by Simon Schama
What Hamilton had witnessed since arriving in Scotland was the first revolutionary upheaval of seventeenth-century Britain. Even the organizers of the Prayer Book riots had been taken aback at the force and overwhelming popularity of the protests. Town officers did nothing about apprehending the rioters, other than briefly detaining a few of the serving women and apprentices who had made the loudest noise. But through the winter of 1637–8, the moment was seized to mobilize a great petitioning movement against the bishops, which caught up ministers, nobles, lairds and townsmen in its crusading fervour. A dissident group on the royal council in Scotland produced a ‘Supplication’ to the king, urging him to abandon the Laudian Church and replace it with a godly Presbyterian order. Charles’s response was to assume that only some sort of foreign, probably French, influence could explain this temerity, to order the council out of the continuously riotous Edinburgh and to threaten to treat as traitors those who persisted in their opposition.
Instead of cowing the resistance, this response turned it into a revolution. On 28 February 1638 a ‘National Covenant’ was signed in a solemn, four-hour ceremony at Greyfriars Church, Edinburgh, full of prayers, psalms and sermons exhorting the godly to be the new Israel. Later that day it was exhibited at the Tailors’ Hall on Cowgate, where it was signed by ministers and representatives from the towns. The next day the common people, including a substantial number of women, added their signatures, and copies were made to be sent throughout Scotland. Although the covenant at first sight seems to be written in the language of conservatism, claiming to protect the king’s peace, it had been drafted in part by the uncompromising Calvinist lawyer Archibald Johnston. Johnston was the kind of dyspeptic, self-mortifying zealot who lay awake at night, tortured by the possibility that he might have one grain of impurity too many to qualify for the Elect, and who, on getting into bed with his teenage wife Jean, immediately assured God (out loud) that he preferred His face to hers. For Johnston, the covenant was ‘the glorious marriage day of the kingdom with God’, and he, like Samuel Rutherford, had no hesitation in assuming that kings could be lawfully called to account and if necessary removed if ever they should violate that marriage bed.
For countless thousands of Scots, signing the covenant was just an extension of the vows they took ‘banding’ them with God in the Kirk, but the document itself rapidly assumed the status of a kind of patriotic scripture, a way of determining who was truly Christian and who not, who was a true Scot and who not. Belatedly, Hamilton attempted to organize a ‘King’s Covenant’ as a moderate riposte, and he managed to secure some 28,000 signatures, proof that, as in so many other crucial turning points in Scotland’s history, the country was divided rather than united in its response. But it seems extremely unlikely that Charles himself ever thought of the ‘King’s Covenant’ as anything more than a tactical manoeuvre while he mobilized enough force to bring the Scots to heel. And by late 1638, most of Scotland was already borne aloft in the whirlwind. A righteously intoxicated general assembly in Glasgow, where Johnston served as chief clerk, went the whole distance, effectively severing all connections between the English government and the Scottish Church: it abolished bishops and the rest of the Laudian establishment. Then the Scottish parliament, which first met in August 1639 and reconvened without royal permission in June 1640, introduced three-yearly parliaments, whether or not they were called by the king.
None of the Covenanters could have been under much illusion about what Charles I’s response to the Glasgow assembly would be. Their own view was that they threatened nothing, presumed no interference in the affairs of England (although, as part of the international Calvinist defence against the Counter-Reformation, they could not but hope that they might set an example for Presbyterians south of the border). If, on the other hand, the king of England came in arms to undo their godly Reformation, they would, of course, defend it with their lives. And proper precautionary measures were quickly taken through the winter and spring of 1638–9 to see to this defence. The veteran soldier of the religious wars in Europe, General Alexander Leslie, was made commander of their forces; money was borrowed from the banker William Dick to buy munitions and powder from the Dutch; castles and strongholds were transferred from royal to Covenanter authority; and the local networks that had produced signatures for the petitions and covenant – the towns and villages of Scotland – were now mined to produce money and men. Charles and Laud had really managed something quite unique: they had contrived to unite two parties, the Kirk and the lords, who were more naturally accustomed to quarrelling. And two sets of loyalties, the Church and the clan, could be used to produce a godly army. By the spring of 1639 that army numbered at least 25,000 and perhaps as many as 30,000 men.
On the other side of the border it proved much harder to get an army together, let alone a force that could be relied on to strike terror into the hearts of the Scots (or at least persuade them to abandon the Covenant). Sir Edmund Verney, who by now was much more the country gentleman than the courtier, enjoyed nothing more than to tend his estate at Claydon in Buckinghamshire, and to keep company with his wife Mary and their rapidly expanding family. But he was still officially Knight Marshal, a member of the Privy Chamber, and therefore duty bound, however reluctantly, to answer the royal summons to attend the king at York, ‘as a cuirassier in russett armes, with guilded studds or nayles, and befittingly horsed’, despite his deep misgivings about the wisdom and propriety of the king’s and Laud’s policies. His eldest son, Ralph, was even less happy about his father (who was, in any case, in poor health) risking his life to enforce contentious doctrines of which he himself rather disapproved and which were best left to the divines to thrash out. Ralph could hardly have been reassured by his father making his will before leaving Claydon, nor by letters, which his father worried might be opened before reaching him, describing military disaster in the making: ‘Our Army is butt weake; our Purce is butt weaker; and if wee fight with thes foarces and early in the yeare wee shall have our throats cutt.’ The learned Thomas Howard, Earl Marshal Arundel, seemed to be better equipped to collect art and antiquities than to lead an army, for he led the king on to fight without warning him of the dire condition of the troops. ‘I dare saye ther was never soe Raw, soe unskilfull and soe unwilling an Army brought to fight,’ wrote Sir Edmund witheringly of Arundel.
My lord marshall himselfe will, I dare saye, bee safe, and then he cares not what becomes of the rest; trewly here are manny brave Gentlemen that for poynt of honor must runn such a hazard as trewly would greeve any heart but his that does it purposely to ruine them. For my owne parte I have lived till paine and trouble has made mee weary to doe soe; and the woarst that can come shall not bee unwellcome to mee; but it is a pitty to see what men are like to be slaughterd here unless it shall pleas god to putt it in the king’s Hearte to increase his Army or staye till thes may knowe what they doe; for as yett they are like to kill theyr fellows as the enemye.
Verney was not exaggerating. The machinery of mustering the trained bands in the Midlands and northern counties to make up the English army was showing signs of imminent breakdown. It was proving difficult, and in some cases impossible, to raise the ship money that had been extended into the inland counties. County commissioners for troops and sheriffs for ship money were disappearing or protesting the impossibility of delivering funds. The men themselves – trained bands of literate artisans, such as clothiers – often failed to show up at the mustering places, and replacements had to be rounded up from wherever the impressment officers could find them. They, too, failed to understand why they were being called on to fight this ‘bishops’ war’. The trained bands were supposed to be called out strictly in defence of the realm against invasion, and it was known, not least from the propaganda the Covenanters were already circulating south of the border, that the Scots had explicitly disavowed any such aim. The reluctance of the trained bands was shared by many of their social superiors and officers. The king sensed this strained lo
yalty but only made matters worse by demanding of his officers an oath of loyalty, which the Puritan nobles, Viscount Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke (of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire respectively), point blank refused. The dissident nobles were immediately imprisoned in York for their shocking rejection of the royal command, thus covering themselves with glory among the godly. As for the rank and file, it was, as Sir Edmund Verney noted, a surly, underpaid (in many cases unpaid), poorly armed, wretchedly led force that trudged north from York towards the border.
At Kelso, just inside Scottish territory, all of Verney’s pessimism seemed borne out. A small force of cavalry, led by the Earl of Holland and including Sir Edmund himself, was confronted by what seemed at first a manageably modest Scots army. But as Holland got his men into battle order the Scots army seemed to grow before their eyes, pikemen and dragoons and horse becoming more and more numerous until it was appallingly obvious that any kind of engagement would end in a calamitous rout. Hastily, Holland withdrew his troops to camp where they (necessarily) exaggerated the size of the waiting enemy. Charles, whose own mood had gone from supercilious complacency to grim irritation at the news of discontent and desertion, now thought better of an impetuous campaign. The Scots’ request to clarify their own position (for they did not at any time consider themselves rebels) was accepted, and a meeting of delegations organized at Berwick-on-Tweed in June 1639. Charles himself appeared at this meeting, where he had his first chance to encounter the full, glaring Calvinist hostility of Archibald Johnston. As usual, the king’s idea of diplomacy was to chide the Scots for their ‘pretended’ assembly and to concede nothing, except that the issues might be aired and, it was hoped, resolved by the calling of a Scottish parliament rather than on the field of battle. Pending that resolution, both armies were to be disbanded. Johnston suspected that this was merely a ploy on the part of the king to play for time, and he had the bad manners to say so, more or less to his face. But suspicious or not, a ‘Pacification’ was duly signed. The ink was hardly dry before Johnston’s scepticism was vindicated as Charles made it known that he would expect a new general assembly to be called that would nullify all the reforms of Glasgow.
In Scotland in July that year there were near-riots when the terms of the Pacification became known, since it was felt not unreasonably that an opportunity to defeat the king had been frittered away and that the Scots were now locked into a truce, pending the onset of a round of more serious warfare. And perhaps, for a time, Charles may have been smilingly deluded, imagining that he had got the better of the Scots tactically and would shortly get the better of them militarily, too. For he was now listening to the counsellor he thought would without question bring him victory, vindication and retribution against the Covenanters: Thomas Wentworth, his Lord Deputy in Ireland. Wentworth had been a kind of miracle for the king. From being one of his most aggressive critics in parliament, he had become the most unflagging and uncompromising upholder of the absolutism of the Crown. Psychologically, Charles must have felt that the flinty, saturnine Wentworth was truly one of his own: a man who understood that the destiny of the Crown was to apply the balm of royal adjudication to nations hurting from confessional wounds. Except that the Wentworth medicine invariably had a nasty sting to it. Those who begged to differ with the Lord Deputy found themselves smartly disadvantaged: their land title investigated, their property taken, themselves in prison. But the policy of ‘thorough’ had kept Ireland quiet, and that in itself was a recommendation for his understanding of the obscure and irate war of the sects – Old English Catholics, Ulster Presbyterians, Gaelic Irish. As far as Charles could see, Wentworth had kept the royal ship of state sailing high above the fray like some celestial galleon in a court masque. So when he gave the king advice about the Scottish crisis, Charles paid attention. Call a parliament, Wentworth advised. Without it, your army will never be well supplied nor the country truly disposed to fight the war. And fear not. Parliaments, however truculent they might seem, are manageable, especially when the defence of the realm can be legitimately invoked. To show the king what could be done, in March 1640 Wentworth called an Irish parliament at Dublin, which behaved like a lamb, the Old English voting with enough New English to produce solid majorities and fat little subsidies for the Crown. Strategy two was admittedly a little trickier. Wentworth was proposing to use an Irish army to deal with the Scottish rebellion. The only problem was how disciplined troops in numbers sufficient to make any impact on the Scottish war could be expeditiously raised. Needless to say, they could hardly be drawn from the New English and Scottish Presbyterians of the Ulster plantation, whose sympathies were all with the Covenant.
A solution was at Charles’s right hand in the shape of Randal Macdonnell, the Marquis of Antrim. He was a unique figure in northern Ireland, a native Irish Catholic, but one who had profited from Wentworth’s bargain, by which his own fortunes were expanded to the degree to which he made room for planters on his enormous estates. At the same time, Antrim had become a familiar, if not entirely trusted, figure in the inner circles of Charles’s court. So when he offered to raise his own native Irish army to be put at the king’s disposal Charles was tempted to take the proposal very seriously, even though Wentworth had deep misgivings about what he considered to be a low, barbarian Catholic force, ‘with as many “Os” and “Macs” as would startle a whole council board’, claiming to do the work of the king. Should the gamble not pay off, he had an all too clear vision of how the idea of a semi-private Catholic army deployed against the godly Covenanters would play in England!
From the beginning then, even Wentworth could see that the two arms of the king’s strategy – a parliament and a native, predominantly Catholic-Irish army – might turn out to be in glaring contradiction to each other. But the king was not thinking logically. In fact, he was not thinking at all, just dreaming dreams of vindication and victory: the Grand Harmonization of Britannia virtually within reach.
Step one was the calling of a parliament in April 1640. Encouraged by Wentworth and Laud, Charles was confident that the interrupted but unresolved crisis with Scotland would ensure an assembly that, as in Ireland, would discuss only the matters proposed by the king and, after such discussion, produce adequate supplies for his armies. He also seems to have felt that his eleven years of personal rule had actually made this docility more, rather than less, likely, since the country had been exposed to the wisdom, energy, benevolence and disinterested justice of his sovereignty. And since he believed that the Covenanters had been in touch with the king of France, all he would have to do would be to flourish evidence of this revival of the notorious ‘auld alliance’ and the country would rise to the defence of the realm. Shades of the Plantagenets and the Bruces (albeit with the odd outcome of the Stuarts fighting against, rather than for, the independence of Scotland)!
It must have come as an unpleasant shock, then, when this new parliament, far from putting old, imagined grievances aside, immediately resurrected them. Virtually the first order of the day was their summoning of the records of the proceedings against Sir John Eliot, whose death in the Tower of London had not been forgotten but had been religiously remembered as a martyrdom suffered for the people’s liberty. However extreme, this was precisely the way in which the fate of Eliot and a whole pantheon of victims of Laud’s Court of High Commission and of Star Chamber appeared in the newsletters and ‘separates’ that were distributed around the provinces. For the newsmongers Eliot made wonderful copy, and there was a steady supply of victims and heroes to join him, men whose stories were celebrated in the newsletters as chapters in a scripture of godly liberty. Some of them like the obdurate, steely lawyer, William Prynne, had done everything they could to court persecution. Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix had been a scathing attack on the court and in particular on the masques in which the king and queen liked to appear as dancers. More dangerously, in the course of the polemic Prynne had asserted a doctrine of resistance (shared by both ultra-Catholic and Calvinist theorists)
by which a prince plainly resolved to violate God’s laws might be set aside. For his sedition Prynne was sentenced in 1634 to have his ears sliced off, pay a fine of £5000 and spend the rest of his life in the Tower of London. In London and in strongly Puritan communities like Dorchester the irascible, unstoppable Prynne became an immediate saint, his epistle broadcast through the network of the godly from Ulster to Scotland. In 1637 the government blunderingly reinforced and perpetuated his popularity by dragging Prynne out of the Tower to stand in the pillory along with Dr Henry Burton – the Puritan rector of St Matthew, Friday Street, London – who had preached sermons on a popish plot and the evils of the Church, and John Bastwick, another active sympathizer, who likewise refused to remain silent. Both the new malefactors had their ears cut off – no deterrent to Burton who defiantly continued to preach while profusely bleeding, or so the Puritan Apocrypha had it.
Nehemiah Wallington, a devout wood-turner living in the parish of St Andrew’s Hubbard, Eastcheap, believed every word of the gospel according to Prynne and began a 2000-page account of the sins and events of his times, including an encomium to the earless martyrs, Burton and Bastwick. In Wallington’s tight little universe nothing could possibly happen without some sort of providential meaning. A boating accident was God’s punishment for the profanation of the Sabbath; a storm that broke the stained-glass windows of a church His judgement on gaudy idolatry. Prynne, Burton and Bastwick had obviously been called to preach against the uncleanness of the times, and their torments were a sign that great days of reckoning were nigh. In this fevered world miracles, portents and signs abounded. A conversation set down in Wallington’s book suggests just how intensely he and his fellow Puritan artisans felt the coming of the battle between the children of God and the legions of Antichrist. No sooner had one of these heretics finished denouncing the three as ‘base schismatical jacks’ who deserved hanging for troubling the kingdom, than he suddenly fell into a terrible sweat with blood pouring from his ears. Wallington’s sense that Prynne, Burton and Bastwick were fighting the good fight, his fight, was brought home all too directly when he was named, along with the three others, in a charge of seditious libel and ordered to answer for it before the court of Star Chamber in 1639. But his own ears survived the ordeal, and he lived to join the triumphal celebrations in the streets of London that greeted the liberation of Bastwick, ordered by parliament at the end of 1640.
