Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  This became clear in the Parliament of 1628–9. Once again, the king needed money to fight his wars. Once again, his plea came in the middle of a depression, this time in the cloth trade. With Buckingham removed, at least one major issue of contention between king and Commons had been eliminated. However, after furious debate, the lower house voted to assist merchants who refused to pay the impositions; and to condemn the Arminian clergy. At this point, the king decided that enough was enough. On March 2, the speaker of the House of Commons, Sir John Finch (1584-1660), announced an adjournment, which many interpreted as the first step toward dissolution. In response, one of the most outspoken members, Sir John Eliot (1592–1632), rose to offer a series of resolutions. The speaker attempted to cut him off by rising from his chair, which would end debate. At this point, two of Eliot’s colleagues rushed the chair and forced the speaker back into it, one of them, Denzil Holles (1598–1680), exclaiming: “Zounds, you shall sit as long as the House pleases!” As the king’s sergeant-at-arms pounded on the door with his mace, the house passed three resolutions: that any subject paying the impositions, that anyone counseling their collection, and that anyone intending innovation in religion was “a capital enemy to the kingdom and commonwealth.” This language, stark as it was, hid an even grimmer reality: the monarch himself had initiated all of the measures that Parliament had just condemned. Obviously, the relationship between king and Parliament, as well as the financial, military, and religious situations, had reached a crisis point. Their resolution would come well beyond the walls of Parliament or even of London, in the localities of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

  The Personal Rule and the Problem of Local Authority

  It should come as little surprise that after the dramatic events of 1629, King Charles chose to not call Parliament back for 11 years. There is some question as to whether this was, at first, a conscious resolution to rule without Parliament or one which grew over time as the king found that he could get away with it. Certainly, he must have concluded that the noble lords and honorable gentlemen were more of a hindrance than a help. They had proved not only uncooperative but challenging to his authority as sovereign and obstructive to the management of his financial situation, the war, and his “reform” of England’s complicated religious situation. There was no reason for the king to wish to hear from them again. Nor was there, in his mind, any obligation to do so. Before examining Parliament’s point of view, it is necessary to probe more deeply the king’s attempt to return the English constitution to its pristine, pre-parliamentary state, an enterprise that lasted 11 years and that has come to be known as the “Personal Rule.”26

  The chief difficulty facing Charles in attempting to rule without Parliament was the very reason he had been forced to call it in the first place: he needed money. He needed money to run his court, to pay for his art collection, and, above all, to fight his wars with France and Spain. How could the king possibly meet his financial obligations without parliamentary taxation? As Salisbury had reminded his father, there were only two choices: cut expenses or raise revenue. Remarkably, Charles did both. First, he authorized his lord treasurer, Richard, Lord Weston (1577–1635; from 1633 earl of Portland), to launch a thorough reform of court and government, to match Laud’s reform of the Church and the activities of Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford (1593–1641), in Ireland (see below) – in fact, the policy came to be known as “Thorough.” It called for the elimination of useless offices (sinecures) and of fees in favor of established salaries. The Privy Council established standing committees for Ireland, the militia, and trade. The performance of masques and the purchase of artwork were both curtailed. More importantly, the king sued for peace with both France and Spain. This allowed him to disband his land forces, which were far more expensive than his paintings.

  One might assume that the king’s frugality and pursuit of peace would be popular with the political elite. But some former MPs were angry that the Protestant crusade against Spain and France had been called off; others worried that a frugal monarch with a more efficient administration would use it to encroach further on his subjects’ liberties. They found grounds for these fears in Charles’s measures to raise revenue. First, in violation of Parliament’s resolution of 1629, he raised the Customs rates unilaterally once again – more impositions. Next, following an Elizabethan precedent, he sold monopolies and farmed out other government services to anyone who could offer quick cash. More positively from a Puritan point of view, his government collected recusancy fines more assiduously. Finally, he had his officials search statute and precedent books for any old law recorded therein which might enable him to squeeze a few more shillings out of his subjects. Thus, the government revived old fees and fines associated with refusing a summons to be knighted, enclosure, hunting and building in royal forests, and the inheritance of widows and wards. In each case, violation of the law or use of a royal “service” resulted in a fee to the Crown. Most notoriously of all, in order to pay for the navy (which Charles kept in a state of readiness as a bargaining tool with France and Spain), he extended an old tax called Ship Money from payment by few coastal towns and maritime counties to the whole nation.

  These policies just about solved the king’s immediate financial problems. Assisted by a boom in foreign trade which increased Customs yields, Weston managed to raise the revenue to between £900,000 and £1 million. As a result, the royal debt became manageable by 1638. Unfortunately, but perhaps predictably, if the king felt that Parliament had violated the constitution by interfering in his right to govern, many aristocrats now began to conclude that the Personal Rule violated the constitution by infringing on the notion that an Englishman’s property was his own and that no king had the right to confiscate it without the subject’s (i.e., parliamentary) permission. In 1636, a wealthy landowner named John Hampden (1595–1643) instigated a test case at law by refusing to pay his Ship Money assessment (all of £1) on the grounds that it was a non-parliamentary tax. The king argued that he had a right to suspend the law, and so collect the tax, during a state of emergency (the so-called suspending power). Hampden countered that there was no current state of emergency to justify its collection. The king responded by taking him to court. In the end, Charles won the Ship Money case, but just barely: although the panel of 12 judges was hand-picked by the Crown, five decided for Hampden. Moreover, one of the judges deciding for the majority foolishly claimed that the king could command all of his subjects’ property if he wished. No landowner could support that. While Hampden lost his legal case and paid the tax, he had won a moral victory. By the end of the 1630s his example, combined with an agricultural depression, was encouraging others to withhold their payments of royal taxes and forced loans. Ship Money assessments returned 96 percent of the amount demanded in 1636, but only 89 percent in 1637, 39 percent in 1638, and just 20 percent in 1639.

  The tax strike signified bigger problems for the Stuart regime than a mere lack of money. At this point, it should be remembered that Charles did not, like his French counterpart Louis XIII (1601–43; reigned 1610–43), have a vast, efficient, and well-paid bureaucracy to run his government, collect his taxes, or keep the peace generally in the localities. Instead, he relied on the loyalty and good will of unpaid aristocrats and gentry, who served as his lords lieutenant, JPs, and sheriffs. In the 1630s, that sense of mutual interest began to break down. Increasingly, the landed elite began to resent the growing interference of the Privy Council and bishops in local life; and they began to refuse not only to pay taxes themselves but to collect them from their friends and neighbors. Order was beginning to break down in the shires of England.

  By 1640, the king was in a precarious position. While he had cut expenditure significantly, the growing tax strike meant that his court and administration were living on the tightest of budgets. Any increase in expenditure, any crisis, would cause the king to fall into spiraling debt and – probably – to have to call a Parliament. Worse, if he should face such a cris
is, he would have to deal with the accumulated resentment of his subjects, the victims of “Thorough,” who had seen the Church and government increase their presence in their lives and in their pockets. After years of personal rule, the king precipitated such a crisis by mishandling a combination of old problems – money, war, and religion – which originated among his own people, the Scots.

  The Crisis of Scotland

  As we have seen, in 1603 King James VI of Scotland became James I of England and Ireland. He continued to rule each of his kingdoms separately, like a modern chairman of three boards. That is, the king governed each country from his court in London through their respective administrations and according to their respective constitutional arrangements and law. Obviously, his Celtic kingdoms were therefore governed at a distance (via courier to the administrations in Edinburgh and Dublin) – and a disadvantage. If the Irish had never really accepted these arrangements, the Scots, as an independent sovereign nation, were even less likely to feel that decisions made at Westminster reflected their best interests. It is true that James filled court offices near his person with his fellow countrymen, but as the reign wore on it became apparent that decisions affecting Scotland were made according to the advice of English ministers. At the beginning of the reign, James tried to forestall these problems by promoting unification. Upon accession, he began to style himself king of Great Britain, France, and Ireland; redesigned the coinage; ordered the use of a union flag (similar to that in use today) by all ships at sea; and proposed a Treaty of Union between the two nations as part of his general plan for peace at home and abroad. But, after heated debate, the English Parliament roundly rejected the treaty, ostensibly because of the incompatibility of the two legal systems. In fact, these debates exposed the ancient animosity between the two countries as English MPs pushed the envelope of parliamentary free speech. One, referring to Scotland’s troubled political history, declared that “[t]hey have not suffered above two Kings to die in their Beds, these two hundred Years,” while another opined that a union between England and Scotland would be like that between a judge and his prisoner.27 In short, the English saw the Scots as impoverished savages. For their part, the Scots continued to feel like second-class citizens in the new constitutional arrangements.

  After the débâcle over the Union, neither James nor his son did much to alleviate that feeling. Each visited his northern kingdom rarely, James in 1617, Charles in 1633 and 1641. Still, James managed to keep the Scottish nobility in check, pacify the clan chiefs of the Highlands and borderlands, and even persuade the Kirk to recognize the authority, albeit limited, of a revived Scottish episcopacy. His ultimate goal was to neutralize the most radical Presbyterians and bring the Kirk into line with the Church of England. But he was smart enough to realize that this process could only happen incrementally, via friendly persuasion and subtle intrigue, not brute royal force. Once again, his son was not so shrewd. Charles expected obedience and conformity from his Scottish subjects as surely as he did from his English ones – even in that most troubled area of seventeenth- century life, religion. Here, if James pursued supremacy over his Scottish Church incrementally, Charles sought uniformity across his kingdoms all at once. After all, good subjects should worship as the king worshipped. In 1636, the Crown began to impose some of the High Church ceremony already being enforced in England. In 1637, just when he least needed trouble, without consulting the Scottish Privy Council, Parliament, or Presbyterian General Assembly, the king decreed that a version of the English Book of Common Prayer should be used in the churches of his northern kingdom.

  Perhaps Charles thought he could get away with this because Scotland was poorer and less populous than England (about 1 million people in 1625 as opposed to nearly 5 million in England and Wales) and because Scottish society was, as we have seen, notoriously divided: into Highlanders and Lowlanders, urban dwellers and farmers, lairds and clergy. But on this issue he managed to unite nearly the whole country. Up to this point, Kirk services had no liturgy in the traditional sense, emphasizing the sermon and extempore prayer instead. So, as with English Puritans, the promotion of an Arminian-style High Church liturgy in Scotland smacked to Presbyterians of a movement back to Rome. At the debut of the new rite in St. Giles’s Cathedral, Edinburgh, on July 23, 1637, a group of maidservants shouted down the minister with cries of “[t]he mass is entered amongst us.” One woman hurled a stool at the bishop of Edinburgh, who escaped the ensuing riot with his life. This was not the sort of decorous ritual and meek submission that Charles and Laud had in mind. More seriously, in February 1638 representatives of nearly every important constituency in Scotland (excluding Catholics) signed the National Covenant to oppose the king’s religious policies, binding themselves to remain united to each other and to uphold true religion against Laudian innovation. In fact, the Covenant established a new constitution of Church and State, stating that only the Scottish Parliament and the Presbyterian General Assembly could make Scottish religious policy. Later that year, the Covenanters abolished the power of the Scottish bishops and declared episcopacy incompatible with the Kirk.

  This, Charles could only regard as an act of rebellion. During the winter of 1638–9, he called on his English lords lieutenant and other local leaders to raise an army to march on Scotland in what would come to be called the First Bishops’ War. The Scots Covenanters replied by raising an army of their own. The Scottish army was religiously inspired, and contained veterans of continental wars, such as their commander, Alexander Leslie (ca. 1580–1661). The king’s forces were equal in numbers but hastily assembled, poorly trained, and starved for funds. But their biggest problem was morale. Charles was counting on the traditional English hatred of the Scots to inspire his forces; in fact, the country gentlemen and their tenant farmers who made up this army were reluctant to leave their native land to attack fellow Protestants in order to enforce royal policies they found oppressive. However much they may have hated the Scots, they hated Laud, “Thorough,” and the policies of the Personal Rule more. Indeed, some Puritan nobles and former MPs were beginning to pull for the Scots; the most committed went so far as to begin secret negotiations with them. In the end, Charles did not dare risk a battle with this uncertain force. Instead, he agreed to a truce, the inconclusive Treaty of Berwick, in June 1639.

  By April 1640 the king was effectively bankrupt and facing a rebel army within his northern kingdom. He had little choice but to call a parliament. Naturally, when it met for the first time in 11 years, that body had no intention of voting money for another army before its grievances could be heard. After all, the king was likely to take the money, raise the army, defeat the Scots, and then turn it on his unruly English subjects. When Charles realized that this parliament was not going to cooperate, he dissolved it in disgust, giving rise to the nickname it has borne ever since: the Short Parliament.

  During the summer of 1640, order, already under strain, began to disintegrate all over England. The tax strike spread, the City of London refused to advance the king money, apocalyptic preaching abounded, a mass petitioning campaign started, isolated rioting broke out, and the Scots began to march south. Charles called upon the Irish Parliament for assistance so that he could resume hostilities in what would be called the Second Bishops’ War. But that August the Covenanters defeated a thrown-together royal force under the king’s new chief military adviser, the earl of Strafford, at Newburn, Northumberland (see map 11, p. 253). This allowed the Scots to occupy the counties of Durham and Northumberland, an arrangement confirmed by the Treaty of Ripon in October. According to the treaty, the king had to pay the Scots forces £850 a day until a more permanent settlement could be reached. Worse, there was no royal army between them and London. Now Charles had no choice. He had to call Parliament and let it sit.

  The Long Parliament

  That summer, for the first time in English history, parliamentary elections were actually contested all over the country. Heretofore, the vast majority of MPs had been s
elected in friendly but closed-door meetings of like-minded local nobles and gentry doing the king’s will, or in public but amiable acclamations of recognized provincial leaders. Now, for the first time in many constituencies, there were real elections because there was a real choice between candidates who more or less favored royal policy and those who did not. The former might not have approved of all the king’s actions, but he was still king, God’s lieutenant on earth. They thought it necessary for the defense of the realm and incumbent upon their duty as good Christians to vote him the money for an army and trust that, out of the good will thus generated, he would listen to reason afterwards. Their opponents also recognized the king as king, but for the past 11 years they had been compiling a list of grievances against his government in Church and State. They intended to use Parliament’s power of the purse, the threat of Scottish invasion, and his need for an army (the problem of war and foreign policy) to force the king to change his domestic policies and, perhaps, even agree to limitations on his power. More specifically, they campaigned on a platform of safeguarding Parliament’s constitutional position (the problem of sovereignty), Englishmen’s property (the problem of finance), and the Church of England’s Protestantism (the problem of religion). Thus, all of the long-term tensions of the English polity came to a head in the localities (the problem of local control) during the election of that summer and autumn of 1640.