30. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, quoted in Smith, p. 133.
31. Brian Manning, ‘The Aristocracy and the Downfall of Charles I’ in Brian Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (1973), p. 40. Northumberland was born at Essex House and was currently acting Lord Admiral.
32. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (2007), p. 18.
33. D. Gardiner (ed.), The Oxinden Letters 1607–42 (1933), p. 173; the bishops effectively linked his sacral kingship to their own claims to holding a divinely ordained office.
34. CSPV 1640–2 (64). A crown was worth five shillings, and was equivalent to a Venetian ducat.
35. CSPV 1640–2 (69).
36. Ibid.
37. CSPV 10 January 1642 (318). The term ‘mob’ from the Latin ‘mobile vulgus’ would be invented to describe scenes that became all too familiar in London.
38. CSPD XVI (152–6).
39. Warwick quoted in Smith, p. 61.
40. Adamson, p. 31.
41. There is an MS held by the Surrey history centre listing seventeen, LM/1331/50. Those mentioned in CSPD have twelve different names, though Warwick etc. are in both CSPD August 1640 (16) and (19).
42. His wife Frances–Essex’s favourite sister–had just had herself painted by Van Dyck wearing the lock of her father’s hair cut off at his execution in 1601–a symbol of royal injustice.
Chapter 10: ‘A Broken Glass’
1. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (2007), pp. 89–90.
2. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), p. 369.
3. Adamson, p. 82.
4. Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (1983), p. 166; CSPV 1640–2 (126).
5. David Scott, Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power (2013), p. 156; BL, Add. MS 70002, f. 313.
6. Adamson, p. 62 and notes.
7. Sarah Poynting, ‘The King’s Correspondence During the Personal Rule in the 1630s’ in Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds.), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (2006), p. 81.
8. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 133.
9. Hibbard, p. 174.
10. Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), pp. 106, 107. The Puritan colonies in New England would similarly use branding to mark out those who had committed particular kinds of sin. The use of the scarlet letter ‘A’ branded on adulterers was immortalised in the nineteenth-century novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
11. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of England (1863), Vol. IX, p. 199.
12. CSPD Charles I, XVI (278).
13. Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, tr. Katherine Wormeley, Vol. I (1886), pp. 196, 197; Adamson, pp. 110, 113.
14. HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, p. 343: Strafford was placed in the Tower on 25 November.
15. CSPV 1640–2 (131).
16. CSPV 1640–2 (140).
17. CSPV 1640–2 (138).
18. Belvoir MSS QZ/22/1: ‘La Reine d Angleterre Feur. 1641 Monsieur de chauigny ayant envoye fester a mon cousin le cardinal de richelieu pour luy faire entan dre lestat presant ou je suis et luy demander son assistance: jay cru que mayant temoygne toujours beaucoup daffection comme vous aues fait en tout ce qui me conserne: que maintenant vous massisteries dans me afaires ou il y va de [xxx] [xxx] ma ruine entierre ou de mon bien etre comme les affaires iront maintenant quy je natans que… quasy sans resource et fautre je lespere par lassistance du Roy mon frere: je ne vous ay pas escrit quant sorter est alle car jay me suis misse entierremant a suiure les ordres que mon dit Cousin ordonneroit quoy que… ordonne forter de [xxx] desirer de luy que vous pensies estre de sette affaire: vous ayant toujours recongnu sy [xxx] prompt a mobliger que jay eru que dans sette afaire [xxx] vous ne me refuseries pas vostre asistance et que vous garderies le secret qui est tres necesaire je vous prie done de le faire et de croyre que je [xxx] suis sy recongnoisante dessangs que vous mains despe temoynges de vostre affection que je chercheray les moyens de vous faire paroistre que je suis Vostre bien bonne amie Henriette Marie R.’ It was tempting to date this letter to February 1642–the year beginning 24 March–especially as she was then about to flee England, but as other letters of hers date the year from January I have placed it in 1641. She is writing to Léon Bouthillier, Comte de Chavigny.
19. Leanda de Lisle, After Elizabeth (2005), p. 264.
20. David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (2004), pp. 25–9; Brenner, p. 319.
21. The best book on this year–and which is a very exciting read–is John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt. For more of the divisions at this time see pp. 158–63.
22. Re-establishing an Elizabethan-style mixed monarchy and church was all very well for the landed classes. The aristocracy and gentry dominated church patronage, access to Parliament, the county commissions and militias. For the ordinary Londoner it was a different matter. They had had no such access to power and they wanted to have it.
23. Brenner, pp. 324, 329, 331.
24. The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, Volume II: 1632–1642, ed. Nadine Akkerman (2011), p. 946.
Chapter 11: Strafford on Trial
1. CSPV 1640–2 (168).
2. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (2007), pp. 216, 223, 224.
3. John H. Timmis, Thine is the Kingdom (1974), pp. 64, 65; Adamson, pp. 221, 222, 225.
4. Adamson, pp. 224–5.
5. HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, p. 374.
6. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 134.
7. John Rushworth, The Trial of Thomas, Earl of Strafford (1680), pp. 658–9.
8. HMC Various, Vol. II, p. 261; C. V. Wedgwood, Thomas Wentworth (1961), p. 153.
9. Clarendon quoted in Smith, p. 134.
10. The English officers in the north had complained bitterly of being forced to live off the people, ‘contrary to our dispositions, and the quality of our former lives’. They sent notice that ‘we are very sensible the honour of our nation was unfortunately foiled’ in their action against the Scots and warned, ‘we hope so to manage what is left that, if the perverse endeavours of some do not cross us, our future proceedings shall neither deserve the world’s blame nor reproach’. HLRO Main Papers 20/3/41 ff. 78–82.
11. Timmis, pp. 126, 127.
12. A Leicestershire MP and a member of the Saybrook Company; Christopher Thompson, ‘Centre, Colony and Country: The Second Earl of Warwick and the “Double Crisis” of Politics in Early Stuart England’, unpublished thesis, p. 47.
13. Surprisingly Stapilton had a Catholic wife. He would fight for Parliament in the civil war, but was a moderate.
14. Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (2007), pp. 282, 283.
15. Viscount Kells to Sir Thomas Aston, 20 March 1641; BL, Add. MS 36914, f. 199.
16. Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), p. 115.
17. She also asks for the cardinal’s good offices in caring for one of Charles’s Catholic servants who had fled to France. Holland claimed there were only two court Catholics she wished to protect–and specifically excluded a man called Wat Montagu, a son of the Earl of Manchester who had been working on expanding a list of exemptions to the order that all priests leave England by 7 April, on pain of arrest; Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (1983), p. 191. One of the lost letters from the Belvoir archives reveals her true opinion, however. In her letter to Richelieu, she recommends the bearer for his ‘merit and his loyalty… in his service to my Lord the King’. He had ‘been in France at the time of my marriage’ (as Montagu had) and was now ‘forced to leave to flee the storm that is falling upon the poor Catholics of this land’. Belvoir MSS QZ/6 f. 16 1641: ‘M
on cousin seluy que vous randra sette lettre estant constraint de sen aler pour fuir lorage qui tombe sur les pauures catoliques de se peis je ne luy ay peu refuser de le vous recomman der car son merite et sa fidellite quil a fait paroistre au seruise du Roy monseigneur me ont conuiee sest pour je vous prie de le vouloir fauoriser et reseuoir de bon oeill comme une personne qui veritablemant se merite: je croy quil vous ait sy bien congnu ayant estte en france au tamps de mon mariage et fort affectione a la france qui sela ne nuira pas a ma recommandation: puis que vous obligeres une personne en le ferant qui est et sera toujours veritablemant Mon cousin Vostre bien affectionnee cousine Henriette Marie R.’ Endorsed: ‘A Mon Cousin Monsieur le Cardinal de Richelieu’.
18. Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, tr. Katherine Wormeley, Vol. I (1886), pp. 196, 197.
19. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. I, p. 320.
20. Adamson, pp. 249–52.
21. For this and other comments see Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (1976), pp. 91–2.
22. Gilbert Burnet, The memoires of the lives and actions of James and William, dukes of Hamilton and Castleherald (1677), pp. 232–3.
23. CSPV 1640–2 (181).
24. John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, Vol. 8 (1721), p. 166; Vernon F. Snow, Essex the Rebel (1970), p. 263.
25. Dorset to Salisbury, [York] 27 June 1642, HMC Hatfield, XXII, 372.
Chapter 12: Given Up
1. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (2007), p. 283.
2. Under one of Suckling’s officers, a former man of affairs to Wentworth, called Captain William Billingsley.
3. John Aubrey, Brief Lives (1999), p. 289. He invented cribbage.
4. ‘There was not among our princes a greater courtier of the people than Richard III, not so much out of fear as out of wisdom. And shall the worst of our kings have strive for that and shall not the best?’ he observed; The Works of Sir John Suckling, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson (1910), pp. 322–4; Brian Manning, ‘The Aristocracy and the Downfall of Charles I’ in Brian Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (1973), p. 54.
5. The countess also had the care of the five-year-old Princess Elizabeth, and their baby brother, Henry.
6. CSPV 1640–2, 17 January 1641.
7. Journal of the House of Commons, Vol. II, p. 143.
8. CSPV 1640–2 (181).
9. Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), p. 197; Lettres de Henriette-Marie de France, reine d’Angleterre, à sa soeur Christine, duchesse de Savoie, Vol. V, ed. Hermann Ferrero (1881), p. 57.
10. Ceremonies of Charles I: The Notebooks of John Finet, 1628–1641, ed. Albert J. Loomie (1988), pp. 311–13.
11. It was not his first visit. He had been to England twice previously: the first time in 1635, aged almost eighteen, when he had lived a life of idle fun at court, even siring an illegitimate child.
12. One of Charles’s unpublished letters at Belvoir dating from 8 May 1638 to his sister Elizabeth concerns a possible Swedish match for Charles Louis, and another, unnamed bride for the younger brother ‘Robert’–better known as Rupert of the Rhine. Belvoir MSS reference QZ/6/9: ‘Charles the First to the Queen of Bohemia, 8 May 1638. My onlie deare Sister I shall onlie name those things that I haue intrusted this bearer with (his haste requyring shortnes, & his fidelitie meriting trust) First concerning the liquidation of accounts betweene me & the King of Denmarke: then concerning a Mache with Swed[en], but of this littell hope: lastlie, of a Mache for your Sone Robert: If he say anie thing else in my name; I shall desyer you to trust, to his honnestie, & not to my memorie: & so I rest Your louing Brother to serue you Charles R. Whythall the 8 of May 1638.’
13. CSPV 1640–2 (188).
14. HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, p. 403.
15. Purkiss, p. 193; Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, Archives ou Correspondance Inédite de la Maison d’Orange Nassau (1857), Vol. III, pp. 460, 463.
16. Behind this measure lay the power of London’s radical citizen opposition–a group very closely associated with the Warwick circle. They had persuaded moderate MPs that Parliament’s financial creditors had to have a guarantee Charles could not dissolve Parliament before its debts were paid; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), p. 341.
17. The opposition were ‘far too nimble for the king in printing’, loyalists admitted, as he failed to respond in kind, leaving ‘the common people [to] believe the first story which makes impression in their mind’; David Scott, Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power (2013), p. 158.
18. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. I, p. 337.
19. Ibid.
20. CSPV 1640–2 (188).
21. Clarendon, Vol. I, p. 338.
22. The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, Volume II: 1632–1642, ed. Nadine Akkerman (2011), p. 957.
23. Ibid.
24. Peter Heylyn quoted in John Milton, Observations Upon the Articles of Peace (1649), p. 95.
25. Journal of the House of Lords, Vol. IV, p. 245.
26. Eikon Basilike, p. 9.
Chapter 13: ‘That Sea of Blood’
1. Fynes Moryson quoted in Leanda de Lisle, After Elizabeth (2005), p. 45.
2. The Treaty of London.
3. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), p. 354.
4. Eikon Basilike, p. 48.
5. Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (1983), p. 198.
6. Having fallen ‘from the highest degree of happiness’, she said, ‘into unimaginable misery’; Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), p. 198; Lettres de Henriette-Marie de France, reine d’Angleterre, à sa soeur Christine, duchesse de Savoie, Vol. V, ed. Hermann Ferrero (1881), p. 57.
7. Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (1857), p. 40.
8. Ibid., p. 32.
9. Charles Carlton, Charles I: The Personal Monarch (1995), p. 223.
10. Thomas Carte, The Life of James, Duke of Ormonde (6 vols., 1851), Vol. V, p. 281.
11. Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013), pp. 349–51.
12. Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), p. 138.
13. Mark Charles Fissel (ed.), War and Government in Britain, 1598–1650 (1991), p. 243.
14. Sir Philip Warwick, Memories of the Reigne of Charles I (1701), p. 225.
15. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Force, Love and Authority in Caroline Political Culture’ in Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds.), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (2006), p. 42; Alnwick MS 15 28v, 29.
16. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1628–1660 (1889/1979), pp. 206–7; Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (2000), p. 147.
17. CSPV 1640–2 (279) (284).
18. CSPV 1640–2 (279).
19. In 1554, facing the Wyatt revolt, Mary had given a speech in London assuring her subjects she was a mother to them. It had helped her defeat the rebel army. In 1601, Elizabeth’s many similar speeches had helped ensure the people’s loyalty to her during the Essex revolt.
20. Charles had by now reached Ware in Hertfordshire where he did a walkabout amongst the people in the market square and the gentry kissed his hand.
21. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, quoted in Tim Harris, Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings (2014), p. 440.
22. Speech by Sir Edward Dering, 22 November 1641.
23. CSPV 1640–1 (296).
24. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (2007), p. 445 and notes.
25. Twenty-two per cent of England’s printed output at this time was dedicated to such atrocity stories.
26.
Harris, p. 439.
27. Belvoir MSS QZ/22/5. Another letter, written by a Royalist, complains that papers from Ireland brought by the Irish councillor Thomas, Lord Dillon, for the king, were confiscated in Ware before Charles’s arrival there, and handed to the Junto; Belvoir MSS QZ/22/6. Back in London, meanwhile, the Junto propaganda paid off on 21 December when the Common Council elections to the lower house of the governing body of the City saw a swing towards the Puritan interest. This gained the Junto the City’s 8,000-strong militia.
28. CSPD 1641–3 (185–221).
29. The remaining two were placed in the custody of Black Rod; Adamson, p. 484.
30. Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (2007), p. 320.
31. Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Green, p. 71.
32. Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, tr. Katherine Wormeley, Vol. I (1886), p. 207.
33. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of England (1863), Vol. X, p. 136.
34. It is assumed that Lucy sent her message to Pym, but the MP’s name is not certain. William Cobbett, Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials (1809–26), eds. Thomas Bayly Howell et al., Vol. IV, pp. 89–90.
35. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. I, p. 483.
36. Adamson, pp. 495–7.
37. Clarendon, Vol. I, pp. 496–7; Scott, p. 148.
38. Clarendon, Vol. I, p. 434.
39. Eikon Basilike, p. 26.
40. Ibid., pp. 15, 21.
41. Clarendon, Vol. I, p. 507.
Chapter 14: ‘Give Caesar His Due’
1. CSPV 1642–3 (8); Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of Charles I (1849), Vol. II, p. 349.
2. CSPV 1642–3 (8); Birch, p. 349.
3. Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (1857), p. 72.
4. CSPV 1642–3 (8); Birch, p. 349.
5. CSPV 1640–2 (344).
6. Henry Ellis (ed.), Original Letters Illustrative of English History, Vol. IV (1825), p. 2.
7. Peter Heylyn, The Works of Charles I etc. (2010), p. 58.
8. Ellis (ed.), Vol. IV, p. 2.
9. The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, Volume II: 1632–1642, ed. Nadine Akkerman (2011), p. 1033.
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