God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  Jeremiah Burroughs had made a similar argument in December 1642 in response to a direct challenge by Henry Ferne, the royalist propagandist. Ferne had asked: ‘But if Parliaments should degenerate and grow tyrannical, what means of safety could there be for such a State’. What he seems to have hoped would make the claim for parliamentary sovereignty look ridiculous actually prompted a more revolutionary argument.55

  Burroughs’s argument rested in part on English freedoms, which distinguished free men from slaves:

  There is no country in the world where country men, such as we call the yeomanry, yea and their farmers and workmen under them, do live in that fashion and freedom as they do in England; in all other places they are slaves in comparison, their lives are so miserable as they are not worth the enjoying, they have no influence at all into the government they are under, nothing to do in the making of laws, or any way consenting to them, but must receive them from others, according to their pleasure; but in England every freeholder has an influence into the making and consenting every law he is under, and enjoys his own with as true a title as the nobleman enjoys whatsoever is his.56

  Here, perhaps, is an echo of the neo-Roman ideas of freedom expressed the previous summer, now cast as a potential source of resistance to Parliament.57 But there was also an Old Testament view of justice – that the shedding of innocent blood required expiation in order to avoid God’s fury. Bowles put this argument too, in Plaine English:

  how can the land by this accommodation be cleansed from blood, that crying sin, which has been contracted by this quarrel… God will not prosper an accommodation without the execution of justice upon these bloodthirsty men… If the people, especially the parliament does not their utmost to wash their hands, and cleanse the land from this innocent and precious blood that has been shed; I fear that blood… will be avenged upon them, which they will believe, when they see their accommodation turned into an assassination.58

  This hard line depended for its appeal on a conviction that Parliament was in defensive arms and that Charles could not be trusted – the latter point though was difficult to express or justify in respectable circles. This, and his improving military position, gave the King little incentive to deal with the hardliners, and the open expression of this more radical position was probably more useful in stiffening royalist than parliamentarian resolve. These pamphlets reflected a developing radicalism on the parliamentarian side which was an embarrassment to mainstream parliamentarians and a gift to royalist propagandists.

  Arguments about the basis of political authority were of great significance for the future but were not very prominent in the peace proposals which were eventually sent to the King at Oxford in early February. Parliament’s discussion of the propositions for peace through the winter of 1642–3 took place against a complicated but generally deteriorating military position, and complex responses to this new political world. Drafting lasted for several weeks, from late December onwards, in the light of pressure from London crowds. Propositions drawn up in the Lords on 20 December were considered by the Commons two days later. These initiatives were given final form in the propositions presented to the King at Oxford on 1 February. They called for the disbandment of the royal army, the settlement of the church and militia on the advice of Parliament, parliamentary power to make a number of judicial appointments, and pardon and restitution for parliamentarians facing charges or who had been deprived of office. The King’s rejection of these proposals was almost instantaneous. His public tone was sorrowful, but in a private letter he wrote candidly that he thought ‘no less power than he who made the world can draw peace out of these articles’. A victory for Prince Rupert at Cirencester on 2 February further convinced Secretary Nicholas that the parliamentary commissioners would have to settle for less.59

  Doomed from the start, negotiations nonetheless continued through February and March. Charles responded with six demands of his own, including restoration of his revenues, towns, forts and ships, and a cessation as a prelude to negotiation. Formally speaking, therefore, the discussion never got to point one of Parliament’s demands – that the royal army disband as a prelude to treaty. The prospects for peace were not promising and (perhaps because) the weight of military advantage was clearly with the King. By late March, Parliament was willing to negotiate its first two demands without a cessation but nothing much in the military situation encouraged flexibility on the King’s part, and the tensions within the parliamentary coalition can only have encouraged him too. By mid-April the negotiations seemed to Parliament to be pointless and the commissioners were withdrawn. Both Whitelocke and Clarendon felt that hardline royalist counsels had prevented progress, although Clarendon felt that this reflected the King’s natural preferences too, whereas Whitelocke felt that the King might have been inclined to conclude a peace.60 In any case, the war had been continuing around the country, and was sure now to last for at least one more campaigning season.

  The City authorities, informed by discontent within the City, had sent a peace petition to the King on 2 January 1643. Charles’s reply to the City, received on 13 January, had given little ground. He was clearly no longer averse to publicity, however, seeking to have his answer read at the City Companies. This was presumably a more or less direct appeal to wavering opinion in London. When Charles’s response to the City’s peace petition was read out at the Guildhall, it was clear to Pym (who was present) and others that the King’s commitment to peace was questionable.61 It was this view that eventually won out in the spring of 1643. An easy peace might simply allow Charles the freedom to renege on all the commitments extracted from him. It was this issue, in March, which seems to have cut the ground from under the feet of the proponents of peace in Parliament.

  The failure of the Oxford propositions could only mean that the war would escalate in the coming year. The march of Prince Rupert on Bristol in early March sent a clear message, as did the publication of an intercepted letter from Charles I to Henrietta Maria in which he acknowledged the lack of serious intent behind his participation in negotiations. By the spring, those in both Oxford and London who had been hoping and working for peace were despondent.62 The coming year saw successful efforts at administrative and political escalation on the parliamentary side.

  In the meantime the influence of ‘peace party’ arguments in the Commons had persisted throughout the Oxford treaty negotiations. By the spring of 1643 this produced little by way of realistic hopes for settlement and drove some writers to think out loud about what to do if Parliament let them down in their fight against tyranny. Secular radicalism, in other words, was in the air, informed by classical and humanist political thought. Motivated by mistrust of the King and fear for the future of the true religion their intention was to break an impasse in constitutional thinking.63 Politics were being transformed by war: the reasons for fighting in the autumn of 1642 might no longer seem sufficient in the spring of 1643; the cause being defended might also seem to have been changed. Escalation of the military conflict seems to have posed new difficulties in deciding political allegiances. War was fought in the light of, and as a means to affect, these political choices.

  9

  Military Escalation, Loyalty and Honour

  The English War Efforts in 1643

  On a ‘calm, clear and fair’ day a little over two weeks after the failure of the Oxford treaty a gang of workmen set about the demolition of Cheapside Cross in the commercial heart of London. Over the next three days, as they went about their work, they were watched by a large crowd, whose response was divided: ‘the majority blessing the deed but others, although of the same religion, detesting and deploring it’. A troop of horse and a troop of foot were on hand in case of trouble.1

  The destruction of Cheapside Cross, May 1643

  This was the final act of a long drama. The cross, standing twelve yards high, was richly decorated with images of the saints and the Virgin Mary, and was surmounted with a crucifix. It was a focal point for
commercial life and both civic and royal pageantry. Under the Tudors and Stuarts it had been refurbished a number of times, but periodically since the Reformation it had also been attacked, verbally and sometimes physically. Attempts to deface it in 1581 and 1595 had forced the authorities to the expense of repairs, and in 1601, when refurbishment was being considered, George Abbot had been asked for his religious opinion of the cross. The Vice-Chancellor of Oxford and future archbishop had supported the case for repairing it, but had suggested changes to the imagery. In particular he had suggested that the crucifix should be replaced with a pyramid in the hope that people would stop calling it ‘the Cross in the Cheap’. While acknowledging the case for iconoclasm, he had been committed to lawful reform – only the magistrate was empowered ‘to redress such enormities’. His advice on reformed refurbishment was ignored, however, and following its restoration in 1601 it was attacked once again. Attacked in print in 1641, and physically in January 1642, the cross nonetheless survived until 1643, despite active hostility and the qualms of the more moderate. The Venetian ambassador described it at that point as ‘a most beautiful pyramidal cross surrounded with figures of saints of exquisite workmanship’.2 But then he was a papist.

  From 1581 onwards it had been regularly claimed that the cross was a comfort to papists and even that they surreptitiously nodded when they approached it. Hotter Protestants had for years attacked the cross as an idol, while others, convinced of its harmlessness, beauty and civic value, had satirized them for their painful consciences. The cross, among many other things, was a symbol of the divisions within English Protestantism. In the tense atmosphere of January 1642, when London’s streets were alive with fear of armed popery, the cross was physically attacked and as a result a protective guard had been posted around it. There remained, nonetheless, a strong current of opinion that the cross was ‘an offence and grief of heart to the strong Christian, a stumbling block to the weak, and a very downfall to the stubborn and wilful’.3

  In throwing their weight behind this view, Parliament and the City authorities were making a clear statement. The troops previously there to protect the cross were, in April, changing sides to protect those charged with its destruction. Armed with an order from the Common Council and prompted by a parliamentary initiative to purge London of such idols, the workmen set about their task on 2 May: maypole season, a part of the old ritual calendar particularly offensive to godly sensibilities. Superstition was being abolished by authority, but in line with the hopes of many ordinary Londoners. Such purgation did not represent a consensus within English Protestantism, but was one of the actions through which its identity was contested: as our eyewitness noted, the destruction of the cross in 1643 elicited a divided response from a crowd ‘of the same religion’.

  Cheapside Cross was in one sense a victim of a desire to cement the parliamentary cause. As the Oxford negotiations meandered towards oblivion the fighting had favoured the royalists, and this gave strength to those promoting administrative and ideological radicalization. Hopton had continued to prosper in the West Country in the first months of 1643, turning back a parliamentary advance under Stamford and drawing Ruthin into battle at Braddock Down. There, on 19 January, the royalists won a decisive victory, forcing Ruthin to flee Saltash on 22 January, where the royalists captured arms and ammunition. Attempts at further advances into Devon in February were repelled, however, and after a skirmish at Chagford and a more substantial battle at Modbury, a local cessation was agreed.4

  Royalist advances in the north were impressive and Henrietta Maria was able to land at Bridlington on 22 February, bringing with her money and supplies assembled in the Netherlands. Unable to prevent her landing, the only parliamentary resistance was an ineffective barrage from ships off the coast while her ships were unloading. According to Clarendon, the hundred-cannon bombardment was primarily a threat to her lodging, ‘whereupon she was forced out of her bed, some of the shot making way through her own chamber; and to shelter herself under a bank in the open fields’.5 Newark resisted a concerted parliamentary assault at the same time, and Scarborough was handed over to the royalists by Sir Hugh Cholmley, who had experienced a change of heart. It was in resistance to further southward advances that Oliver Cromwell began to establish a reputation as a cavalry commander, and a major relief for Parliament was the victory at Grantham on 13 May. Two days later, however, Henrietta Maria’s convoy of arms arrived in Oxford and the Queen herself, the ‘she-generalissima’, was able to move fairly freely from York to Newark and then to Oxford, eventually joining forces with the King on 13 July.6

  The only encouragement for Parliament in the north came from Lancashire. The Earl of Derby had taken Lancaster for the royalists, but then burnt it, thereby grasping a political defeat from the jaws of military victory. Local opinion, which was by no means uniformly parliamentarian, turned against him and, following a defeat at Whalley Abbey on 20 April, he fled into exile on the Isle of Man. He returned in early 1644, when the arrival of Prince Rupert’s troops in Lancashire made it safe for him, but in the meantime the Stanley (and Stuart) interest in Lancashire was defended by his wife. The Countess of Derby held out at Lathom House in one of the more celebrated acts of heroism from this period of the war. This was of larger military significance too, since it tied down parliamentarian forces that might otherwise have been engaged elsewhere.7

  The Earl of Essex was based at the eastern end of the Thames Valley, and Waller to the south and west of the main royalist forces, centred in Oxford. Waller became something of a darling of the parliamentary side in these early months of the war. Between January and March he won a string of victories at Winchester, Farnham Castle, Arundel Castle and Chichester. Although these were relatively minor victories, they earned him the title ‘William the Conqueror’ from the London press, not least perhaps because the picture elsewhere was so discouraging for Parliament. In central England the balance of advantage swung quite rapidly. Royalist control of Banbury and Brill gave solidity to the position in Oxford, while Waller’s victories had given Parliament secure control of the areas south of the Thames as far west as Devon. In the late spring he won victories against Herbert’s forces in Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire, but his advances were halted by Prince Maurice at Ripple Field, north of Tewkesbury (13 April). In the north Midlands, Brereton held much of Cheshire, but not Chester, for Parliament, and Sir John Gell held much of Derbyshire. But in Lichfield local royalists seized control of the cathedral close and in the course of the ensuing siege Lord Brooke was killed by a single shot from the roof of the cathedral. At Hopton Heath (19 March) royalist forces under Compton and Hastings won an important battle over Gell and Brereton, although the loss of the Earl of Northampton was a blow to the royalists. That, and the successful defence of Lichfield by parliamentary forces, prevented a significant follow-up to the victory. Rupert took and sacked Birmingham on 3 April, but, on 21 April, Lichfield Cathedral was captured by Parliament, albeit briefly.8

  It has been widely accepted that the King had a consistent concern to capture London, and that during 1643 this involved a three-pronged advance from the west, centre and north. In fact, it is not clear that there was a general strategy, or at least one that could be executed. Command structures were rather confused, and communications imperfect, so much of the war had the quality of separate, reactive and tactical skirmishing. At the same time, Parliament’s strategy was probably clearer than was once argued – seeking to push back the regional armies sufficiently to allow Essex to move on Oxford from the lower end of the Thames Valley. In either case, it seems that Parliament had little to be cheerful about in strategic terms by late spring 1643 (see map 1).9 Before the cessation in the west the advantage had clearly been with Hopton, and in the north the war had gone badly for parliamentary forces everywhere except in Lancashire. In the Midlands the picture was more confused, but it is hard to make a case that the parliamentary cause was thriving. The death of Lord Brooke and the victory at Hopton Heath certa
inly seemed to give the advantage to the royalists.

  Told as a series of regional stories, some order can be imposed on the campaign history, but as a week-by-week account, as it might have been heard in Oxford or London, the war made much less sense. In these circumstances rumour and news about particular triumphs or failures had a great impact on morale. Waller’s campaign was a huge boost to parliamentarian spirits, for example, although its effect on the outcome of the war is difficult to chart; so too individual setbacks such as the surrender of Scarborough or the death of Lord Brooke. For this reason it was important to try to impose a meaning on events. The death of Brooke, for example, was reported by royalists as a divine judgement on a rebel: an amazing shot that clearly reflected the divine hand. It was reported in the parliamentary paper Mercurius Britannicus, on the other hand, as evidence that the cathedral was a ‘Monster’ with ‘bloody Anthems’ and ‘murdering Organ-Pipes’.10 It was not only the meaning of the news that was disputed, however, but also its accuracy – the royalist press reported with some glee that ‘Sir Jacob Astley, lately slain at Gloucester, desires to know was he slain with a musket or a cannon bullet’.11 These minor paper skirmishes were probably as significant to morale at any particular point as the realities of the broader strategic position. Nonetheless it is hard to make a case that Parliament’s military or political position had been improving between January and April.