Despite the apparent problems of the English mobilization and the relative success of the Covenanters, the English defeat was by no means assured.20 It is clear though that the English camp at Birks, just south of the border, was an unhappy place – poorly provisioned, of uncertain morale and the rump of a once much more impressive strategy. Reservations were expressed there about whether to proceed, given the weakness of the army. In the event, the English threw in the towel without much of a fight. The Earl of Holland, second in command in the English army, advanced to Kelso, where he was probably fooled by Alexander Leslie into thinking that the Scottish forces were more numerous than they actually were. Holland withdrew, and when the Covenanters advanced to Duns Law on 5 June, the king agreed to negotiate.21
In seeking negotiation Charles was following the advice of the nobility in his camp and the decision probably rested as much on political as military calculation. The weakness of Scottish opposition to the Covenanters, the divided and often lukewarm English response and the threat of calling an English parliament persuaded him to do a deal.22 A Pacification was agreed at Berwick but it seems to have fudged the key issues. In return for the summoning of a General Assembly and parliament the Covenanters agreed to disband, free royalist prisoners and hand back royal castles. However, on the powers of the General Assembly (and hence, by implication, the future of episcopacy) the two sides seem to have had a quite different impression of what had been said. The King issued a declaration denying the legality of the measures taken by the General Assembly in Glasgow the previous year, but promised to deliver on the promises made by Hamilton. For the future, he said, ecclesiastical matters would be in the hands of a lawfully constituted General Assembly and all secular matters in the hands of the Scottish parliament. The Covenanters interpreted this as a victory for the independence of the kirk, and it could be presumed that the end of the bishops was not far off. Charles later disavowed this interpretation without offering another, but notes made by one of the English delegates suggest that the difference may have lain in what was meant by the phrase ‘lawfully constituted’: for Charles this clearly implied the persistence of episcopal representation in the assembly. That such a crucial detail could be fudged probably reflects how much both sides wanted to end the armed conflict.23
In the aftermath of the Pacification it was clear that Charles was not altogether trusted and that his royal word was regarded by some as worth less than the parchment on which it was not written. An indication of the underlying attitude, to which he might well require obedience when he had the opportunity to command it, was the public burning of a Covenanter paper giving their interpretation of these events, which had circulated widely in England. For the Covenanters this reinforced the sense that the real security for their reformation lay in a sympathetic settlement in England.24
Management of the King’s interest at the resulting General Assembly was handed back to Traquair, Hamilton clearly calculating that there was little pleasure or advantage to be had from this role.25 Traquair presided over an assembly that confirmed most of the decisions reached by the ‘illegal’ assembly in Glasgow the previous year and went further on episcopacy. He also agreed that a parliament would be called in the expectation that these measures would be ratified. He failed to manage the legislative programme of that parliament, with the result that by November it was clear that Parliament had claimed more than the King would actually grant. The King intervened, dissolving Parliament on 14 November 1639, but the acquiescence of the parliamentarians was publicly stated alongside the view that it was an illegal dissolution.26
From here it was a relatively short and predictable step to renewed hostilities. In early February, Edinburgh Castle was garrisoned with English troops and, although Edinburgh’s governors did not interfere, this did spur the Covenanters to renewed military preparations. One ill-advised initiative in this respect was a letter to Louis XIII asking him to intercede with Charles on behalf of his Scottish subjects.27
Charles had resolved to call an English parliament for this second war and clearly expected to find support. His sole purpose was to raise money to fight the Covenanters and he certainly had no intention of justifying the war, or of having to redress other grievances before receiving supply. He was also clear that if Parliament failed, he would be willing to proceed by other means, and in order to have some room for manoeuvre he had taken out loans. Many of his subjects, it would soon become clear, saw things differently. To Charles, King of three kingdoms, the Covenanters were rebels, and there could be no question of the need to crush rebellion, but to his English subjects this was a proposed invasion, or at least a war with another kingdom. In that respect there was some concern that an army was being raised prior to Parliament.28
Certainly, after an eleven-year intermission, the summoning of a new parliament was the occasion of much excitement. The Earl of Bridgewater had some difficulty in securing a place at a window from which his wife could watch the opening procession. When a place was found on King’s Street she was advised to take up her place by six o’clock at the latest, since the streets would be full by five and after six it would be impossible to get into the house from the street.29 Sixty-two elections were contested (by comparison with twenty to forty during the 1620s), and since most of these were in two-member constituencies, this meant that around one quarter of the members of the new Commons had arrived as a result of contests. In some cases this reflected a campaign by the godly, to get their own men in.30
The House of Commons in the Short Parliament
Charles and his subjects clearly had different expectations of this parliament, and Charles’s willingness to go to war without a parliament if necessary was almost self-fulfilling since to bring his subjects along would need patience. The royal view was clear, however. Lord Keeper Finch opened the parliament by asking for immediate supply to support the war while holding out the promise of another session later in the year in order to pursue the redress of grievances. Charles then handed him the letter written by the Covenanters to the French king and Finch read it out, claiming that it was treasonous.31 The letter was subscribed ‘au roy’, a form of address which was only used by Frenchmen when addressing their own king. Charles claimed that this was treasonous – that the Covenanters were recognizing Louis to be their sovereign.32 The defence offered by Loudon, one of the signatories, that he did not have enough French to understand the niceties of the letter, may not have been completely dishonest,33 but what is most striking about this is the lack of excitement caused by the revelation of apparently treasonous activity.
On the following day, in the House of Commons, Secretary Winde-bank opened business with a restatement of the need for immediate supply, and offered to read the letter again, in both French and English, for those who had not been able to hear clearly at the crowded opening the previous day. This he did, but the first speakers offered little comfort to the crown. Harbottle Grimston stood up, acknowledging the importance of the King’s business in fairly brisk terms before concentrating the burden of his remarks on other issues altogether: ‘I am very much mistaken if there be not a case here at home of as great a danger’. This was a case that the King, confronted by armed rebels, would find hard to accept, but it was made at length by Grimston and others. Grimston was also innocent of understatement, to say the least:
the Commonwealth has been miserably torn and massacred and all property and liberty shaken, the Church distracted, the gospel and professors of it persecuted and the whole nation is overrun with multitudes and swarms of projecting cankerworms and caterpillars, the worst of all the Egyptian plagues.34
Sir Benjamin Rudyerd and Sir Francis Seymour spoke next, building on Grimston’s concerns about the lapse of liberties granted by Magna Carta and the Petition of Right, but concentrating in particular on the circumstances of the dissolution of the previous parliament in 1629.35
This desire to secure redress of grievances before granting supply was widely but not universally sh
ared, and it might arise from a variety of political concerns – it was by no means the same thing as supporting the Covenant, although it seems reasonably clear that the Covenanters had friends in the English parliament.36 Many seem to have been hoping that the parliament would succeed – producing both supply and redress – but there were those who were not at all anxious that it should.37 As the debates on grievances unfolded over the next few weeks, some speakers hinted at opposition to the war, but that was not on the surface of the debates.
These are important distinctions, but behind these various positions there was also a clear political message: Parliament, and not just the Commons, showed very little interest in shelving grievances in the interests of supplying the impending war. John Pym, a veteran of the parliaments of the 1620s, emerged as an influential speaker early on. He was an unusual parliamentarian in that he lacked a large landed estate. A convinced godly Protestant, he enjoyed the patronage of the Earl of Bedford and had held office in the Exchequer. This latter experience seems to have made him more responsible and realistic about the financial needs of government than many of those whose opinions he courted. On 17 April he spoke for two hours on a threefold threat: to the liberties of Parliament, to religion and to the law (‘affairs of state or matters of property’). In most of these respects he was speaking to the mood of the House, but he went further in arguing that these were symptoms of a single malaise: ‘the intermission of parliaments have been a true cause of all these evils in the Commonwealth, which by law should be once every year’. The liberty of Parliament, he was arguing, was the safeguard of religion and law.38 When he sat down a string of county petitions were presented in what seems like a co-ordinated move, perhaps reminiscent of Covenanter tactics.39
Over the following weeks unsuccessful shuffling could not overcome this essential impasse – that Parliament wanted redress before supply, a procedure which Charles said ‘put the cart before the horse’. Some members of both Houses supported the King’s position, but Ralph Hopton seems to have spoken for the majority in the Commons when he drew the analogy with a servant who held his master up to remove a thorn from his foot. Such a delay was not the same as disobedience; Parliament, as a dutiful servant, had an obligation to remove the thorns from the King’s foot.40 Deals were proposed to give up unpopular revenue sources in return for parliamentary supply, and the crown tried to enlist the help of the Lords in persuading the Commons to grant supply and put the grievances on hold. This suggestion, however, made the Commons bristle, acutely conscious of any threat to the constitutional principle that supply could only be initiated in the Commons. Rather than acknowledge the immediate and unquestioned necessity of supplying the King’s needs, MPs continued to call for redress of their grievances. And these grievances ranged widely – the long intermission of parliaments and the administrative measures Charles had taken in that time had created a backlog of moaning, and it seems that many MPs were keen to give it full rein. If the problems of mobilizing for war earlier in the year had disappointed the monarch, the attitude of his parliament was still more frustrating and after only three weeks he dissolved it.
Five or six days prior to the dissolution rumours had gone round London that in the event of a dissolution, Lambeth Palace (the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury) would be burned down, with William Laud inside it. This proved to be not far from the truth. On 8 May 1640, after the dissolution, the words ‘bishop’s devils’ were scrawled on the walls of the Royal Exchange. Placards soon followed there and elsewhere, urging an assembly at St George’s Fields of ‘all gentlemen ’prentices that desire to kill the bishops, who would fane kill us, our wives and children’. Apprentices were also invited to join in the hunting of ‘William the fox’. The assembly was planned for the following Monday morning, 11 May. Although threats and rumours circulated about a number of royal ministers identified as public enemies it was clear that the real target of this hostility was Laud (who was also rumoured to have become a Roman Catholic) and bishops more generally. The Southwark militia were mustered at St George’s Fields all day but people simply waited. About midnight, after the departure of the militia, a crowd gathered. One report had it that 1,200 ‘prentices and others’ (probably an over-estimate) had knocked at the gate and ‘said that they must needs speak with his Grace, of whom they would ask (as they termed it) but one civil question; and it was who was the cause of breaking up the parliament?’ Laud had been forewarned and was not in Lambeth Palace when the crowd got there. They stayed for two and a half hours, until they were convinced that he was not inside, but left saying ‘they would be shortly there again, and would not leave until they had spoken with him either by hook or by crook, sooner or later’.41 In fact, he did not return to his palace until 27 May.42 Their anger was instead expressed in damage to the garden and orchard. On the following Thursday crowds gathered again, and broke into the White Lion prison to release men awaiting trial for their part in these events.43
Despite hostile contemporary comment, these were not the actions of a mindless mob. It was an organized, targeted protest which had a clear (if not necessarily sophisticated) political agenda.44 In the following days, anxious authorities responded edgily to reports of a gathering of thousands of armed men on Blackheath. In fact it was local people being summoned to work on the roads by the beat of a drum. But this was symptomatic of an atmosphere in which rumours circulated freely, threatening more drastic action. Armed watches were set in the city and the suburbs, and guards placed outside St James’s Palace and Whitehall. The militia was augmented by men drawn from the surrounding counties and a Provost Marshal with a company of horse and foot was appointed to keep order on the South Bank. St James’s was home to actual Catholics, possibly agents of international Catholicism. It was the residence of the French Queen Mother, Marie de Medici, who had arrived in mid-October 1638. Another Catholic chapel had been opened there, served by a Jesuit confessor, and she was a strong presence at the court. The rioters reportedly said that the guard there was for the ‘defence of the French’. The Queen Mother ignored advice to move out, fearing that if she left she would never come back.45
The attack on Lambeth Palace, May 1640
It may have been the threat to his family, or memories of anti-Buckingham disturbances in the late 1620s, that prompted Charles to particularly stern measures. A royal proclamation declared these events to be rebellious and called for the apprehension of three ringleaders. Two of the rioters were brought to trial in Southwark on 21 May at a special session of Oyer and Terminer (a court empanelled by a specific writ to investigate particular crimes). A man called Archer, who had beaten a drum to summon the crowd, was put on the rack to discover whether he had been put up to it. This was the last use of judicial torture in English history, and the warrant for it is in Charles’s hand throughout. The eventual victim was Thomas Bensted, probably a mariner but described in some sources as a tailor from Lambeth or a cobbler. Bensted had been the only casualty of the initial riot, when he sustained relatively minor injuries. Having been injured, however, he said, ‘come follow me, seeing I am hurt I will be your captain’. It was enough to get him a death sentence. He was kept in Newgate prison prior to his execution in the early hours of the morning in Southwark. He met his end on gallows constructed overnight under guard of the militia. His head was displayed on London Bridge and the rest of his body, cut into quarters, at four of the city gates.46
Parliaments coincided with meetings of the clergy of the diocese of Canterbury in Convocation to discuss ecclesiastical matters and to provide clerical taxation. Convocation’s important decisions were ratified in Parliament: those who believed that the Royal Supremacy in the church resided in Parliament (by no means all of them Calvinists) were very hostile to the view that a Convocation could issue canons on its own authority. Customarily, Convocation dissolved with Parliament, but on this occasion it continued to sit and, moreover, produced controversial new canons. This was highly unusual, and was clearly Charles’s pers
onal decision – the Council minute expressing support was intended as a statement about whose idea this was. Charles claimed that the new canons would reassure opinion about the future of the faith, a prominent concern in the just-dissolved parliament, but it is more likely that he hoped by these means to flush out those of his subjects who were supporting the Covenanters. The canons therefore represented a characteristically forthright statement of royal intent – they defended the Laudian policies from the charge of innovation. The chief controversy arose from the disastrous ‘etc oath’, however. Clergy were required to swear never to alter the government of the church by ‘archbishops, bishops, deacons, and archdeacons etc’. This kind of open-ended commitment was unacceptable to many people in a culture in which swearing was taken extremely seriously. The clause was probably the result of sloppy rather than deceitful drafting, but it provoked fears that something terrible might be intended.47
Charles had lost patience with his parliament and dissolved it: his needs unsupplied, the grievances of the country unaddressed. The response revealed a powerful strain of anti-popery, associated with hostility to Laud and an attachment to parliaments. A failed parliament did not provide the best basis for renewed war in defence of Laudian ceremonial: indeed, it was worse than no parliament at all.48
Unsurprisingly Charles’s military preparations for the 1640 campaign were once again problematic. The intention, as in 1639, had not been to depend on English resources alone. Once again, however, the strategy disintegrated and Charles depended entirely on a response in England that was measured, to put the best gloss on it. When Wentworth had returned from Ireland the previous September he had urged Charles to form a committee for Scottish affairs. It was at a meeting of that body in the aftermath of the dissolution that he suggested to Charles: ‘you have an army in Ireland that you may employ here to reduce this kingdom?. From the context there is no doubt that he meant that the 8,000 men in Ireland could be used in Scotland, but the accusation that he meant to use an Irish army to enforce the royal will in England was later to be a crucial charge against him.49 In the event the Irish army did not materialize, and neither did the foreign mercenaries or money which Wentworth, now the Earl of Strafford, had advised Charles to seek.50
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