God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  This situation was made more complicated by the arrival in 1645 of the Earl of Glamorgan, a Catholic who arrived directly from the King’s side and who, in the aftermath of Naseby and the deteriorating royalist position in England, was able to offer more-substantial concessions. He had been negotiating directly with the Confederates on the King’s behalf for military aid, a reflection of the pressing military needs in England, but something which undermined the authority of the King’s official representative, Ormond. In August 1645 Glamorgan signed a treaty promising dramatic concessions – more than Ormond would have been comfortable to offer – in return for further military aid. It is not clear whether or not the King had approved these concessions, although Glamorgan did sign a defeasance exempting the King from anything that he did not like – this probably tells the story it seems to. Distrust in Ireland delayed agreement, and when the nature of the negotiations became public late in 1645 Glamorgan’s efforts collapsed.13

  This left Ormond unrivalled as the King’s representative in Ireland, and he negotiated a peace with the Confederates which was signed at the end of March 1646. In return for important concessions on religion, he secured the promise of troops to support Chester: too late, however, since it had fallen on 3 February. Not only did this fail to produce military aid, but it also divided the Irish Confederates. The clericalist wing, now led by a papal nuncio called Rinuccini, rejected the terms as too soft. Rinuccini had arrived in October 1645, with money and arms, intent on securing freedom of worship for Catholics in Ireland and willing to exploit divisions among the Confederates to avoid a peace that fell short of that. By comparison, he was relatively casual about the need to restore Charles’s authority: an alliance with the royalists was not his priority. The Ormond peace offered almost no guarantees about the future of Catholicism and was not acceptable to an important slice of Confederate opinion. In the meantime, the war with Monro’s army continued, and through June and July 1646 the Confederate army enjoyed considerable military success, including a significant victory at Benburb (5 June) and the capture of castles at Roscommon and Bunratty in the first half of July. This allowed preparations for an attack on Dublin.14

  Ormond faced other difficulties too. On 4 July, Digby had arrived in Ireland with the news that, during the King’s captivity, Ormond was to take instructions from Henrietta Maria and the Prince of Wales. At the end of the month, however, Digby told the Irish privy council that his own authority was sufficient for him to act in the King’s name, and that the Ormond peace should be published. This was duly done the following day, 30 July. Not only did this breach a confidentiality agreement, but it prompted Rinuccini into open opposition. He convened a meeting of the Irish clergy at Waterford, which denounced the peace on 12 August. They then threatened an interdiction on any town that proclaimed the peace, and the effect seems to have been fatal to Ormond’s authority. He summoned a meeting of the Irish nobility at Cashel, but was refused admission to the town and by mid-September his ruin was complete. Leading figures of the Supreme Council of the Confederacy were arrested when Rinuccini arrived at Kilkenny at the head of an armed force, and the Ormond peace was denounced. A purged Confederate leadership was in place, with Owen Roe O’Neill at the head of its forces, and was very unfriendly to a peace in Ireland that was no more than a capitulation. Faced with the triumph of this wing of the Confederacy, Ormond decided to surrender Dublin to the English parliament rather than risk a Catholic capture. In response Rinuccini recognized the Earl of Glamorgan as the King’s lieutenant, in place of Ormond. Parliament accepted Ormond’s resignation in the middle of October.15 By September 1646, then, the King could at least be clear that the Irish were not his salvation. The Irish Confederates were, like the English parliamentarians, seeking to extract concessions at this moment of weakness and concessions to the English parliament and the Irish Confederates were likely to be mutually unacceptable.

  In Scotland the prospects for Charles looked no less bleak. It had been clear for some time that the English parliament was not necessarily reliable from the point of view of the Covenanters, and they had been negotiating with the King directly since the middle of 1645, although they denied it publicly. Early in 1646 papers presented by the Covenanters to the English parliament were published, prefaced by an outline of how the terms for negotiation had been softened since the Uxbridge negotiations. The Commons ordered that they should be burnt, although the Lords modified the measure to mean that only the preface, not official papers produced by formal allies, would be publicly burnt.16 Clearly there were possibilities here for Charles.

  But what the Covenanters wanted from the English parliament – chiefly a strict Presbyterian settlement – was no more acceptable to Charles. Henrietta Maria and the French consistently urged compromise on the church settlement in order to secure military help, but Charles was never willing to pursue this line, and French help never arrived. In April the Covenanter terms for a settlement became clear and Charles soon discovered, following his surrender, that there was little room for manoeuvre. He agreed to receive instruction on Presbyterian government (no easy thing to agree to, one might think) and that encouraged hopes that he might throw in his lot with them. At Newcastle, however, it quickly became clear that he was not really learning from Alexander Henderson’s instruction. His hopes rested on divisions in Scotland, between the relative hardliners like Argyll and a group led by Hamilton which sought security both for the kirk and for monarchical authority, and which might be persuaded to help restore Charles to effective rule with weaker demands about the church settlement in England. But the Hamiltonians had little leverage in these months.17

  In the late summer of 1645, Charles received a special envoy from France, Jean de Montreuil, who had been sent to broker a deal between Charles and the Covenanters. This would allow for an invasion of England, with French support; one of the final schemes of the first war. Behind this lay a French plan to annexe the Spanish Netherlands. They now offered Charles the prospect of military support in the hope that it would ensure there was no English intervention in the Netherlands. The French remained interested (at least apparently) in pursuing this following Charles’s surrender in 1646 and the scheme was picked up again the following spring.18

  Charles then had many options, and that was bound to make him seem flirtatious to the many parties with which he was apparently willing to deal. It was quite reasonable for a man of his convictions to play the field in this way – the most important thing was to preserve the monarchy, not pander to the opinions of his subjects. On the other hand, to those with whom he was dealing he must have seemed actively deceitful, rather than open to offers from any potentially helpful source. For example, on 11 June he wrote a letter to the long-suffering Ormond telling him to treat no further with the Irish, and allowed the Scots around him to see the letter. This was clearly intended to foster the impression that his dealings with the Confederates were over and that the Covenanters could be reassured about dealing with him. In a letter to the Queen, however, he explained that he meant no further negotiation – what had already been agreed was not to be undone. An unfortunate feature of this minor conceit was that Ormond did not understand this distinction. Later in the year Charles offered to Parliament management of the war in Ireland, boasting to the Queen that it was the management that was offered – if he chose to make peace then his engagement with Parliament would be ended. Most of us would think, perhaps, that Charles should have backed only one of these horses – opted for a deal with Covenanters and English Presbyterians or with English Independents, and probably not (for domestic reasons) a deal with the Irish Catholics or the French. But instead he was always interested by all options, and in November toyed with encouraging a general rising against the English parliament.19

  For all these reasons, nothing much happened in relation to the English peace treaty between July and December. Charles’s initial response to the Newcastle Propositions was to play for time. His first reply, on 1 August, asked f
or the opportunity to come to London personally to ‘raise a mutual confidence between him and his people’ and satisfy his conscience in full discussion since the propositions ‘do import so great alterations’ in church and state.20 This call for a return to London had recurred throughout the 1640s, but was completely unacceptable to the Westminster leadership, who feared that it would lead to an unravelling of their position. William Sancroft, writing in May 1646, said that the dominant Westminster faction ‘fear nothing more than’ the King’s arrival in London: ‘they know not what to do with him if he comes… his presence will attract hearts and animate many of the members to appear for him with open face who now mask under a visor’.21 It was probably a well-grounded fear, which Charles played on again, in his second formal response to the propositions in late December. It was only the following May that he gave a substantive answer to the specific proposals, and then the purpose was largely disruptive.22

  From the late summer onwards the Covenanters had been preparing to go home. Charles’s intransigence made it seem that there was little hope of reaching a deal with him, while the revelation of their negotiations with him made the English parliament increasingly hostile. Open trading had started in mid-August, when the Commons voted £100,000 to cover the Scots” costs. In retaliation they estimated those costs at £2,000,000, but said that they were willing to accept £500,000. Two weeks of haggling produced a settlement at £400,000, half to be paid before they left and the rest to be paid in instalments thereafter. The security for the loans raised in the City was the sale of bishops” lands and the excise. The quid pro quo was that the English parliament claimed power over the King’s person and this became the deal – payment of reparations to the Covenanters in return for control of the King. The details were worked out by the end of December: this was the context of Charles’s second plea to come to London and be heard (‘the which if refused to a subject by a King, he would be thought a tyrant for it’). Parliament again felt unmoved by the attractions of this plan and it was decided to hold the King at Holmby, Northamptonshire. The alternative had been Newmarket – a favourite royal stamping ground before the war but in the now-Presbyterian Eastern Association. In January the Committee of Both Kingdoms was superseded as the crucial political body by the Committee for Irish Affairs at Derby House. Payments to the Covenanters began and at the end of January parliamentary commissioners arrived in Newcastle to take the King south. The Covenanters marched north on 30 January, having received the first £100,000, and the second instalment arrived a few days later: to many royalists then and since this has looked rather like the Scots selling their king. Charles himself embellished the story by noting that it was ‘at too cheap a rate’.23

  A fixed point in these negotiations was the centrality of the King to any settlement. The surrender of Charles had not settled much and had clearly not ruled out the possibility of renewed fighting. The idea of deposition, or of some kind of ‘temporary abdication’, was in the air, but this was plainly hampered by the fact that none of the alternative claimants to the throne was willing to deal with Parliament. The heir, in fact, had prudently been sent abroad. Martyrdom was in any case preferable for Charles, as he was keen to let everyone know.24 The military defeat of the King was by no means a political defeat for monarchy since there was every prospect of a dissolution of the parliamentary coalition. Prevarication worked in his favour because of this essential fact, which reflected the cultural prestige of monarchy. Charles I and his policies were in general less popular than the idea of monarchy, and he was at his most effective when he presented himself as the embodiment of the latter. From 1647 onwards he increasingly presented himself as such, and as a monarch suffering in the service of that sacred office. In a way he was preparing himself for the martyrdom which he did indeed ultimately embrace – it was certainly a turn away from the austere image of a distant figure, seeking the welfare but not the approval of his people, that had been presented by Van Dyke in the 1630s.

  En route from Newcastle to Holmby, Charles was greeted by enthusiastic crowds, which provide vivid testimony to the continuing cultural power not just of the idea of monarchy, but even the appeal of this particular monarch. Many of those who attended hoped to be healed by the royal touch. At Ripon on 7 February he touched for the King’s Evil.25 The King’s Evil was scrofula, a tubercular infection which manifested itself in swellings in the neck and in skin conditions. It was claimed that by his sacred touch an English king could cure this disease, and there is plenty of contemporary testimony that it worked. Richard Wiseman, the royalist surgeon, devoted a whole book of his Chirurgicall Treatises to medical treatments of the disease but noted in advance that the royal touch was the most effective cure, as testified in ‘our chronicles’ and by ‘the personal experiences of many thousands now living’.26 Given the symbolic force of the royal touch, and his own immediate interests, Wiseman could hardly have been expected to say anything else, of course. His book was dedicated ‘To the most sacred majesty of Charles II’: the royal touch was a crucial demonstration of that sacred majesty which attached to kings.27 Wiseman’s professional and political interests could be resolved, however: those unable or unwilling to attend the King were missing the simplest and most effective cure, but there were medical alternatives ‘since it is not necessary that a disease which is cured by miracle, should be remediable by no rules of art’.28 Wiseman was certainly not alone in thinking that the royal cure worked. Those who came to be touched were issued with ‘touch-pieces’ and these too acquired supernatural qualities.29

  Charles had touched for the Evil throughout the 1630s, although, characteristically, he had also issued numerous proclamations attempting to bring order to the procedure.30 The 1635 edition of the Prayer Book had been bound with directions for the touching ceremony: this came close to integrating the enactment of sacred monarchy into the liturgy of the national church, of which, of course, he was head.31 In that sense, touching was a powerful demonstration of exactly the image of monarchy and church that Charles had consistently defended. It is, perhaps, no surprise that he had touched at Edinburgh during his coronation visit in 1633 and at York on the eve of his ill-fated campaign in the second Bishops” War.32 He was certainly assiduous about touching in the spring of 1647 and afterwards: it made his point that someone with these powers could not reasonably be asked to submit to the terms of the Newcastle Propositions and suggested that there were many others who might agree.33

  Only the French and English kings claimed the power to touch, the English claiming that since the time of Edward the Confessor their monarchs had been endowed with this power. In fact, it seems, the ceremony was of more recent origin and some of the evidence cited that there was an unbroken tradition from the time of the Confessor comes from seventeenth-century claims to that effect.34 Indeed, Charles and his son seem to have been among the most enthusiastic touchers in English history,35 and it may be their propaganda that fooled historians subsequently.

  Not only did the rite chime with Charles I’s sense of church and state, but it made a powerful political point at a moment when monarchy was being demystified. The relationship between the sacred office and the royal body was here very direct. At Hull in 1642 Sir John Hotham had refused the King entry, claiming that the King’s authority was expressed through Parliament, and that in obeying an order of Parliament he was not disobeying the King. Charles had nailed this argument of convenience with a neat debating point – he was familiar with the argument that his authority could be where his body was not, but not that his body could be where his authority was not. In 1643 some poor petitioners had sought permission from the King to go from London to Oxford to receive the touch. This miraculous cure, they noted, ‘is one of the greatest of his Majesty’s prerogatives, which no force can deprive your highness of’.36 Touching demonstrated the particular powers that resided in the King’s actual body, while at the same time demonstrating the seamlessness of his political vision.

  It was not just tho
se with scrofula who were drawn to the King. Outside Leeds the road was crowded for two miles with onlookers and everywhere he went the bells were rung. On 13 February, Fairfax rode out from Nottingham to meet him and there was an honourable exchange between the two former enemies. In Northamptonshire hundreds of gentry came to escort him and in Northampton bells were again rung and guns fired in his honour. Wherever he went, apparently, he was greeted with shouts of ‘God bless your majesty!’ and he arrived at Holmby, unsurprisingly, in very good spirits.37 In April 1647, as crowds continued to flock to Holmby for the healing touch, Henry Marten jokingly suggested in the Commons that ‘the parliament’s Great Seal might do it if there was an ordinance for it’. He was responding to preparations to send the Newcastle Propositions to the King once more, and his barb was linked to his description of the King as a ‘man’: ‘The man to whom these propositions shall be sent ought rather to come to the bar himself than to be sent to any more’. But like many of his jokes, this was uncomfortably close to the bone – neither the new Great Seal nor the recent expedient of an ordinance claimed sacred sanction dating back 600 years. Many evidently felt that a powerful and divinely sanctioned authority really was embodied in the King, that he was not a man just like any other. A week later the Commons denounced the practice of touching as superstitious,38 further evidence that Charles’s touching was a powerful demonstration of a significant political fact.