Mixed in with these disputes were hostility to the burdens of taxation and the tyrannies of parliamentary administration, and positive commitment to royalism and Prayer Book religion, and to the forms of local government that had existed prior to the war. There were rival petitioning campaigns once more as activists sought to harness these multiple grievances to drive forward their programme. Through 1647 there were sporadic petitions for settlement, and an end to military occupation. October, for example, had seen a petition promoted at Somerset quarter sessions against the persistence of free quarter. But following the Vote of No Addresses a number of Independent MPs promoted petitions in support of their position: in Warwickshire, Essex, Somerset and the northern counties. In Essex, Sir Henry Mildmay did get a packed Grand Jury to approve his petition, but a meeting of freeholders at Romford expressed strong opposition. In Buckinghamshire 5,000 signatures were gathered and in Somerset a packed Grand Jury at the March assizes also approved a petition which had enjoyed some success in parts of the county. It commended the Vote of No Addresses, was critical of local malignants holding office, and drew attention to the material hardships of the times: just as in 1642 complaints about material hardships were not necessarily the home ground of the royalists.9
This Independent mobilization did not go unanswered. A ring of counties from Essex to Hampshire produced petitions against military government and centralization. In Essex, the failure of the petition in favour of the Vote of No Addresses was followed by the adoption of a petition calling for a personal treaty with Charles, which was accepted by the Grand Jury at the Chelmsford assizes in March. It linked this call for a personal treaty with a denunciation of free quarter and high taxation, and a call for the disbandment of the army. Two thousand men came to London to present the petition. The key point in the ‘moderate’ campaign, therefore, was the call for a personal treaty, and opposition to the Vote of No Addresses: it was intended to forestall a Scottish invasion, and secure a rapid settlement by bringing Parliament back to the table. Similar petitions were produced in Sussex and Hampshire, and calls for restraint of the county committees, local control of the militia, and restraint of the military and of sectaries were heard around the country throughout the summer.10 But while that might offer a means to resolve disparate problems it was not clear that those who joined in these campaigns were royalists, or in favour of a return to the religion of bishops and the Prayer Book.
Naturally, these disparate issues also got an airing in print. During March there were attacks on sectarianism and protestations in favour of the calendar and promoting the image of a royalist London. A true and perfect picture of our present reformation was yet another catalogue of sectarian errors, arranged thematically (scripture, God, Trinity and so on). Its diagnosis was plainly stated on the title page: ‘the Christian’s Prospective to take a short view of the new lights that have brake forth since Bishops went down’, ‘Printed in the first year of King Charles His Imprisonment’. Heading the list of authors in whose works these new views could be found was Thomas Edwards, rubbing shoulders with some of the pantheon of religious enthusiasts – Roger Williams, Laurence Clarkson, Richard Overton, John Lilburne, John Milton and others. The current parliament was denounced as mother to this monstrosity in Mistris Parliament Brought to Bed of a Monstrous Childe of Reformation, while another pamphlet announced the Last will and testament of that ‘monstrous, bloody, tyrannical, cruel and abominable’ parliament, which was ‘desperately sick in every part of its ungodly members, as well committees, sequestrators, agitators, solicitors, promoters, clerks, door keepers and all her other untrue and unlawful adherents’.11
The tide was not all in one direction, of course. Along with calls for parliamentarian unity, vindications of Independents and celebrations of the conversion of Indians in the New World came a translation of the Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, the leading work in favour of the right of subjects to resist their monarch in early modern Europe. The man often named as the translator, William Walker of Darnall (near Sheffield), was later credited with cutting the King’s head off, although it is more likely that his credit lay in the inspiration than in the physical act. More ambiguously, Edward Husbands republished Elizabeth I’s speech to her last parliament, made on 30 November 1601.12 Here, in miniature, lay one of the crucial weaknesses of the royalist mobilization in 1648: did attachment to this view of harmonious relations between monarch and Parliament necessarily support a second civil war? Proponents of this vision might be in favour of the Vote of No Addresses and bringing the King to see reason, for example – would a weak peace of the kind threatened by the Treaty of Newport really restore this vanished world?
It was not, however, completely unreasonable to think that these grievances might support pro-royalist risings all over England. Henry Firebrace had a plan for the King’s escape from Carisbrooke, rumours of which reached the Committee of Derby House on 7 February and of another one on 13 March. The following week came the attempt foiled by the failure of the King’s physical body to fit through the window. If he had got out, though, he would have had a welcome – there is evidence of individuals seeking with some success to mobilize arms from many areas of the north, north Wales, the Marches, East Anglia, Hertfordshire, Herefordshire and the east Midlands as well as Bristol, Bath and Tavistock. Many people seem to have gone from, or through, London to join the risings in Essex and Kent.13
There were strong parallels with 1642 – the end of parliamentary attempts to come to terms, against a backdrop of more or less spontaneous expressions of miscellaneous grievances, led activists to mobilize support. Petitions, promoted at quarter sessions and assizes, and pamphleteering publicized grievances, while activists sought to forge from them coherent political campaigns – to renounce the Vote of No Addresses and enter into a personal treaty with the King, for example. In June 1648 in Hampshire a petition was organized, despite pressure from the county committee, which denounced the continued restraint of the King, high taxation, ‘arbitrary power’ and ‘those that think they have monopolised all truth and would therefore square our religion according to their own confused models’. The King was to be restored to his ‘indubitable right’ and ‘the true reformed Protestant religion professed in the reigns of Queen Elizabeth, and King James of blessed memory’, with some ‘ease to tender consciences’.14 This was more comforting for the King than Parliament, for sure, but it was not particularly happy reading for many of his allies among Presbyterians and Engagers.
As in 1642 this attempt was only partially successful, for there were two essential difficulties in forging an alliance from these very disparate forces: it was going to require people to start a new war, aimed in part against the consequences of the last one; and that people persuade themselves that the King, who was what held the alliance for a personal treaty together, was worth fighting for. Hostility to the army, the sects, the parliamentary regime might all fuel resentments, but they did not necessarily lead to support for the aims of the Engagers. The Scottish kirk, after all, was not a known supporter of Christmas festivities, or games of tip-cat during divine service. Formal Scottish demands, received in Parliament on 3 May, included the suppression of heresies and schisms, including the Prayer Book, and the extirpation of episcopacy.15 The previous summer the Presbyterians had made concessions to anti-excise feeling largely because they had to, and had sought to insulate apprentices from the consequences of their reform of the calendar. But they were no more the people’s friends than the army, which, its material burden aside, offered a potentially attractive alliance of tolerant Independents and indulgent Anglicans. Being against the Vote of No Addresses was not the same as being in favour of the Engagement; indeed, it might mean quite the opposite – talk not silence might be the best way to keep the Engagers out.
With hindsight it is possible to see that the story of the second civil war is the story of a dog that didn’t bark. As in 1642 there were plenty of grievances but a relatively small number of activists willing
to resort to arms. And in 1648, it turned out, there were more-effective forces of suppression, including auxiliary forces raised by hawkish parliamentarians, which prevented activists from rallying effective support.16 It may also be that the disparateness of the movement, and recent experience of the costs of warfare, served as another disincentive: for how many of these grievances was warfare likely to be an effective solution? In Scotland, as in 1640, the decision to invade England was controversial, particularly since it was in defence of a king who was so palpably unreliable on religion. An alliance of Charles with Presbyterians against Parliament was, in the end, a peculiar sight, in both kingdoms. Enthusiasm for renewed warfare was limited, in both England and Scotland, but quite what forms of negotiation might forestall it was impossible to say.17
Last-minute attempts to square the Vote of No Addresses with the pursuit of a settlement were less impressive than the preparations for war. The obvious solution was to try to secure a deposition or forced abdication in favour of one of his elder sons. Charles, Prince of Wales, now seventeen years old, had fled to the Isles of Scilly in March 1646 and from there to Jersey, before taking up an offer of refuge in France following his father’s surrender. There he was beyond reach or persuasion. His younger brother James, Duke of York, now in his fifteenth year, had been in Oxford during the war. When it ended he was placed under the guardianship of the Duke of Northumberland at St James’s Palace in London. He was not willing to countenance a deal of the kind being proposed and was to escape, at the third attempt, in April 1648, in the course of a specially arranged game of hide-and-seek. Colonel Bampfield was waiting for him, and spirited him away to the Netherlands. Replacing the King was therefore not an option, however attractive it might have been as a way out of the impasse. Henry Marten had made overtures to the Scottish commissioners to try to avert an invasion, but they were rebuffed. Meanwhile men rushed north to sign up for the Engagers” army and both Berwick and Carlisle were quickly occupied in the last days of April. For a time, the prospects for armed royalism looked quite good. In late April the Scottish parliament announced that the Solemn League and Covenant had been broken, called for the establishment of Presbyterianism in England and named its officers. On 4 May the Scottish parliament ordered the raising of an army.18 But it would not arrive for some time, until after England and Wales had been pacified, in fact.19
In the meantime the situation in many areas of England and Wales was tense – the disorders of March, April and May and the rival petitioning campaigns spoke of serious problems for the parliamentary position. On a number of occasions there had been moves to take hold of local magazines and to resist the army, but only two of these movements actually resulted in armed risings against the parliamentary regime: in south Wales in April and May; and in Kent and Essex in June.
Politics in south Wales displayed continuities from 1642, a history which illustrates the uneasy relationship between local grievances and national political platforms. In Glamorganshire in 1642 prompt action by the Marquess of Hertford had secured royalist control, but in 1645, faced with increasing military burdens, a ‘Peaceable Army’ was formed, committed to a programme rather like that of the English clubmen. The King went along with their demands, but when he seemed to be about to renege on the deal the Peaceable Army made common cause with the parliamentarians in neighbouring Pembrokeshire. By February 1646, however, there was open resistance to parliamentary government on more or less the same grounds – the intrusion of new men and the suppression of the rites and traditions of the Anglican church prominent among the grievances. A similar revolt took place in June 1647, defeated by force. In 1648, however, there was a military ally. Colonel John Poyer, the mayor of Pembroke in 1642, had taken military control of the county under cover of a fabricated popish plot. In alliance with Rowland Laugharne he had established military domination in an area where there was little sign of enthusiasm for either side. By 1648 Poyer and Laugharne had many local enemies, however, and Poyer had become very vulnerable should he lose command of Pembroke Castle – his power base. When the armies were rationalized late in 1647 this happened and he was required to hand over the castle to a detachment from the New Model.20 The resulting mutiny became a vehicle for a pro-royalist rising, drawing on the kinds of grievance visible in many other areas.
Although Poyer never accepted a commission from the King, he did put his mutinous troops behind a rising of the Glamorgan gentry. The aim of the movement was to bring the King to a personal treaty, along with demands that:
the just prerogative of the King, privileges of the Parliament, laws of the land, liberties of the people, may be maintained, and preserved in their proper bounds, and the Protestant religion, as it now stands established by the law of the land, restored throughout the kingdom with such regard to tender consciences as shall be allowed by Act of Parliament.21
In a sense this was the programme of the Prayer Book petitions of 1642, but without the anti-sectarian bite – liberty to tender consciences had become a currency of ‘moderate’ politics. But here, in essence, was the problem of the second war – a movement in favour of the Book of Common Prayer was hardly an easy bedfellow of a Covenanting army and it seems unlikely that ease of tender consciences would extend very far in the direction of the Irish Catholics also being wooed by royalists. The secular concerns about the balance between the prerogative, law and the people’s liberty was the kind of mother and apple pie declaration that all sides had been making since 1642. Little had changed to promise agreement about what that meant in practice.
At St Fagan’s on 8 May a small force under Colonel Horton, who had been sent to disband Laugharne’s force, engaged them instead. Many of Laugharne’s troops wore papers in their hats saying ‘we long to see our king’. The battle was a small one, and Parliament’s forces were victorious, but elsewhere in south Wales the picture was less good. In late April, Colonel Fleming had led 120 horse too far into rebel territory and was forced to surrender. He died by a shot from his own pistol, although whether it was suicide or an accident was not clear. In the meantime Cromwell had been ordered to march into south Wales to retake Pembroke Castle.22 His campaign was quickly successful. Chepstow fell on 25 May and Tenby a few days later, so that he soon arrived before Pembroke.23
What proved to be the only substantial English rising was by then under way in Kent. There were plenty of signs of hostility to Parliament elsewhere in England, however: May saw the riots at Bury St Edmunds, and a petition from Surrey, approved by a meeting of freeholders, in imitation of one from Essex that had claimed 20,000 signatures. The petition called for restoration of the King, disbandment of the army and restoration of known laws – all very well, but offering little guidance about the religious or constitutional settlement. It had a cool reception at Westminster, leading to serious disorder. In London the Essex petitioners had been cheered through the streets.24 News of the raising of the Scottish army reached Westminster as an army prayer meeting was taking place at Windsor, and there was very evident discontent around the country about taxation, the army and the end of negotiation. Awareness of all this prompted the suspension of the Vote of No Addresses in late April, so that members could consider how to settle the kingdom.25
The Kentish rising had grown out of the Christmas disturbances. Leading figures in the Canterbury Christmas riots were put on trial at the assizes starting on 10 May in Canterbury. Two trials were organized, one for the city and one for the county, and the Grand Juries were carefully filled with the well-affected. However, Sergeant Wilde, one of the judges sent down to ensure a clear outcome, delivered a misjudged address, which seems to have inflamed opinion and the Grand Juries proved less tame than hoped. They refused to support the prosecution and rumours immediately circulated that they would be prosecuted, or even hanged. In the heated atmosphere a petition was drawn up and approved by the Jurymen, calling for a personal treaty with the King to settle the just rights of King and Parliament; disbandment of the army; government by know
n laws; and defence of property according to the Petition of Right against illegal taxes and impositions. When the county committee drew up an order declaring the petition to be seditious, however, the campaign took off. Two hundred gentlemen signed the petition in Canterbury and then sent copies all over the county to be signed more widely. In fact all but ten members of the county committee signed, and the copies returned from the county were collated on 29 May. Anyone who wanted to accompany the petition was called to assemble at Blackheath the following day.26
Annexed to the petition was an engagement to defend the petition by force of arms, if necessary, and a remonstrance declaring the necessity of this provocative step. More than 27,000 people were said to have signed this declaration – more or less equivalent to the total adult male population in the county. Helped by defections many of the county’s strongpoints and magazines fell into the hands of those promoting the petition, although Dover held out. Crucial too was the mutiny of the navy. The displacement of the Earl of Warwick as admiral by the Self-Denying Ordinance, and of Sir William Batten on partisan grounds in September 1646, had been unpopular; so, too, was the appointment of his replacement, William Rainborough. Many of the crews were from Kent, and in May there was an open mutiny, which included Rainborough’s own ship.27 Swift military action was taken, Fairfax abandoning his march north in order to relieve Dartford. In order to forestall what seemed like an imminent general mutiny in the fleet Rainborough was moved aside in favour of Warwick.28 The origins of the Kentish rising can be traced to numerous discontents, but it is again clear that its political programme did not sit particularly easily with any of the main players on the national stage, and there were significant divisions within the county about what this movement was for.29
God’s FURY, England’s FIRE Page 68
