4 No civilian could be subject to martial law.
Charles tried to wriggle out of the agreement in the House of Lords. In the end, however, the war was too pressing, his financial situation too precarious. Desperate to secure the carrot of five new taxes, and to avoid the stick of Buckingham’s impeachment, he agreed to the Petition of Right.22 As soon as he did so, the Commons once again began to debate the favorite’s conduct. The king once again responded by dissolving Parliament to protect his friend.
In fact, there were limits to the king’s ability to protect Buckingham. That summer, while on his way to join the fleet, the duke was assassinated by an unpaid and resentful officer named John Felton (d. 1628). Felton’s knifework horrified the court and he was duly executed. But many ordinary people celebrated his act in bonfires and doggerel verse. This event had two profound effects. First, it served to further alienate Charles from his subjects, and especially from the parliamentary leaders who had, in his view, stirred up resentment toward his friend. Second, it led to the perception that the king would now turn for advice to his new wife, Queen Henrietta Maria. If true, this was alarming, for Henrietta Maria was a Roman Catholic.
The Problem of Religion
The early Stuarts inherited a religious situation in the British Isles that was nothing if not complicated. As we have seen, the Church of England was, officially, Protestant but there was much debate as to precisely what that meant. To Puritans, Protestantism meant continued, perhaps even continuous, reformation. Though persecuted under Elizabeth, most Puritans had remained in the Church, and many Jacobean clergymen, even bishops, embraced Puritan ideas. That is, they believed in predestination, the necessity of Scriptural justification for both doctrine and practice, and a stern “godly” morality. Indeed, their influence was such that, by 1603, these were mainstream theological views within the Church of England. But some Puritans wanted more. They sought to enhance the material circumstances of the chronically poor parish clergy, but disliked hierarchy (represented for some by the power of the bishops), ceremony, and such activities as sports and dancing on the Sabbath. To more conservative churchmen, including King James, these activities were perfectly harmless: as we have seen, in 1618 James issued a compendium of allowable Sunday pleasures called the Book of Sports. Such conservatives, later known as “high” churchmen, embraced hierarchy and ceremony, leading to Puritan charges that they intended to revive Catholicism.
To alarm Puritans even further, there remained a small but dedicated Catholic minority in England numbering perhaps 40,000. These people were caught in a struggle that was both international and internal: though they followed Rome in religion, most were loyal to the Crown in temporal matters and had given Spain no assistance during the war. By 1603 they had, for the most part, given up the political struggle and wished to be left alone to practice their faith quietly. But, as we have seen, contemporaries could not easily separate religious from political loyalty and anti-Catholic feeling had only grown amongst the generality of English men and women. This was due, in part, to the persistent memory of Bloody Mary, the writings of John Foxe, and the more recent memories of Catholic plots and war with Spain. As noted previously, some historians argue that anti-Catholicism (or, really, antipopery as it was usually directed outwards, against the Catholic powers, instead of against one’s neighbor), far more than any positive sense of “Englishness,” helped the English to define themselves as a nation at the end of the sixteenth century. Consequently, the Elizabethan penal laws against Catholic priests and recusant lay people remained on the statute books; however, as the political activities of the Catholic minority seemed to die down in the 1590s, Elizabeth’s government had ceased to enforce them with any regularity, much to the chagrin of radical Puritans.
The situation in the Stuarts’ northern kingdom of Scotland would have been more to their liking. While there remained a Catholic minority in the Highlands, it was relatively poor and isolated from political power. The most powerful religious body in Scotland was the Presbyterian Kirk. Run by its General Assembly, a sort of council of elders, its power was diffused through regional synods down to local, individual congregations. Grudgingly acknowledged by the Stuarts, the Kirk maintained the sort of unadorned liturgy and church decor that Puritans sought for England. While James had reintroduced Scottish bishops, their power and jurisdiction within the Kirk remained weak. In Ireland, by contrast, the native population, spurred on by a Jesuit missionary effort, remained largely Roman Catholic, as did most of their Old English landlords. The Crown had established a Protestant Church of Ireland, but made little effort to proselytize the native population. Attempts to ban Catholic priests, close Catholic schools, and fine absence from Church of Ireland services were left unenforced by Catholic local officials. Instead, after each war or rebellion, both the Catholic Mary and the Protestant Elizabeth had encouraged English, increasingly Protestant, immigrants by granting them the land of dispossessed Irish Papists. James continued this policy after the fall of Tyrone in Catholic Ulster. Irish lands were too poor to attract many English settlers, but they were attractive to Scots, and thousands of Presbyterians emigrated to northern Ireland. By 1625 this group controlled much of Ulster and increasing amounts of land in the rest of the island. In summary, none of the three Stuart kingdoms embraced religious unanimity or a toleration free of resentments. How did the Stuart kings deal with this situation?
King James had been reared a Scots Presbyterian, but he had never taken to that faith. He resented its rejection of hierarchy and the related notion, put forth by his own tutor, George Buchanan, that political power came from the people, who could revoke it from a bad ruler. James found the Church of England, with its Calvinist theology, yet emphasis on hierarchy, ritual, and order, far more to his taste. He tended to see Puritans as English Presbyterians, “brainsick and heady preachers,” self-righteous, dubiously loyal, naturally anti-authoritarian if not outright rebellious. But in 1603 English Puritans, largely ignorant of his views and frustrated by Elizabeth, projected their own reformist impulses onto their new prince. On his way south, they presented him with the Millenary Petition, signed by 1,000 ministers, which asked for the abolition of certain traditions such as the making of the sign of the cross at baptism, greater freedom of discretion in the use of vestments, more sermons, and stricter enforcement of the Sabbath. In response, James, ever one to enjoy intellectual debate, called a conference of conservative and Puritan divines at Hampton Court Palace in 1604. At the conference, James promised moderate reform and a new, authorized translation of the Bible, which appeared in 1611. But he also rejected more radical change and made clear that he was a high churchman at heart by declaring “No bishop, no King.” In James’s eyes, radical Puritan attacks on the ecclesiastical hierarchy (bishops) were tantamount to attacking the civil hierarchy (monarchy). Like Elizabeth, he believed that radical Puritan “reform” logically implied political disorder. After the conclusion of the conference, James underlined the point by authorizing the conservative Archbishop Richard Bancroft (1544–1610) to expel nonconforming clergy from their livings, depriving about 90 men of their congregations. In future, the king would continue to appease moderate Puritans by offering gradual reform and ecclesiastical preferment, leaving radicals isolated. As a result of James’s divide-and-conquer strategy, most Puritans did not leave the Jacobean Church; instead, they gradually came to dominate its hierarchy and remained an important segment of its membership. Tragically, his son would see this not as an achievement but as a problem.
James tried a similar strategy – toleration for loyal moderates, hostility toward extremists – on his English Catholic subjects. Like the Puritans, this group had high hopes for the new king in 1603; and their most fervent members, too, were disappointed by the result. Like Elizabeth, James had no stomach for religious persecution if he could count on political loyalty. Prior to his accession he had promised the Catholic Henry Howard, earl of Northampton (1540–1614), privately, that he would not
“persecute any that will be quiet and give but an outward obedience to the law.”23 The fact that he immediately began to negotiate a peace with Spain was also a good sign. When James insisted that Protestant British merchants and sailors should not be subject to the Inquisition when trading with Spanish possessions, many expected Spain to demand relaxation of the penal laws against English Catholics in return. But the Spanish negotiators of the Treaty of London made no such demand. Worse, in the aftermath of the Hampton Court Conference the king renewed low-level persecution of Catholics in order to appease Puritan critics in Parliament. Their new king had dashed Catholic expectations.
This helps to explain why in 1605 a group of hot-headed Catholic gentlemen, soldiers, and hangers-on made desperate by Spain’s abandonment of their cause, launched the Gunpowder Plot. Their plan was to blow up the king and both houses of parliament when they met in the House of Lords for its State opening on November 5. Remarkably, the plotters simply rented the undercroft below the House of Lords and filled it with barrels of gunpowder. Fortunately, the court was tipped off when one of the conspirators tried to warn a relative, William Parker, Lord Monteagle (1574/5–1622), who, in turn, approached the Privy Council. On the evening of the 4th a search was made and another conspirator, Guy Fawkes (1570–1606), was caught red-handed in the undercroft with the barrels – only hours before the king’s arrival. Here, in the eyes of many English men and women, was manifest proof of Catholic treachery and God’s providential care for the Protestant nation. For years afterward, they would “remember, remember, / the fifth of November” with bonfires and church bells. More immediately, by February 1606, the conspirators were tried and executed. New penal laws prohibited Catholics from living in or near London, practicing law, or holding office. Finally, Catholics were forced to swear an oath acknowledging the king and denouncing the pope’s claim to be able to depose civil rulers.
But James enforced the penal laws only intermittently, usually when he was trying to placate Puritans in the weeks leading up to a parliament. As for the oath, he hoped that moderate Catholics would swear it, leaving extremists without allies. In fact, this worked, more or less. As a result, while Catholics did not secure official toleration or recognition, they were very largely allowed to live and worship in peace under the early Stuarts. Though a total of 19 priests were executed under the old Elizabethan statute, the total number living in England rose from about 300 in 1603 to 750 in 1640; the number of lay Catholics from around 40,000 to perhaps 60,000. While this was a victory for tolerance, it did nothing for the Stuarts’ contemporary reputation as leaders of a Protestant nation.
Jacobean religious policy in Scotland and Ireland will be discussed below. In England, at least, James had been largely content to let sleeping religious dogs lie. Unfortunately, his son Charles was not so given to compromise. Rather, he was a doctrinaire high churchman before there was such a term. What did this mean? Under James there had arisen within the Church a group of clergymen influenced by the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609). Arminius modified the Calvinist insistence on predestination by arguing that God’s judgment might be influenced by free will. That is, salvation might be won, in part, by human actions. This implied a greater emphasis on good works, religious rituals (in particular communion), and the sanctity of the clergy necessary to perform them. This, in turn, implied a stronger role for episcopacy. This theology appealed to conservative Protestants, but Puritan critics saw these as Catholic beliefs and practices, plain and simple. It did not help that Arminians generally regarded the Roman Catholic Church as the “mother” Church of all Christian denominations, albeit one that had gone astray. When the Dutch synod of Dort met in 1618, Church of England representatives voted with the majority to censure Arminius.
Things changed with the accession of King Charles in 1625. The Arminian idea that the clergy were sanctified beings fit nicely with similar notions about monarchs. In fact, while Puritan preachers had railed against James’s court and foreign policy, Arminians promoted the sanctity and prerogatives of kings. Not surprisingly, Charles promoted Arminians to positions of power within the Church of England. Their leader, William Laud (1573–1645), became bishop of London in 1628 and archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. Puritan and even moderate Calvinist Church members grew alarmed, and in February 1629 a committee of the House of Commons condemned the “pernicious spreading of the Arminian faction.”24 Charles and Laud responded that it was the Calvinists who were out of the mainstream and insisted on conformity and liturgical uniformity as Elizabeth had done. In doing so, they wrecked the spirit of religious compromise that had obtained under James. Their first major initiative was to order all communion tables to be moved back to the eastern ends of churches, thus restoring the orientation of Catholic altars. They also enforced the wearing of vestments, bowing at the name of Jesus, and the full liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer; they banned the preaching of unlicensed (usually Puritan) preachers; and they attacked landowners in all three kingdoms who had impropriated (confiscated) tithes at the Reformation. Laud and his fellow Arminians regarded these orders as a return of the “beauty of holiness” to the Church, but many saw them as dangerous innovations, Romish revivals, or attacks on private property. Bishops and archbishops enforced these controversial measures by more frequent visitations, ejection of nonconforming clergy, and the prosecution of lay critics in the courts of Star Chamber and High Commission.
These policies had two unforeseen results. First, they revived anticlericalism. Landowners saw the attempt to resume impropriate tithes as an attack on their property rights. Puritans felt that their Church was turning against them and the Reformation which had given it birth. Overall, neither the changes in the fabric of English churches, nor the increasingly overbearing presence of “pontifical lordly prelates,”25 nor the persecutions of Puritans sat well with the English people. The most famous expression of this discomfort came in 1637 when William Prynne (1600–69), John Bastwick (1595?–1654), and Henry Burton (1578–1647/8) were condemned in Star Chamber for writings critical of the bishops and the queen. Their punishment was not as brutal as Bloody Mary had imposed: they were to have their ears cropped. But on the day, a great crowd cheered them to the place of punishment; subsequently, in a show of support, many spectators dipped their handkerchiefs into the “martyrs’” blood. As this implies, the second unforeseen result of Laud’s policies was that people began to draw parallels with the last Catholic reign. Staunch Protestants – and not only Puritans – thought that Arminianism looked a great deal like Catholicism. In their eyes, these persecutions, combined with the king’s autocratic political and financial tendencies and his constant desire for more troops looked like a plot to subvert the constitution and bring England back to Rome. Their most compelling piece of evidence for this charge lay much closer to the king: his Catholic wife.
Arguably, Buckingham’s most momentous legacy had been that, after failing to engineer a Spanish marriage, he had negotiated a French one. In 1625 Charles wed the daughter of Henry IV, Henrietta Maria. In Buckingham’s defense, it must be said that the marriage made a great deal of diplomatic sense. England, at war with Spain, needed powerful friends; though, as we have seen, the duke managed to squander that advantage soon after by declaring war on France as well. Moreover, the marriage was, after an initial period of coolness, a very happy one which produced six children. But it was never popular. From the first, Charles’s subjects disliked what they could only see as a “popish” marriage and feared that Henrietta Maria would poison his mind against Protestantism. Worse, as a princess of France and queen of England, she was entitled to maintain a court which included Catholic servants. Worse still, the marriage treaty stipulated that she be able to worship according to her faith. This meant a Catholic chapel staffed by Catholic clergy at the heart of the English court. Worst of all, what about the religious training of the children? This was a very good question, for in granting a dispensation to marry the “heretic” king of England
, the pope had secretly advised the new queen that she was obligated to rear her children as Roman Catholics. Consequently, she regarded herself as the means by which both the king and his kingdom would eventually be returned to the One True Faith.
Today, in our tolerant and ecumenical age, it is difficult to conjure up much understanding of the religious anxieties of Charles’s subjects. But if one compares the English fear of international Catholicism with the mid-twentieth-century American panic over international communism, then the picture becomes a little clearer. It was as if, during the most dangerous period in the Cold War, the first lady of the United States, Mamie Eisenhower or Jacqueline Kennedy, were a publicly acknowledged card-carrying member of the Communist Party. In fact, Protestant England’s situation was much worse. Not only did the king’s spouse have his ear, not only had she filled his court with her fellow sympathizers; she was paving the way for a future Catholic takeover by ensuring that the hereditary succession would bring her presumably Catholic children to the throne. Charles’s tolerance for the growing number of “Papists” at court, combined with his avid persecution of Puritans – who may have been extreme, but were at least Protestants – led to the darker charge that he was a secret Catholic himself.
In fact, the charge was false. King Charles was a Church of England Protestant, as was his archbishop of Canterbury. The former insisted that his children should be raised as Protestants; the latter refused the pope’s offer of a cardinal’s hat. If the king was married to a Catholic, it was because that match made the most sense given the international diplomatic situation. If he was soft on Catholics it was because he saw them as a relatively small, loyal, and, ultimately, harmless minority. If he was hard on Puritans it was because he saw the implications of their thought to be revolutionary and dangerous. These reasons all made sense – to the king and his court circle. Unfortunately, that circle was smaller and more narrow than his father’s had been. Moreover, neither Charles nor his courtiers made any significant attempt to justify themselves to his subjects beyond Whitehall through a propaganda campaign. As a result, the weighty straw of religion was added to the pile of long-term issues breaking the back of consensus upon which the English polity depended.
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