The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  But when it became clear that the Scots still had no intention of deviating from their course of maintaining the Covenant, abolishing the prayer book and getting rid of the bishops, for Charles the issue meant war. He dissolved their gatherings and recalled Wentworth (newly created Earl of Strafford) from Ireland. Strafford nobly lent the king a great deal of money of his own and managed to convince him that the only way he could raise enough money to fight the Scots was by recalling Parliament. In April 1640 the first Parliament for eleven years came together. Charles had hoped to use the Scottish threat of invasion to make MPs do his bidding. But having been denied free speech for so long, the Commons was not in the mood for obedience. Strafford counselled the king to listen to its demands and, in particular, to end ship money. But after three weeks Charles dismissed what is known as the Short Parliament and began the Second Bishops’ War.

  Without the money from Parliament to raise a proper army, the king had to rely on borrowing more money from friends. The Second Bishops’ War ended in a rout, with the Scots army camped in the northern English counties as far south as Newcastle. With general disaffection throughout England, the king was eventually forced to make a very expensive truce with the Scots. He had to pay them the then enormous sum of £25,000, and to summon a new Parliament to meet on 3 November 1640.

  The Long Parliament as it was called would endure in various guises for the next twenty years. Given the continued presence of the Scots army in Northumberland and Durham–with which it is almost certain Pym was secretly in communication–the king was powerless. Unless he made concessions to Parliament and thus could raise money for an army to drive out the Scots, they would advance further into England. In the first session both the pillars of Charles’s government, Strafford and Laud, were arrested for treason and impeached–Laud was accused of conspiring illegally to return the Church of England to Rome and Strafford of plotting to overthrow Parliamentary government.

  While the Lords hesitated over whether Strafford could really be said to have committed treason when treason was a crime against the king and Strafford was the king’s faithful minister, the Commons saw that the trial might end in Strafford being released and the slippery king get away again. One of the more violent Puritans, Sir Arthur Hazelrigg, jumped to his feet and demanded a Bill of Attainder against Strafford–in other words, that he be condemned to death without trial. Although the Lords hesitated again, the discovery of an apparent plot by the king and queen to ask the northern army to save Strafford hastened his end. Hysteria was rising uncontrollably in London, encouraged by Pym. He announced that Queen Henrietta Maria had sent for French soldiers who would shortly be landing at Portsmouth.

  Throughout the proceedings against him Strafford had kept his head, urging the king to counter-attack by impeaching the Puritan leaders for their treasonous letters to the Scots Covenanters. But the king was apparently paralysed by the awfulness of his predicament. He sat watching Strafford’s trial, staring vacantly into space for much of the time, his face working nervously. Beside him was his son, the ten-year-old Prince of Wales. As the City of London trained armed bands for the coming crisis, and Parliament passed the Attainder against Strafford, Charles hesitated.

  He alone could have saved his devoted servant from these trumped-up charges by refusing to sign the bill. Perhaps he should have done so, because he had constantly assured Strafford that he should have no fear, that he would never be executed because the king would protect him. Ever the good servant, Strafford wrote to the king saying that he would willingly forgive him for his death, ‘if it leads to better times’. Secretly he never really thought it would come to it. But with violent men patrolling the streets and fears for his wife and children, Charles made his decision. He threw Strafford to the lions. The king had already offered never to employ Strafford in a confidential capacity again and had even suggested life imprisonment, but now he signed the Attainder.

  Charles never forgave himself for it and believed that his subsequent ill luck was the result of his betrayal. He even sent the young Prince of Wales with a message down to Westminster after he had signed the Attainder, pleading for Strafford’s life. But it was too late. Strafford shook his head with disbelief when he heard that he was to die. As he went out to his execution at Tower Hill on 12 May 1641, he was heard to say, ‘Put not your trust in princes.’ Imprisoned in the Tower Archbishop Laud heard the drum roll and then the sudden thud as Strafford was beheaded in front of 200,000 people. He wrote bitterly that Charles was a prince ‘who knew not how to be or to be made great’. But as one contemptuous Puritan remarked brutally, ‘Stone dead hath no fellow,’ and that summed up the reactions of the Puritans in the House of Commons.

  Robbed of his two chief counsellors, the king had to rely on the bad advice of the politically inept Queen Henrietta Maria. As a foreigner she was incapable of appreciating that the Long Parliament was becoming the senior partner in government throughout 1641. Now that Strafford was dead and Laud as good as, the Commons concentrated on destroying all the instruments of government Charles had used during what was described as the eleven-year tyranny. The judges who in 1629 had pronounced forced loans to be legal were committed for trial. All the king’s methods of raising taxes without Parliament such as ship money, tonnage and poundage were pronounced illegal and unconstitutional. All the prerogative courts were destroyed, the Star Chamber, the Council of the North and the hated Court of High Commission. Prynne was released, without his ears but otherwise hale and hearty. By the Triennial Act, it was ordered that no more than three years should elapse between Parliaments and elections were to be held whether the king had summoned Parliament or not.

  However, when by the Root and Branch Bill the Commons set about removing the bishops from the Church of England and substituting in their place a Presbyterian system of Church government consisting of lay elders, a royalist party began to emerge, led by the lawyer Edward Hyde (the future historian Lord Clarendon) and Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland. Now that Charles’s worst abuses of power had been removed, the more moderate members of Parliament did not want what was becoming a revolution to be taken any further. The royalist party were offended by the Puritans’ hatred of tradition, their joylessness and their contempt for anything elaborate, whether it was clothes, manners, books or religion. Of course the Puritan party numbered great poets and thinkers among them, such as John Milton, arguably England’s greatest poet. But a considerable proportion were also uneducated people who feared what they could not understand. English people who valued their cultural heritage became uneasy that much that was of value built up over many centuries could be destroyed by destructive zealots.

  But, despite the development of a royal party in Parliament, it was rapidly becoming evident that Charles had no real interest in ruling through Parliament and observing the rules of the game. During the Parliamentary recess in the summer of 1641 he rushed off to Scotland, intending to persuade the Scots and their army to come in on his side and mount a coup in England. But he fell foul of infighting among the Scottish nobility, and succeeded only in increasing suspicion of himself even among the royalists.

  Then the real crisis began. With Strafford dead, the Catholic Irish realized that the time was ripe for a rebellion and massacred the Protestant settlers in Northern Ireland. On 23 November 1641 the dispossessed landowners, the Norman Irish and the ancient Celtic Irish, turned on the English colonists, driving them off their lands and destroying the system of ‘thorough’ in Ireland. Although the numbers killed were exaggerated thanks to anti-Catholic hysteria, the Parliamentary party interpreted the rising as the first action of an Irish Catholic army about to invade England on behalf of the king.

  The Irish rebellion raised the stakes of the game at Westminster considerably. An army now had to be mustered to put it down, and that army could not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands–that is, used against the Parliamentarians by the king. Vicious rumours were sweeping the capital: not only had the king and queen i
nspired the massacre, but the foreign queen was in touch with Catholic powers abroad. She was said to have authorized them to send armies to invade England and crush Protestantism. In an atmosphere of acute tension and distrust Parliament, led by Pym, agitated for further revolutionary changes. To rally his followers against Hyde’s and Falkland’s royalist party, that same November Pym issued the Grand Remonstrance, which listed all Charles I’s crimes to date and accused him of a ‘malignant design to subvert the fundamental laws and principles of government’. The document went on to demand the power to vet the king’s ministers and to call for a Presbyterian Church settlement.

  Fortunately for Charles, like the Root and Branch Bill the Grand Remonstrance gained him more friends. The royalist or constitutional party now consisted of almost half of the Commons. At the end of November 1641 the Grand Remonstrance was passed in the House of Commons by a mere eleven votes and was probably far too revolutionary to get through the Lords. But at the beginning of January 1642 Charles spoilt all by trying to arrest the most prominent members of the Parliamentary party–five MPs (Pym, Hampden, Holles, Hazelrigg and Strode) and Lord Mandeville. Evidently the leopard had not changed his spots. Charles had not really repented his bad old ways and had become over-confident again when he saw that support for him against the extremism of Pym was growing.

  In fairness to Charles, Pym was hardly playing strictly by the constitutional rule book himself. A rowdy mob was permanently in attendance outside the Houses of Parliament menacing anyone who was not for Pym. Pym was unwilling to restore safety to the streets because the pressure of the mob would help him achieve his aims. Charles had been secretly warned that Parliament was about to impeach Queen Henrietta Maria for inciting the Irish massacre and conspiring against the people. Where there was impeachment there might well be attainder. That is why on 3 January 1642 Charles struck first. He accused the five MPs and Lord Mandeville of high treason. But neither House of Parliament would arrest them, claiming that the king was encroaching on their privileges. When she heard this, Henrietta Maria is supposed to have shouted at her husband, ‘Go, you coward, and pull these rogues out by the ears, or never see my face more.’ But when Charles broke all precedent and marched to Parliament with several hundred soldiers to arrest them, he found, as he said, that ‘all the birds were flown’. They had escaped to the walled City of London where they were protected by citizen train-bands and sailors from the port.

  The train-bands then moved to surround Parliament, so that within a week the five MPs had returned to their seats in the Commons. On 10 January, having learned that the Commons was about to arrest the queen for treason, Charles and the royal family abandoned the royal palace of Whitehall and fled like thieves in the night to Hampton Court, to Windsor, to Canterbury and finally to the port of Dover. The king would not be seen at Whitehall again until another January seven years later when he stepped out from the Banqueting Hall to be executed.

  From Dover on 23 February Queen Henrietta Maria left the country, taking with her the magnificent crown jewels which she intended to pawn in Holland to pay for an army to rescue her husband. With her was her eldest daughter, the Princess Mary, who had been married by proxy to the important Dutch ruler William II of Orange the year before. They were to seek refuge with her husband. Meanwhile Charles set about rallying support in the country, for clearly there was to be no going back.

  War was declared six months later on 22 August. In the intervening months Charles had made some attempts to achieve consensus with Parliament–he had even signed a bill removing bishops from the House of Lords. The Militia Bill, which was to remove royal control of the army, and the Nineteen Propositions, which sought to restrict royal power so that the king would be ruler in name only, were the last straw. Charles saw that the only way to save his throne was by war. But his attempts to seize a great cache of arms stored at Hull and to commandeer the fleet both failed: the fleet was thoroughly pro-Parliament, as was the governor of Hull.

  Charles meanwhile retreated north to York, and in June sent out directions to all his loyal supporters and friends across England to call out their local militia on his behalf. In the north and west men armed themselves as they had never done before and came out for the king. But all over the south and east an equal number of men, such as the MP Oliver Cromwell, a Cambridge squire who would have left England for America had not the Grand Remonstrance passed, also called their horses in from the plough and armed themselves to the teeth.

  On 11 July the Houses of Parliament announced that Charles had begun the war, and a month later declared that all men who served the king were traitors. On 22 August, watched by his young sons Charles and James in their children’s armour (Charles II’s can still be seen in the Tower of London) the king unfurled the royal standard before the walls of Nottingham Castle. The Civil War had begun at last.

  The Dutch artist Van Dyck, who became Charles I’s court painter just as Holbein had been Henry VIII’s, has left us with a vivid record of the major personalities of the court. With their colourful silk clothes, their lacy collars, their feathered hats and their charming lovelocks as their long, curling hair was called, they cannot help making a somewhat less serious impression than the Parliamentarians: they were not called Cavaliers for nothing. By the time the Civil War broke out, the extremism of the Puritans had ensured that Strafford and Laud were not the only high-minded, hardworking men to have supported Charles. Nevertheless a sort of artistic truth is to be found in the striking contrast between paintings of the two sides, court and Parliament. There is an absence of ornamentation about the Parliamentarians’ clothing and appearance–the dark cloth, the plain collars and the short hair cropped under a pudding basin that gave them the name Roundheads. And there is a terrible purposefulness in the portraits of Oliver Cromwell, Sir Ralph Hopton and General Ireton. Plain was their appearance, plain was their talk, and unlike the Cavaliers they had been in deadly earnest from the beginning, not just now when it was really too late.

  Civil War (1642–1649)

  From the very first luck seemed to be against the king. The royal standard with its prancing golden lions rampant blew down outside Nottingham Castle as soon as it had been put up, to everyone’s secret dismay. But before long the king’s men were too busy with preparations–unrolling maps, arranging for ammunition, calculating food and supply lines–to think about this bad omen. Nevertheless the news that the navy and the City of London had declared for Parliament could not be anything other than worrying. In the end those two factors would give the Puritans an outstanding advantage: thanks to the navy, the Parliamentary forces could move their troops far more quickly to trouble spots than the royalists could. The king’s soldiers had to go everywhere overland. The seaports too were an important part of the resistance to the king and prevented his troops from using their harbours. Mastery of the City meant that Parliament controlled the money supply from customs and trade. In the long run it would be extremely difficult for the king to pay for extra supplies of weapons or troops from abroad. Nevertheless just as the House of Commons at the outbreak of war had been evenly divided between the royalists and the Parliamentarians, so too was the country. The conflict would be very long drawn out.

  For the Civil War turned into two linked civil wars. The first, which took place from 1642 to 1646, can be described in simple terms as the king versus the radicals–in other words, the half of Parliament led by Pym. In the course of the war, however, the aims of Parliament changed. The Parliamentary army itself became a separate revolutionary movement determined to resist the return of Charles I, who by then had drawn the Scots and most Parliamentary MPs on to his side. There was thus a second civil war in 1648 in which the army was triumphant. Parliament would be emasculated, the king executed, and a Commonwealth replaced the monarchy. After military triumphs against royalist armies raised in Ireland and Scotland, where the Presbyterians had crowned the Prince of Wales Charles II, the army leader Oliver Cromwell became lord protector–in ef
fect a republican dictator. Seven years later in 1660 after the Commonwealth had degenerated into a new sort of tyranny under which Parliament was as powerless as it had been during the 1630s, the constitutional wheel came full circle: Charles II was restored to the throne by one of the republic’s ruling generals, George Monck.

  When the First Civil War began in 1642, England more or less divided along the same geographical fault-line that it had done during the Wars of the Roses. The north, Wales, the south-west and the more rural parts were for the king, while London, the east, the south and the south-east, where there was a greater concentration of towns and commercial wealth, tended to support the Parliamentary cause. Within these categories there were of course exceptions. Inside generally royalist areas, the clothing towns–for example, in the West Riding of Yorkshire or in Somerset–would contain pockets of Parliamentary supporters, for almost all people who made their living by trade were Parliamentarians. The two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, were for the king, and had begun melting down their college silver to pay for arms (though Oliver Cromwell, as the local MP for Huntingdon, put a stop to that in Cambridge).

  For the first two years of the war the king’s strategic aim was to reach London. He never got nearer than Turnham Green in Hammersmith, right at the beginning of the war. Then the sheer size of the London train-bands which had made such a nuisance of themselves outside Parliament under the Puritan Earl of Essex, Elizabeth’s favourite’s son, made Charles turn about and head for Oxford. Thanks to its enthusiasm for the still-imprisoned Laud, Oxford was vehemently pro-royalist, and the king made his headquarters there for the rest of the war. By and large the campaigns of 1643 were favourable to the royalist party. The king’s dashing nephew Prince Rupert, the son of the Elector Palatine and the Winter Queen, captured Parliamentary Bristol. Having defeated Lord Fairfax and his son Sir Thomas Fairfax at Adwalton Moor near Bradford, the Earl of Newcastle held all Yorkshire for the king except for Hull. Cornwall and Devon and the south-west up to Devizes in Wiltshire were royalist. The king’s men were further encouraged by the early deaths of two of their most inspiring opponents: Hampden died at Chalgrove Field in a battle with Prince Rupert, and Pym of cancer.