Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Whatever the truth about Charles's role in the ‘Incident’, it had immediate and immense consequences for his cause. Not only did its miscarriage prevent him from imposing ‘the weight of punishment’ on his critics, both in England and Scotland, but it also led many to question his integrity. A member of the royal household in Edinburgh feared that ‘all will end in an agreement to our master's disadvantage, and what will be required by the [Scottish] Parliament at first must be yelded to at laste, and soe putt everie thing into a wors condition then wee fownde it’. Almost immediately, the assembly exercised its new power of veto over the king's nominees to executive and judicial office, thus realizing Charles's fears that he would have ‘no more power in Scotland than as a Duke of Venice’ (page 335 above).68 In England, news of the Incident also ‘putt everie thing into a wors condition’. The interrogations of ‘littell Will: Murray’ and the conspirators (duly forwarded to Westminster), coming just months after the Army Plot to rescue Strafford, suggested that Charles would stop at nothing to eliminate his enemies. However, the ‘accons and successes’ of Charles's opponents in the Edinburgh Parliament encouraged their colleagues at Westminster to ‘take a patterne for their proceeding’ and frame demands ‘according to the Scottish precedent’ as soon as the king returned to England. But first, events put Ireland into a far ‘wors condition’.69

  The Irish Revolution

  The Irish political elite found the developments in Charles I's other kingdoms deeply troubling. One protagonist in the Irish rebellion later recalled hearing ‘that the Scotts hadd peticioned the Parliament howse of England that there should not bee a Papist left alive either in all England, Ireland or Scotland’, so that the only effective response was ‘to ryse vpp in armes and take all the stronghouldes and forts into their handes’.70 Ireland's Catholic leaders were therefore receptive to hints from Charles that if they organized military and financial support for him against his enemies in Britain, he would confirm the ‘Graces’ (page 338 above). Working principally through the earl of Antrim (who had married the duke of Buckingham's widow and, through her, enjoyed a close relationship with the monarch), the king apparently approved a plan ‘that the castle of Dublin should be surprised and seized’ and an army of 20,000 men mobilized to be ‘employed against the [Irish] Parliament’ and then ‘against the Parliament of England if occasion should be for so doing’. In other words, Charles envisaged starting a civil war first in Ireland and then in England.71

  Antrim did his best, but again the climate intervened. Adverse weather ruined the harvest in Ireland in 1641, as it had done in 1639 and 1640, causing widespread food shortages and reducing exports (almost all farm produce) by about one-third. The province of Ulster suffered worst because the presence of the troops raised by Strafford for the invasion of Scotland soon consumed all available resources. According to a resident of Belfast, the combination of hungry troops and scarce food meant that the poor ‘are so much impoverished that they can no longer subsist’. Throughout the province, land rents fell by half, creating great tensions between natives and newcomers. Those who had ‘lived by [their] husbandry’, now ‘haveing noe mantainance’, saw rebellion as their only option.72 In this highly charged atmosphere, in August 1641 the king gave his consent for the Irish Parliament to debate the ‘Graces'; but when the news arrived in Dublin, the ‘Lords Justices’ (a commission of Protestants entrusted by Charles with governing Ireland after Strafford's fall) immediately dissolved the assembly.

  This surprise move, which blocked the road to constitutional reform for the foreseeable future, outraged the Catholic members of the Irish Parliament. Seeing that the Scots’ armed insurrection had secured concessions, first from the king and then from the English Parliament, they concluded that only military strength could now overthrow ‘the tyrannicall governement that was over them’, and decided that they would ‘imitat Scotland, who gott a privilege by that course’.73 Over the next few weeks, one group of conspirators under Connor, Lord Maguire, made plans to take Dublin Castle, while another led by Sir Phelim O'Neill, a prominent landowner and a justice of the peace, would seize all the fortresses in Ulster garrisoned by Protestants. Everyone agreed to act simultaneously on 23 October, a market day in Dublin, which would make the arrival of the conspirators in the capital the night before less conspicuous. Maguire intended to equip his followers with the weapons stored in Dublin Castle and then force the English government to grant religious and political freedom.

  On the night of 22 October Maguire's plot miscarried. Owen Connolly, one of the few Protestant conspirators, slipped away to tell the Lords Justices all he knew. The latter ‘gave at first very little credit to so improbable and broken a [story], delivered by an unknown, mean man, well advanced in his drink’ and so sent him away; but Connolly later made a second attempt to warn the authorities. This time, ‘being in better temper’ (that is, being less ‘advanced in his drink’) ‘he found more belief for his then less distracted story’. The plotters, he warned, intended ‘that in all the seaports and other townes in the kingdome, all the Protestants should bee killed this night’. The government immediately arrested Maguire and the other plotters in the capital, and sent urgent messages to warn Protestants elsewhere.74

  They arrived too late. On the night of 22 October, just as the drunken Owen Connolly betrayed the plot in Dublin, Sir Phelim O'Neill and his allies used a variety of ruses to capture the major fortresses in Ulster, and Catholics elsewhere rejoiced. In County Meath, ‘the very first night after this rebellion was knowne, generally all papists houses’ round about ‘were sett upon a merry pin, danceing, singing, and drinkeing, as if hell had bin broken open among them'; while in County Monaghan an insurgent boasted that ‘this was but the beginning’ because ‘by the next night Dublin would bee too hott for any of the English doggs to liue in’. Insurgents in many other counties immediately declared their opposition to British rule, and well over one hundred members of the Irish Parliament eventually joined the rebellion.75

  Like the Scots Covenanters, whose example had both inspired and alarmed them, the initial aims of the Irish confederates were conservative: they did not seek the return of forfeited lands, only an end to further plantations; they did not demand independence from England, only an end to London's power to alter the status quo; they did not strive to overthrow Protestantism, only to end the persecution of Catholics. In the absence of leadership from Maguire, however, groups of Catholics exploited the temporary collapse of public authority to settle scores with local Protestants.

  Although several confrontations were intensely personal – some attackers stabbed, hanged, burned or drowned neighbours whom they had known for years (see chapter 17 below) – most Catholics did not intend to kill their victims, but rather to expel and humiliate them by stripping them as they gloated ‘Now are you wild Irish as well as we’ (Plate 16). But the Little Ice Age often rendered these activities lethal. Contemporaries considered 1641–2 ‘a more bitter winter than was of some years before or since seen in Ireland’, with severe snow and frost afflicting the whole island – a part of the world that rarely sees any snow. The cold weather started in October, just before the rebellion began, and it either killed or almost killed thousands of half-naked Protestants as they tried to flee.76 In County Tyrone, in the north, Reverend John Kerdiff was ‘stript of al my clothes and left stark naked’, and was then compelled by the local Catholics, ‘without any thing to cover my lower parts’ to ‘travell about two miles in the frost and snow’. In the Midland, Dorcas Iremonger ‘and her 2 chyldren were by the rebells stript of all their clothes’ who then ‘exposed her to great and unwonted cold’: she ‘and 220 poore English more were inforced to lye a whole night almost stark naked on the snow upon a rock soe as two of her children dyed since of the cold’. In the southwest, Gilbert Johnstone, an innkeeper from Tipperary, was one of ‘fortie more yong and ould in one company with him being all stripped’ by the local Catholics, and ‘in one flock starke naked driven to one of
the gates of the said Cittie’ where he was stabbed and ‘left for dead amonge the rest of the corpses’. He ‘layed from foure of the clocke in the forenoone till foure in the afternoone dureing which time (being frostie weather) this deponents body (after he came to himself) was soe frozen and fast to the ground with his owne blood and the bloode of those that were killed closeby with him that the deponent had much to doe to loose himselfe from the ground’.77

  The surviving accounts of those affected by the uprising record more deaths from ‘snow and frost’ and ‘extreme cold’ than directly from violence, indicating that the Little Ice Age at least doubled – and may have tripled – the number of Protestants who met an unnatural death in autumn 1641.78 The most harrowing and heart-wrenching (and for English readers, the most inflammatory) accounts involved the suffering of women and children. A Protestant sailor recorded how, shortly after the uprising began, he and ‘his wife and five smalle children’ were ‘stript of all their clothes’ by their Catholic neighbours. That night, ‘flying away for safftie naked in the frost, one poore daughter of his, seeing him and her mother greeve for their generall misery, in way of comforting said she was not cold, nor would crye’, but immediately afterwards ‘she died by that cold and want. And the first night this deponent and his wife, creepeing for shelter into a poor [shack], were glad to ly upon their children, to keep in them heate and save them alive.‘79

  A second factor that increased the death toll was more predictable: sectarian passion. On the one hand, some of the Catholic clergy, especially in Ulster, presented the rising as a Crusade, a chance to regain Ireland for the True Faith, and encouraged Catholic gangs to round up Protestant settlers (Scots as well as English) and either stab them to death, burn them alive in their houses, or drive them into icy water where they perished. As soon as they could, the Protestants responded in kind, ordering the troops ‘sent into the enemies [Catholic] quarters to spare neither man, woman nor child’.80

  How many died in the violence? Few paused to count the corpses at the time, and some who did found the task overwhelming. When Anthony Stephens, a farm hand from Roscommon who became a soldier, gave his impressions five years later, he admitted that ‘as to murthers and cruelties comitted by the rebellious Irish upon and against the persons and estates of the Brittish in those parts, they were soe many in number, and soe fowle and wicked in nature that this deponent is not able to expresse them’. His most vivid memory was seeing about 140 people at Coleraine buried ‘in one deepe holle or pitt, and layd soe thick and closse together as he may well compare it to the makeing or packing up of herrings’ – a peculiarly vivid and disturbing image. In all, Stephens was ‘perswaded there died noe fewer within three months after the begining of the Rebellion within the said towne of Colraine then seven or eight thowsand of the Brittish nation’.81

  Although this account outraged the many British Protestants who read it, Stephens's claim was impossible – Coleraine, a small town, could not have sheltered so many people – but it is hard to be more precise. After a diligent study of the surviving records, one historian recently estimated that 4,000 Protestants in Ireland were massacred, while a further 8,000 succumbed to hunger and cold; but another, after equally diligent study, has argued that no more than ‘ten thousand men, women and children, Catholic and Protestant’ perished ‘through direct violence, exposure and privation’. What mattered at the time, however, were the estimates that circulated (like that of Anthony Stephens), all of which (like his) put the total of victims far higher. The figure that received the widest currency in Britain at the time (and for many decades afterwards) was provided by the Reverend Robert Maxwell, Archdeacon of Down, that the Catholics had massacred 154,000 English and Scottish settlers in Ulster alone. This absurdly exaggerated figure (there were not 154,000 Protestants, dead or alive, in the whole of Ireland), coupled with the horrifying individual examples, explains why the survivors and their families, friends and co-religionists found such a sympathetic audience when they called for immediate revenge against the Irish rebels.82

  A King without a Capital

  News of the Irish rebellion quickly spread around Charles's composite monarchy. The king himself, still in Edinburgh, remained curiously – to some, suspiciously – unmoved. Upon hearing news of the massacre, he went out to play a round of golf; and he later scribbled on a message from one of his ministers, ‘I hope this ill newes of Ireland may hinder some of theas follies in England’. In Ireland, many openly claimed his support. O'Neill and other Ulster rebels brandished ‘a parchment or paper with a great seal affixed which he affirmed to be a warrant from the King's Majestie for what he did’, and it convinced even many Protestants that Charles supported the Catholics and may even have sanctioned their rebellion.83

  The English Parliament, which received the first news just after returning from its summer recess, saw the massacres as clear justification for their fears of a general Catholic uprising against them and lost no time in organizing countermeasures. It resolved to ‘make use of the friendship and assistance of Scotland’ in restoring Protestant control in Ireland, and solicited loans from leading Londoners to raise and arm troops for an immediate counter-attack. But who would control these soldiers? John Pym, now so prominent in parliamentary business that he was known as ‘King Pym’, feared that Charles might use any troops raised for Ireland against his English opponents, and so compiled a Remonstrance with 204 individual points, asserting that without redress of outstanding grievances ‘we cannot give His Majesty such supplies for support of his own estate, nor such assistance to the Protestant party beyond the sea [in Ireland], as is desired’. The 204 points included not only the demands for religious uniformity made by the Scots but also many constitutional novelties based on Charles's concessions to the Scots, such as the requirement he appoint only officials approved by Parliament.84

  Like the Petition of Right in 1628 (page 330 above), the Remonstrance of 1641 situated individual acts of ‘misgovernment’ by Charles since his accession within the overall framework of a Catholic conspiracy to subvert the ‘fundamental laws’ and religion of England and Ireland. Not all MPs accepted this – ‘I did not dream that we should remonstrate downward, tell stories to the people, and talk of the king as of a third person’, as one MP put it – and after 14 hours of bitter debate, it passed the Commons by only 159 votes to 148. Nevertheless, Pym made sure that copies were available for purchase the following day, 24 November 1641. On the 25th Charles entered London, escorted by over 1,000 soldiers from the recently disbanded northern army.85

  For the next six weeks ‘popular tumults’ rocked the capital. Gangs of unemployed young men roamed the streets of London shouting ‘Down with the bishops, hang up the popish lords’. The king responded provocatively: he ordered the Lord Mayor to ‘kill and slay such of them as shall persist in their tumultuous and seditious ways and disorders'; he commanded his courtiers to start wearing swords; and he built a barracks just outside Whitehall Palace to accommodate the soldiers he had brought with him from Yorkshire. Clashes between anti-royalist gangs and Charles's guards steadily increased until, following the worst frosts in living memory, early in January 1642 some 200 Londoners armed with staves and swords marched through the cold to Whitehall shouting anti-Catholic slogans. One threw a ‘clot of ice’ at the soldiers guarding the palace gates, who promptly gave chase and injured several civilians.86

  On 3 January 1642 the Commons asked the London magistrates to call out the city militia (its ‘Trained Bands’) to protect them, but Charles forbade this move. Instead he presented to the House of Lords articles of impeachment against one peer and five MPs, ordered his agents to seal and search the residences of the ‘five members’, and sent a messenger to the House of Commons to demand their immediate arrest. The king's printer published and distributed the articles of impeachment against them. Parliament responded by ordering the unsealing of the residences; refusing to deliver the five; and calling for the printer of the ‘scandalous publicat
ion’ to be punished.

  This triple slap in the royal face, combined with unseasonable floods that prevented about 200 MPs from returning to the capital after the Christmas recess, encouraged Charles to undertake a coup d'état. According to one source, it was his wife Henrietta Maria who triggered this disastrous course of action: ‘Go, you coward,’ she allegedly yelled at him, ‘and pull those rogues out by the ears, or never see my face more’. Unfortunately for her plan, one of the queen's confidantes, Lucy, countess of Carlisle, overheard this exchange and sent ‘timely notice’ of Charles's plans to the House of Commons. The heavy rains had turned the streets of London into a quagmire, so that on the afternoon of 4 January Lady Carlisle's messenger got from Whitehall to Westminster faster than Charles and his 500 soldiers. Even so, as one of the five members later recalled, ‘the king came immediately in, and was in the House, before we got to the water’ (the Thames), where they found a boat to take them to safety in the City of London.87 As his soldiers ostentatiously brandished their weapons at the door to the Commons chamber, Charles entered and ‘commanded the Speaker to come out of his chair, and sat down in it himself, asking divers times whether these traitors were there’. When no one replied, he carefully scrutinized the faces in the chamber before uttering his most famous words, ‘All my birds are flown'; after which he rose and returned empty-handed to Whitehall.88 The next day, 5 January, having learned that his ‘birds’ had alighted in the City, Charles led his swordsmen on another hunt but, again, he failed to find them and returned empty-handed.

  Charles's flagrant breach of parliamentary privilege caused the Commons to cease their deliberations, and as he returned through the streets to Whitehall, the king found that the shopkeepers had pulled down their shutters and stood menacingly at their doors bearing arms. Worse, ‘the rude multitude followed him, crying again “Privileges of Parliament! Privileges of Parliament!”’ and clutching the Protestation. Charles experienced ‘the worst day in London’, according to one eyewitness, ‘that ever he had’.89