned the latest price of peace with the Scots, his anger was such it was said ‘the king he runs stark mad’. But the demands of the Scots were also the shock that brought the moribund Royalist party in England back to life.

  Like the king, the majority of MPs saw episcopacy and Henry VIII’s royal supremacy in religion as an integral part of England’s constitutional arrangements. Upending them could undermine the rule of law and the entire social order.20 The legislation Parliament had put through limited the king’s freedom to act without the direct co-operation of the landed classes. This was what they had wanted to achieve. What they did not want was to introduce to England a Scottish-style Presbyterian system of church government. There was also widespread dislike for another Scottish demand: the Scots wanted a new confederal constitutional arrangement between the two kingdoms that would support a military agenda aimed against the native Catholic population of Ireland. Few English MPs wished to see any kind of political union with Scotland.

  Within the Junto itself there was also a division between hard-line and more moderate elements.21 But they were all at least partially dependent on the support of London radicals who wanted revolutionary change.22 Most striking was a radical petition to Parliament, bearing 20,000 signatures, that demanded episcopacy be abolished ‘root and branch’. As with other such petitions it was backed by the threat of mass violence. Moderate MPs fought against having the petition even considered, ‘because tumultuously brought’.23

  When Charles’
s sister, Elizabeth, in The Hague, received a letter from a friend with the ‘news of Parliament’, it was a tale of cold civil war: ‘We are full of distempers, all is like a broken glass,’ her correspondent wrote, ‘our world of happiness is near an end.’24

  * Shakespeare used the term ‘cavaleros’ in Henry IV Pt 2. It is from the same Latin root as the French word ‘chevalier’.

  11

  STRAFFORD ON TRIAL

  ON 22 MARCH 1641 THE VAST SPACE OF WESTMINSTER HALL WAS packed with spectators for Strafford’s impeachment trial. There had never been a trial like it, with tickets sold to the public. Demand for the tickets outstripped supply and onlookers who could not get inside crowded at the doorways. The Junto’s intention was to see Strafford ‘sacrificed on the altar of public satisfaction’, the Venetian ambassador reported.1 What was said and seen in that room would be reported by word of mouth, in letters, and in print to a national audience.

  The southern end of the hall had been set out in the same rectangular shape as the Chamber of the House of Lords, England’s court of last resort. The peers sat in long rows on benches opposite each other, dressed in crimson and ermine, the judges, bareheaded, sitting amongst them. Holland was absent, although he was due to be called as a prosecution witness. This may have been because of his hopes of being a bridge between the king and the more moderate members of the Junto. For the first time the entire Commons was also present with MPs seated on a grandstand of sharply rising tiers, juxtaposed on either side of the peers’ benches.2

  Strafford stood in a panelled dock between the grandstands, his hair uncombed as a symbol of grief, his black suit adorned only with his George, the insignia of the Garter with the figure of St George killing the dragon of rebellion.3 He faced the raised dais on which sat the king’s empty throne and, beside it, a seat for the Prince of Wales. Viscount Saye and Sele had argued a few days earlier that the king’s sovereign authority was vested in the two Houses of Parliament while it was in session, and that his physical presence in the court would violate this premise. On this basis a committee of peers had decided that Charles would not sit on his throne, but in a box, of the kind seen in theatres, placed near the throne, but where he would be hidden behind a lattice screen. Court officials would not bow to the king, but to ‘the state’ represented so strikingly by the empty chair.4