God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  In response to the provocations of Parliament’s measures, and against the background of these developments in crowd politics, Charles adopted a surprisingly conciliatory tone. He had gone to Windsor on 13 January partly in fear for his safety, since it was rumoured that 1,000 citizens were on their way to Hampton Court with a petition. At Windsor he kept a rather thin and depressing court, which can have done little for his morale.9 On 20 January he wrote to the Houses in fairly emollient terms, acknowledging ‘the manifold distractions which are now in this Kingdom which cannot but bring great inconveniency and mischiefs to this whole government’. Accordingly he asked the Houses to consider what was necessary ‘for the upholding and maintaining of His Majesty’s just and regal authority, and for the settling of his revenue, as for the present and future establishment of their privileges, the free and quiet enjoying of their estates and fortunes, the liberty of their persons, and security of the true religion now professed in the Church of England, and the settling of the ceremonies in such a manner as may take away all just offence’. He hoped that, digested into a single document, this would provide the basis for progress, and disavowed ‘intending or designing any of those things, which the too great fears and jealousies of some persons seem to apprehend’.10

  This restrained public response was probably a reflection of his desire to get his wife safely across the Channel. Whatever its motives, it did not satisfy the more radical spirits in Parliament. On 20 January the Commons had received a petition from Colchester which was hostile to the Prayer Book and a move to refuse to give thanks for the petition was overruled. The following day, in a debate about a forthcoming declaration of their position, the Commons voted in favour of a clause arguing that the ills of the kingdom were due to the want of reformation of church government and the shortcomings of the liturgy. When the Protestation had been passed the previous spring it had silently excluded a commitment to defend the discipline of the Church of England. Now the Commons were actively refusing to defend the Book of Common Prayer. Meanwhile, John Hampden called for parliamentary control of military strongpoints, including the Tower.11

  Such developments had often been obstructed by the House of Lords over the previous fifteen months. But there was a committed core of activists who fought for, indeed sought to lead, the cause during the 1640s in co-operation with fellow travellers in the Commons. Their effectiveness in the Lords was increased by the defection of those who had restrained them.12 In early February Charles gave fourteen peers leave to absent themselves from the House, some of whom joined him. Others took the opportunity to leave the House: on 9 February sixty-seven. Lords were absent and attendances in both Houses fell further during the early spring.13

  This exodus allowed the passage of the Bishops Exclusion Bill and the Impressment Bill in early February. Most provocatively of all, the reduced House immediately welcomed the proposed Militia Ordinance when it was presented on 15 February. The ordinance suggested that the King was being misled by the counsels of papists and other ill-affected persons and that as a result, in this time of imminent danger, Parliament should take over the King’s military authority, appointing dependable men as lieutenants and deputy lieutenants. As a practical political measure this is easy enough to understand, given what many people thought they knew about Charles. As a constitutional issue this was outrageous: what kind of king was it who did not control the military resources of the realm?

  Throughout this period Charles held fire, agreeing to the Bishops Exclusion Bill and the Impressment Bill, dropping the charges against the Five Members and agreeing to place the command of the Tower of London in the hands of Sir John Conyers. Even in this mood, however, the Militia Ordinance was impossible for him to accept, but he signalled this only with a fairly moderate prevarication. By the time Henrietta Maria was safely embarked, on 23 February, Charles had made spectacular concessions, and London’s streets were quiet once again. Pym pressed on, however, securing the passage of the Militia Ordinance on 5 March.14 These measures were hardly likely to be seen as solutions to ills of the kingdom – parliamentary government as it was normally understood had collapsed. An important reason for this political failure was the way in which political argument had spilled out beyond the walls – in the mobilization of opinion in petitions, demonstrations and printed polemics. Following the breakdown of parliamentary government this process was virtually unrestrained. From March onwards battle was joined for the hearts, minds and military resources of provincial England.

  After Henrietta Maria’s departure Charles had returned to Greenwich where, despite the wishes of Parliament, he met up with his eldest son. While he was there he finally responded to the Militia Ordinance, in strongly negative terms. This rejection led to a further escalation of the constitutional terms of the conflict. An important argument in justification of the ordinance was that there was a state of emergency manifest in the various military threats to Parliament. Tackling this emergency required Parliament to have control of defensive military forces and, in the absence of the King, that could only be achieved by an ordinance. This was, in other words, presented as an executive measure rather than a new law. When the King rejected the measure, according to this line of argument, it confirmed the emergency and the absence of the King. As Simonds D’Ewes, a member with a keen eye for legal matters, wrote: ‘if the king should be desperate and lay violent hands upon himself [we] must not only advise but wrest the weapon, so too if he should seize the helm of a ship in a storm and threaten to drown them all, only one course of action was possible’.15

  With affairs in this posture, the King began a leisurely progress to York, taking eighteen days for a journey that was possible much more quickly. En route he was warmly received in Cambridge and enjoyed a day of hunting at Little Gidding, but his reception at York was disappointing. In the meantime he had exchanged declarations with his parliamentary critics. In these exchanges his absence, the nature of the emergency and the extraordinary political and constitutional postures adopted by Parliament were all debated at length and in historical detail. Both parties sought to attribute blame for the breakdown of the political process to the other party in an exchange that has been likened to a marital dispute – a series of mutual recriminations rather than an attempt to resolve the dispute, almost incomprehensible in its detail to non-participants.16 But it was also intended for public consumption: to extend the analogy, it was communication in the form ‘tell your father that he’s the one who is jeopardizing the constitution’.

  The ‘paper war’: fundamental constitutional issues argued out before a print audience

  These mutual recriminations were aimed at a print audience, and were intended to recruit allies as much as to resolve differences. Proclamations, petitions, ballads, pamphlets and scandalous verse brought the issues of this paper war to the provincial middling sort. Letters accompanied pamphlets sent down to the country, fuelling tavern conversation that was engaged, irreverent and often satirical. The response could be informed and critical, as in Colchester, where Stephen Lewes was disgruntled at the suppression of royal propaganda: ‘why should not we know the King’s mind as well as the parliament’s mind?’17

  Behind these public and widely discussed exchanges, a parliamentary constitutional theory was taking shape: claims for the rights of subjects to exercise key restraints over the powers of their monarch. The argument for the executive powers of Parliament as the Great Council of the kingdom solidified – the King’s absence was said to be part of the crisis which necessitated the emergency measure (an argument which duly infuriated the royalists). By the early summer Parliament had staked out political territory which could only be justified by these arguments with a dose of goodwill and a following wind. A key issue in these exchanges was the King’s ‘Negative Voice’. To become law, a bill had to pass both Houses and then receive the royal assent. This effectively gave the monarch a veto – a Negative Voice which allowed him to stop legislation which had been passed by both Houses
(hence, for example, the slight delay in securing Strafford’s death). According to the Great Council argument now being made, the use of the Negative Voice could necessitate an ordinance. Where the King was not willing to assent to necessary measures the Houses had to act in his absence.18 This, of course, implied something very profound about the relative powers of King and Parliament, and their relationship to the good of the kingdom. Charles was upholding his right to withhold consent, arguing that without that power he was no longer a king in a meaningful sense. In that, surely, he must have had a lot of support, and there were few who would have drawn the conclusion that England would therefore be better off without a king. Advocates of Parliament’s position, on the other hand, seemed to be suggesting that the King was answerable to his advisers” sense of what was good for the kingdom – if something was unacceptable to them then the King could not insist upon it.19

  Throughout the life of this parliament there had been a tendency for political difficulties with Charles to lead to constitutional resolutions affecting all kings. Control of the militia was accelerating this process, and leading to startling claims. Even though the sternest opponents of these measures were now likely to be absent from the Houses, it took considerable political skill on Pym’s part to maintain the momentum, and to carry increasingly radical policies despite the qualms of many more moderate spirits.20 In his public declarations Charles was guided by moderate, constitutional royalists, like Edward Hyde, later the Earl of Clarendon, who aimed to undercut the political and constitutional radicalism of Parliament’s position. An opponent of abuses of the prerogative, he supported episcopacy and the Church of England, but without an insistence on enforcing ceremonial issues that were ‘indifferent’. His trajectory from the ‘opposition’ of 1640 to royalism in 1642 is fairly clear, and similar to that of others. By the summer of 1641 Hyde had been working informally to achieve a full settlement in co-operation with Sir John Colepeper and Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, the latter two parliamentary critics of the Personal Rule who, as defenders of the rule of law and religious decency, drew back as the measures of reform pressed further. Together they co-ordinated court attempts to influence the Commons in late 1641 and were widely suspected of being the authors of Charles’s propaganda. On concrete policy, however, Charles seems to have been heavily reliant on the forthright advice of Henrietta Maria, who had consistently counselled him to settle matters by force, foreign force if necessary. Disappointed by the rather lukewarm reception in York, Charles decided on two inflammatory courses of action – to go to Ireland personally to settle the political conflict there, and to wrest control of the arsenal in Hull from Sir John Hotham. Both suggestions were provocative in a situation where the King was thought to be in the hands of an armed papistical conspiracy, and was known previously to have considered bringing Irish forces into England in order to exert a bit of discipline on his behalf.21

  The journey to Ireland did not materialize, but the attempt on Hull did, and it resulted in one of the most famous confrontations of the decade. The King’s second son, the Duke of York, and Charles’s brother-in-law, the Elector Palatine, had visited Hull on 22 April and been well entertained, but when the King made the journey there in person the following day the reception was much cooler. Four miles from town he sent ahead a letter saying that he had come to inspect the arsenal and that if his request was refused he would make his way into town ‘according to the laws of the land’. Forewarned Hotham decided to stick by his orders from Parliament. Aware that around forty-five strangers had arrived the previous day in the train of the princes, and that the King was accompanied by 300 horsemen, he shut the gates of the town and sent a message ahead to the King telling him ‘with all humble submissions’ that he would not break his trust to Parliament. In the rain, outside the walls, Charles’s supporters called on the garrison to kill Hotham and throw his body over the wall, but they did not; and Hotham refused Charles’s request to enter with just twenty of his men. Charles called on the heralds to proclaim Hotham a traitor, and rode away. He had given such ample notice of his arrival that it is hard to believe that he simply wanted to take control of the arsenal – arriving unannounced he would almost certainly have been able to do it. It seems likely that this was intended to be the symbolic moment that it subsequently became – demonstrating that Hotham was in rebellion against his king.22

  Hotham’s position had not been an enviable one. His defence against the charge of rebellion rested on a well-established (though now rather incredible) line of argument. In January, when Parliament had sent him to take control of Hull, the order had been not to deliver it without ‘the King’s authority signified unto him by the Lords and Commons now assembled in Parliament’. The King, and some Members of Parliament, could not believe that this stretched to refusing entry to the King himself, and he rather cleverly put Hotham in the position of arguing that it did. The justification was that the authority of the King was separate from his physical body, that his authority could be present where his private person was not. For example, when a judge gave a judgement in court, it was considered to be the King’s judgement, underpinned by royal authority, even if the King did not agree with it. The argument went, therefore, that Parliament could express itself with the King’s authority in ways with which the King as an individual disagreed. All very clever, but rather cleverly nailed by Charles in a subsequent proclamation: ‘these persons have gone about subtly to distinguish betwixt our person and our authority, as if, because our authority may be where our person is not, that therefore our person may be where our authority is not’. For him the case was clear – these people were in open rebellion against him.23

  Although he scored a fundamental political point, Charles had lost the arsenal. He had also by this time lost Portsmouth, the other great provincial arsenal, and the navy. After his initial departure from London in January it seems fairly clear that Charles was manoeuvring to take control of Portsmouth but it was for the time being under the command of George Goring on behalf of Parliament.24 Parliamentary attempts to influence the choice of naval commanders had been going on since 1640. In March 1642 the Lord High Admiral, Lord Northumberland, declared himself too unwell to go to sea and was persuaded by the House of Lords to nominate the Earl of Warwick in his stead. Warwick’s naval credentials were good, but his political and religious views persuaded the King to resist this nomination. He sought instead to secure the appointment of Sir John Pennington, a man who had commanded the fleet since 1639. Parliament launched an investigation of his conduct as a means of subverting this appointment, and persuaded Northumberland to confirm Warwick’s appointment on 4 April. The King, faced with a fait accompli, even failed to accept by way of consolation the appointment of Sir George Carteret, a man trusted by him, as vice-admiral. The military effects of this were soon to be felt, for Warwick, acting under Parliament’s orders, had sent warships to lie in the Humber before the King’s confrontation with Hotham. Their presence there had strengthened Hotham’s position, of course, and in May the fleet brought the arms to London. Having ignored direct orders from the King the commanders of the fleet were thanked for their fidelity by the House of Lords. The military benefits of parliamentary command of the navy were significant in the coming years.25

  In the aftermath of these events the constitutional struggle and attendant pamphlet war reached new heights. In this round of argument the intention seems even more clearly to have been to appeal for support rather than to achieve reconciliation.26 On 5 May, Parliament ordered that the Militia Ordinance be put into execution, provoking an immediate printed answer from the King and, on 27 May, a formal proclamation against the ordinance and those who obeyed it. On 6 May a parliamentary declaration had put the Great Council argument particularly pungently:

  The High Court of Parliament is not only a court of judicature, enabled by the laws to adjudge and determine the rights and liberties of the kingdom, against such patents and grants of His Majesty as are prejudicial thereu
nto… but is likewise a council, to provide for the necessities, prevent the imminent dangers, and preserve the public peace and safety of the kingdom, and to declare the King’s pleasure in those things as are requisite thereunto; and what they do herein hath the stamp of the royal authority, although His Majesty, seduced by evil counsel, do in his own person oppose or interrupt the same; for the King’s supreme and royal pleasure is exercised and declared by this High Court of law and council, after a more eminent and obligatory manner than it can be by personal act or resolution of his own.27