A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  What followed accelerated the likelihood, if not the certainty, of armed conflict. Since the king continued to refuse to sign the Militia Bill, its provisions were enacted unilaterally as an ordinance, transferring to parliament the right to commandeer men and munitions, and enabling it to appoint lord-lieutenants and deputy lieutenants in the counties to see to the execution of the orders. From his transplanted court at York the king countered by declaring anyone obeying those illegitimate officers to be guilty of treason. Invoking an ancient Lancastrian form of feudal mobilization, he then appointed his own ‘Commissions of Array’ in each shire to supply men to defend the Crown.

  In its declaration to the king parliament had, for the first time, formally accused him of conspiring to wage ‘civil war’ against his own subjects, The words were out. They could not be unsaid. But even Puritan parliamentarians, like Bulstrode Whitelocke, were momentarily unnerved that actual bloodshed now seemed so near. The country, he told parliament, had ‘insensibly slid into this beginning of a Civil War by one unexpected Accident after another, as Waves of the Sea, which have brought us thus far: And we scarce know how, but from Paper Combats, by Declarations, Remonstrances, Protestations, Votes, Messages, Answers and Replies: We are now come to the question of raising of Forces. ‘There was one last chance at settlement, when parliament delivered its ‘Nineteen Propositions’ to the king at York. But they were more a clarification of its own ideas on the future of England’s government than any kind of negotiating position, since they included things they knew the king could not possibly concede, like parliamentary control over the education and marriage of his children, the vigorous prosecution of all Catholics (which would include his wife) and the transfer of all ports, forts and castles to their officers. The fact was that parliament, along with Pym, now simply believed that Charles, together with the Irish, was committed to an English Counter-Reformation. So until he was made harmless they would put the monarchy out of commission – forcing it to exercise its powers through committees – creating, in effect, a parliamentary regency, as if he had become insane.

  With that last hope gone, the months ahead were dominated by a scramble to secure martial assets – plate, money, guns, powder, horses and hay – so as to be best placed when hostilities actually began. At the same time attempts were made to sway the undecided. The showers of propaganda sheets now became downpours. The royal printing press had been prudently taken to York so that the work of influencing the north could proceed apace. A battle of the Mercuries took place with the parliamentary newspaper, the Mercurius Civicus, answered and satirized by the royalist Mercurius Aulicus. And beneath the anathemas and the requisitioning something profoundly sad was happening: the Balkanization of England, not in the sense of its fracturing into coherent, warring regions (for there were virtually none), but in the collapse of communities and institutions – parishes and counties – which, despite differing sentiments and religious beliefs, had none the less managed to contain those conflicts in the interests of local peace and justice. Doubtless there must have been many places where the choice of allegiance was unthinking or even involuntary. Men and women followed habit, prejudice, their landlord, their preacher. And there were certainly those like Robert and Brilliana Harley on the one side and Viscount Scudamore on the other for whom the choice was pretty much a foregone conclusion. Just what they did about it, of course, was another matter. (Surprisingly, Scudamore showed himself to be a rather tepid royalist when the time came for action.) And there must have been many more, like poor Thomas Knyvett, a Norfolk landowner, whose purposefulness was not at all equal to his predicament. ‘O sweete hart,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘I am nowe in a greate strayght what to doe.’ Walking in Westminster he had run into Sir John Potts, who had presented him with his commission from the Earl of Warwick to raise a company for parliament. ‘I was surpris’d what to doe, whether to take or refuse. ’Twas no place to dispute, so I tooke it and desierd som’ time to Advise upon it. I had not receiv’d this many howers, but I met with a declaration point Blanck against it by the King.’ Richard Atkyns, then twenty-seven years old and living in strongly parliamentary Gloucester, believed that no one who had heard the trial of Strafford and ‘weighed the concessions of the King’ could be against him, but that ‘fears, and jealousies, had so generally possessed the kingdom, that a man could hardly travel through any market town, but he should be asked whether he were for the King, or parliament’.

  What is truly extraordinary about the spring and summer of 1642 is the wealth of evidence testifying to the agonies of allegiance, the painful rigour with which many thoughtful souls pondered the weightiest question of their lives and how earnestly and honestly they endeavoured to justify their decisions to their friends, their family and themselves. Different men and women reached their point of no return at different moments in the great crisis, which had been gathering head since the opening of the Long Parliament. Cornwall – which is often thought of, not altogether wrongly, as an especially cohesive community – was shattered right down the middle. For the two leading figures among the Cornish Members of Parliament, who had travelled to London optimistically expectant of peaceful reform, it had been their responses to Strafford’s attainder that had separated them. Sir Bevil Grenville was the grandson of the pirate-patriot sea captain Richard Grenville, but after his education at Exeter College, Oxford, he became the very paragon of a learned, energetic country gentleman, devoted to his wife, children and land (in that order), an experimenter with new techniques for tin smelting, a breeder of Barbary stallions and a life-long enthusiast of classical history, philosophy and poetry. In 1626 he had been among the fiercest Cornish critics of the forced loan, had turned out his freeholders on behalf of Sir John Eliot and William Coryton and had been devastated by Eliot’s death in the Tower. But in 1641 he was appalled at the attainder of Strafford, seeing it as the kind of naked manipulation of justice he had attacked when it was practised by the court. Grenville was one of eight MPs from Cornwall (including Coryton) who voted ‘nay’ and who tried to persuade Sir Alexander Carew to follow their example. ‘Pray, Sir,’ wrote Grenville to Carew, ‘let it not be said that any member of our county should have a hand in this ominous business and therefore pray give your vote against the Bill.’ Carew’s reply was unclouded by equivocation (and would come to haunt him in the years that followed before his execution in 1644): ‘If I were sure to be the next man on the scaffold with the same axe, I would give my consent to the passing of it.’ Others in Cornwall who had long been friends, and had lived in mutual amity and respect, now divided: Sir Francis Godolphin of Godolphin (and his son, the poet Sidney) for the king; Sir Francis Godolphin of Trevneague for parliament.

  Although none of Lord Falkland’s Great Tew friends had any trouble with the act of attainder (one suspects none of them much liked the bleak, brusque Wentworth), they parted company, first over the attack on the bishops and then again over parliament’s Militia Ordinance. Hyde and Falkland saw the Ordinance as a demonstrably unlawful usurpation of the sovereign’s legitimate prerogative; indeed, a test case of whether the king was to be granted any sort of prerogative at all. But their legalistic friend and MP John Selden truly believed that it had been the king who had acted illegitimately, not being entitled to impress any of his subjects except when the realm was plainly threatened by foreign invasion. Selden thus remained loyal to parliament. Conversely, there were those like Lord Montagu, who were at pains to be understood as supporting the most parliamentary monarchy there could possibly be, short of conferring on the institution some sort of exclusive and transcendent sovereignty. To his son William, Montagu wrote that:

  The civil wars, 1640–51.

  It is most sure he is not of a true English spirit that will not shed life and all that he hath for the maintenance and preservation of parliaments consisting of the King, Lords and Commons. But to have the ordinance bind all the subjects to England without the consent of the King is of most dangerous consequence and a v
iolation of all the privileges of parliament and the common liberty of the subject; therefore I would to God that the Lords and Commons would be pleased not to stand upon that. My heart, hand and life shall stand for parliaments but for no ordinance only by Lords and Commons.

  For Sir Edmund Verney the choice was simpler, yet so very much harder. For he found himself governed by an unforgiving and unequivocal obligation of duty, even while his moral sense and his intellect told him the cause was worthless. Edward Hyde discovered his friend Verney’s melancholy predicament at York, when he asked him to put on a face of public cheerfulness, the better to raise the spirits of the fearful royalist soldiers. Verney replied smilingly to Hyde that:

  I will willingly join with you the best I can but I shall act it very scurvily . . . you have satisfaction in your conscience that you are in the right; that the King ought not to grant what is required of him and so you do your duty and your business together. But for my part, I do not like the quarrel, and do heartily wish that the King would yield and consent to what they desire; so that my conscience is only concerned in honour and gratitude to follow my master. I have eaten his bread, and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him; and choose rather to lose my life (which I am sure I shall do) to preserve and defend those things which are against my conscience to preserve and defend.

  The Verneys, who had been the model of a companionable, loving gentry household, were now torn apart. Ralph, who had sat next to his father in the parliaments of 1640, had not just expressed his support for their cause but had taken the solemn oath of loyalty required of all members after the passing of the Militia Ordinance. Oaths were no light matter in the seventeenth century, especially to a Puritan. The act sharply separated him not just from his father but also from his younger brother, Edmund, who could not understand Ralph’s failure to perceive his duty to his king as well as to his father. They were still, somehow, a family. In the early summer the steward at Claydon was getting letters from Sir Edmund at York asking him to prepare the defence of the house with carbines, powder and shot, ‘for I feare a time maye come when Roags maye looke for booty in such houses; therefore bee not unprovided; but saye noething of it, for that maye invite more to mischeefe that thinek not of it yet . . . gett in all such monnys as are owing you with all speede, for wee shall certainly have a great warr. Have a care of harvest, and God send uss well to receave the blessing of and returne thancks for it. I can saye no more – Your loving master.’ But the steward was also getting letters from Ralph in London asking him to search for his father’s best pistols and carbines to be sent on to his father at York! For a time in the late spring of 1642, when tentative feelers were being put out between king and parliament, the Verneys and their friends clung to the hope that there might yet be peace. But on 1 June both houses of parliament passed the Nineteen Propositions for the future of England.

  Not surprisingly, hopes of accommodation dwindled away to nothing. By late August it seemed certain that the Verneys, father and eldest son, would end up as enemies. Eleanor, Lady Sussex, an old friend of the family, parliamentarian by sympathy and conviction, but socially very much in both worlds, wrote to Ralph on 9 September that she had had a letter from his father. ‘It was a very sade one and his worde was this of you: “Madam he hath ever lane near my hart and truly he is ther still”, that he hade many afflictyon uppon him, and that you hade usede him unkandly.’ Sir Edmund had, she said, become ‘passynate, and much trublede I belive that you declarede yourselfe for the parlyment: a littil time will digest all I am confident’. And she asked Ralph in return to humour his father as much as he could: ‘lett me intrete you as a frende that loves you most hartily, not to right passynatly to your father, but ovour com him with kandnes; good man I see he is infinitely malincoly, for many other thinges I belive besides the difference betwixt you.’

  All over England, in the summer of 1642, disengagements and separations, often described as ‘unnatural’, like the prospect of civil war itself, were taking place in communities that for so long had shared customs, territory and beliefs. Very few counties or even towns were so politically homogeneous as to make the decision of allegiance a matter of course or obvious self-interest. Essex was overwhelmingly parliamentarian and much of Wales deeply royalist, but even in shires such as Warwickshire, where there were strong partisan presences – like the Grevilles – parts of those counties, in this instance in the north, were far more mixed in their loyalties. And there were a few regions – Cumberland and Westmorland – that tried to be studiously neutral and avoided organizing either parliamentary or royalist musters. The actual event of the musters – and the response they received in county and market towns – was a warning to those on the wrong side of the fence that they should either move to safer territory or prepare to defend their houses and farms as best they could.

  Lady Brilliana Harley was one of those who decided against moving, being unafraid, as she later said, to die in defence of the family estates and godly religion. Her husband, Sir Robert, away in Westminster, very much a moving spirit in the committees of parliament, advised her to stay put: he could not quite believe that much harm could come to her in remote northwest Herefordshire, especially since there were friendly ties between the Harleys and fellow-gentry in the county, even when they parted company on religious beliefs. But in the summer and autumn of 1642 it quickly became plain to Brilliana that her household was an island of parliamentary puritanism in an ocean of royalism and that the old, dependable bonds of gentility might not survive the coming conflict. She was already the butt of popular abuse, some of it genuinely menacing. At Ludlow, she wrote to their son Edward, she had heard that a maypole had been set up ‘and a thinge like a head upon it . . . and gathered a greate many about it, and shot at it in derision of roundheads’. And their old friend Sir William Croft had made it no secret that, while in private he still respected Lady Brilliana, this could have no effect whatsoever on his public conduct as a loyal servant of the king. Before long Brilliana and her household were enduring abuse while in the grounds of Brampton Bryan, from ‘exceeding rude’ country people on their way to market at Ludlow who shouted from the roadway that they wished ‘all the Puritans and roundheads at Brampton hanged’. When, later that year, royalist soldiers took two of her servants away to prison, she asked Viscount Scudamore to intercede, appealing, anachronistically, to ‘the many bonds by which most of the gentlemen in this country are tied to Sir Robert Harley, that of blood and some with alliance and all with his long professed and real friendship and for myself that of common courtesy, as to a stranger brought into their country, I know not how all those I believed to be so good should break all these obligations’. But, little by little, Brampton Bryan was becoming a godly stockade, with frightened preachers and schoolmasters and Puritan friends coming to the house for shelter. How long it would remain safe was anyone’s guess, but with royalism strong not only in Herefordshire but also in Shropshire to the north and in Wales to the south and west, Brilliana must have put in extra prayer-time for the help of the Almighty.

  In the third week of August 1642 Charles I decided to raise his standard. He was, as yet, in no position to do more than wage the heraldic equivalent of war rather than the real thing. Far fewer counties had produced men, money and plate for him than for parliament. The navy had come out for parliament, and the king had suffered the indignity of being locked out of Hull by its governor, Sir John Hotham. An attempt by Lord Strange to seize an arms depot in the little Lancashire town of Manchester had ended with his troop of horse being chased out of the town by indignant, armed fustian weavers. But the king had been promised troops and horse in thousands from Wales and Shrewsbury, and he evidently felt confident that the quality of his officers and the rapid training that his professional soldiers, not least the young Prince Rupert, were giving the cavalry would prevail over the superior numbers of the parliamentary army, commanded by the dour veteran of the Dutch wars, the Earl of Essex
– the first husband of the notorious Frances Howard. So the standard was to go up, the Rubicon to be crossed, and the man to whom this honour fell was the Knight Marshal, newly appointed standard-bearer, the fifty-two-year-old Sir Edmund Verney. It was a heavy duty, literally, for the thing needed twenty men to get it upright in the field just outside Nottingham castle. ‘Much of the fashion of the City Streamers used at the Lord Mayor’s Show,’ one antiquarian remembered, several flags were mounted on a huge pole, the top one being the king’s personal arms, with a hand pointing towards the crown and beneath it the imperious, optimistic motto ‘Give Caesar His Due’. The flag was paraded around by three troops of horse and 600 infantrymen. Just as the trumpets were about to sound and the herald to read the royal proclamation, Charles suddenly asked for the paper, a quill and some ink and, still on horseback, started to make some last-minute revisions. When he was done and the herald nervously attempted to read the document, corrections and all, the flag went up, along with the army’s hats, high in the air. The standard was carried back to the castle and hoisted to be seen for miles about. But that night a powerful storm got up and the flag was blown down. It was two days before the winds and rain abated enough for it to be raised once more. Those (and there were plenty) in the habit of searching for omens were not encouraged. For Sir Edmund Verney, though, the die was very definitely cast. His charge read ‘that by the grace of God they that would wrest that standard from his hand must first wrest his soul from his body’.