Civil War: The History of England Volume III

by Ackroyd, Peter

  On 9 January 1631, Love’s Triumph, a masque devised by Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson, introduced Henrietta Maria as the Queen of Love in Callipolis or ‘the city of beauty and goodness’. When the scene dissolved the ‘prospect of the sea’ appeared, into which setting the king himself walked in the guise of Neptune with a train of sea-gods and Cupids. He was then apostrophized as ‘the centre of proportion, sweetness, grace!’ At the end of the performance ‘the throne disappears, in place of which there shooteth up a palm tree with an imperial crown on the top’.

  In that same month, by royal command, a ‘book of orders’ was published. It decreed that two justices of the peace should meet each month in petty sessions to maintain the operations of local government. The overseers of the poor were to ensure that poor children were placed in apprenticeships; the constables and churchwardens of the parish were ordered to discipline offenders and to chase away vagrants. It was also the responsibility of the two justices to make certain that the roads were in a good state of repair and that, in general, law and order were imposed. They were also obliged to submit reports to London concerning ‘how they found the counties governed’.

  Although the king himself may not have drawn up these provisions, they bear all the marks of his paternal authority and of his predilection for good order. Charles was also determined that the local gentry and nobility should play an active part in the government of their neighbourhoods; a proclamation was issued ordering any of them still dwelling in London to return to the countryside where they belonged. At a later date another royal declaration ordered that urban vintners should stop selling tobacco and that innkeepers should not dress or serve game birds; this was believed to be a device to make the city less attractive to the country gentry.

  The servants of the Crown were going about their duties. At the beginning of March William Laud preached at Paul’s Cross in celebration of the sixth anniversary of the king’s accession. He remarked that ‘some are so waspishly set to sting that nothing can please their ears unless it sharpen their edge against authority’; he added, in sententious fashion, that ‘I hope I shall offend none by praying for the king’.

  The king’s other great councillor, Sir Thomas Wentworth, had been dispatched to York as lord president of the north in order to curb disorder. At the beginning of 1632 he was further promoted to become lord deputy of Ireland, where his cause of promoting ‘good and quiet government’ could be tested. He was a man of strong will and of commanding temper. He believed implicitly in royal authority and in public duty. He told one of his relatives that ‘a life of toil and labour’ was his effective destiny. The portraits of him by Van Dyck show him to be profoundly animated by zeal or, perhaps, by vision.

  Laud and Wentworth shared similar precepts and preoccupations that were embraced by them under the name of ‘Thorough’, by which they meant a disciplined and energetic response to the problems of the realm. They would not be diverted from their self-imposed task, and held nothing but contempt for those ministers of the state whom they regarded as lax, cowardly, or concerned only with enrichment. The administration of the king and his councillors – parliament was put to one side – should be enabled to push through those policies that were in the public interest. The vital alliance was that between Church and Crown in the cleansing of the kingdom.

  The lord treasurer, the earl of Portland, was described by them as ‘Lady Mora’ or ‘Lady Delay’; Laud also described the chancellor or the exchequer, Lord Cottington, as ‘Lady Mora’s waiting maid’ who ‘would pace a little faster than her mistress did, but the steps would be as foul’. This represented the difference between complaisant councillors and committed reformers.

  Wentworth, like Laud, believed that only royal sovereignty could bring order out of disorder and discipline out of anarchy. As lord deputy of Ireland, therefore, he was inclined to drive himself over any opposition, to consolidate the authority of the king, to lead the people – and in particular the recent English settlers – into the pastures of obedience and docility. He was intent upon recovering the powers of the king, as he said, by ‘a little violence and extraordinary means’. By his own light he succeeded, but only at the cost of arousing hostility and even hatred. He brought to his task a less than attractive combination of austerity and obstinacy. It was said, in A Collection of Anecdotes and Remarkable Characters, that ‘his sour and haughty temper’ meant that he expected ‘to have more observance paid to him than he was willing to pay to others’.

  Laud was more practical than the inspired Wentworth. The bishop wrote to the lord deputy that ‘for the State, indeed my Lord, I am for thorough . . . and it is impossible for me to go thorough alone’. ‘Thorough’ and ‘through’, spelt in an identical way in the seventeenth century, were for all intents and purposes the same word. Laud added that ‘besides, private ends are such blocks in the public way, and lie so thick, that you may promise what you will, and I must perform what I can and no more’. Nevertheless Wentworth was relentless, describing himself at his subsequent trial as ‘ever desiring the best things, and never satisfied I had done enough, but did always desire to do better’.

  In this period, too, the proclamations of the privy council were given legislative authority; the privy councillors could make laws on those matters which the actual courts of law neglected or avoided. The other governors of the realm maintained the emphasis upon law and order. It was reported in London by a news-writer, John Pory, that ‘on Sunday, in the afternoon and after supper, till midnight, my lord mayor visited as many taverns as he could, and gave warning to the vintners not to suffer any drinking in their houses, either that day or night; and the same afternoon also he passed Moorfields and put down the wrestling of the western with the northern men, which was there usual on that afternoon’. The Star Chamber also enjoyed new authority with its enforcement of the proclamations from the council and its pursuit of transgressors.

  One of the most prominent of these public offenders, William Prynne, had already aroused controversy with his strongly puritan opinions. He wrote tracts and pamphlets endlessly, his servant bringing him a bread roll and pot of ale every three hours; he was known as a ‘paper-worm’. John Aubrey wrote that he ‘was of a strange saturnine complexion’, and Christopher Wren said that he had the countenance of a witch.

  In the late autumn of 1632 Prynne’s Histriomastix: A Scourge of Stage Players launched a general assault upon the plays and players of London, with a particular attack upon the practice of boys playing female roles and of women themselves appearing on the stage. He wrote that the actresses were ‘notorious whores’ and asked if ‘any Christian woman be so more than whorishly impudent as to act, to speak publicly on a stage (perchance in man’s apparel and cut hair), in the presence of sundry men and women’.

  Unfortunately for Prynne the queen, Henrietta Maria, took part in a theatrical pastoral entitled The Shepherds’ Paradise just a few weeks after the publication of his tract. The play itself was in the best possible taste. It was recorded of its audience that ‘my lord chamberlain saith that no chambermaid shall enter, unless she will sit cross-legged on the top of a bulk’. It was a serious affair, and was of such complexity that the production lasted for seven or eight hours.

  Nevertheless Prynne’s attack upon female players was interpreted as an attack upon the queen herself; he had also denounced public dancing as a cause of shame and wickedness, and it was well known that the queen was fond of dancing. Prynne was sent to the Tower, where he faced prosecution by the Star Chamber and by the high commission on religious affairs. He was sentenced to imprisonment for life, fined £5,000 and expelled from Lincoln’s Inn where he had practised law. The severity or the judgment was enhanced by the brutal order that both of his ears should be cut off as he stood in a public pillory. The sentence was duly carried out. One of his ears was cut away at Westminster, and the other in Cheapside.

  Another opponent of the court, Sir John Eliot, died in confinement at the end of 1632. The king’s en
mity against him was such that, despite pleas for his health, he had never been allowed to leave the Tower in the course oi his imprisonment. He had sent a petition to the king in which he declared that ‘by reason of the quality of the air I am fallen into a dangerous disease’; he also stated that ‘I am heartily sorry I have displeased your majesty’. The king replied that the petition was not humble enough. Eliot’s humiliation was continued after his death. His son petitioned the king to allow his father’s body to be carried into Cornwall for burial. Charles scrawled at the bottom of the petition, ‘Let Sir John Eliot’s body be buried in the church of that parish where he died.’ He was in other words to be interred in the Tower.

  A sequence of letters between the members of the Barrington family, in the early months of 1632, gives the flavour of the time. Thomas Barrington, writing from Holborn, informs his mother that ‘women are cruel this year, Saturn reigns with strong influence: another wife has given her husband a potion of melted lead, but it was because he came home drunk’. His wife, Judith Barrington, wrote to her mother-in-law that ‘I find all my friends sick or dying, the air is so bad . . . Here is little news stirring, much expected at the latter end of this week . . . This day was the poor woman burned in Smithfield that poisoned her husband, which is wondered at the cruelty, since there was so much cause of mercy to her.’ A week or so later she reported that ‘the smallpox is so much here that we wish ourselves with you’. In May Thomas Barrington wrote that ‘the current of London runs so contrary and diverse courses as that we know not which way to fasten on certain truths’. London was the city of disease, of cruelty and of false reports.

  In the spring of 1633 the king returned to his homeland. He made a leisurely journey northwards, and reached Edinburgh by the middle of June. His relations with Scotland in the past had not been entirely happy; at the beginning of his reign he had asked for the restitution of Church lands in Scotland to the Crown. The measure was not in the end advanced, but it stirred bad blood. When some Scottish lords came to defend the existing landowners, the king made a characteristic remark. ‘My lord, he said to the leader of the deputation, ‘it is better the subject suffer a little than all lie out of order.’ Charles himself did not seem especially to like the Scots and, in particular, the Highlanders, whom he described as ‘that race of people which in former times hath bred so many troubles’. Yet his principal feeling was one of indifference rather than hostility.

  He was crowned as king of Scotland in Holyrood Abbey on 18 June, and it was remarked that he had been happy to wait eight years for the privilege. The delay showed no overriding desire to endear himself to his people. The coronation itself was marked of course by ritual and formal ceremony that did not impress the natives; for most Scots, brought up in the Presbyterian faith, it smacked of prelacy and popery.

  One of the complaints advanced by the Scots concerned the introduction of English ritual into the service. Yet the chief proponent of that ritual was about to be raised to the highest see. When Bishop Laud came into the king’s presence for the first time after the journey to Scotland he was greeted with unfamiliar words. ‘My Lord’s Grace of Canterbury, you are very welcome.’ Charles had just heard of the death of George Abbot, the previous archbishop.

  As bishop of London Laud had been the king’s principal religious adviser, but his authority had been ill-defined. Now as archbishop he became the source and spring of English religion, with an energy and purpose that the king himself lacked. Yet, at the beginning of his ministry, he was beset by anxiety. He wrote to Thomas Wentworth that ‘there is more expected from me than the craziness [infirmity] of these times will give me leave to do’. Nevertheless like Sisyphus he was ready to put his shoulder to the stone.

  He was a man of quick temper, small in stature, inclined to irritability and impatient of contradiction. His harshness and rigour quickly made him enemies, particularly among the puritans whom he excoriated. He was known as ‘the shrimp’, ‘the little urchin’ and ‘the little meddling hocus-pocus’. The king’s fool, Archie, made a pun before a royal dinner. ‘Give great praise to God, and little laud to the Devil.’ Yet no one could question the new archbishop’s sincerity or personal honesty. One English diplomat, Sir Thomas Roe, told the queen of Bohemia that Laud was ‘very just, incorrupt . . . a rare counsellor for integrity’.

  Thomas Carlyle described him as ‘a vehement, shrill voiced character confident in its own rectitude, as the narrowest character may the soonest be. A man not without affections, though bred as a college monk, with little room to develop them: of shrill, tremulous, partly feminine nature, capable of spasms, of most hysterical obstinacy, as female natures are.’ He was something between an Oxford don and a bureaucrat. A portrait of him by Van Dyck represents him as austere and quizzical. Not that he would have put much faith in the artist. He described his paintings as ‘vanity shadows’.

  He was highly superstitious and kept a record of his uneasy dreams. He dreamed that he gave the king a drink in a silver cup; but Charles refused it, and called for a glass. He dreamed that the bishop of Lincoln jumped on a horse and rode away. On one night ‘I dreamed that I had the scurvy; and that forthwith all my teeth became loose. There was one in especial in my lower jaw, which I could scarcely keep in with my finger till I had called for help.’

  Soon enough his influence was being felt. In October 1633 he and the king caused to be republished King James’s Declaration of Sports, which had granted a degree of entertainment and recreation on the Sabbath. The king’s ‘good people’ were not to be discouraged from dancing or archery, while the sports of leaping and vaulting were also permitted; ‘may-games, whit ale and morris dances, and the setting up of maypoles’ were perfectly acceptable to the authorities. It was almost like a return to the more picturesque religion of earlier centuries. For the Calvinists and the stricter sorts of Protestant, the Declaration of Sports was a poisoned document set to destroy true religion. Certainly it had unforeseen consequences. A seventeenth-century historian, Thomas Fuller, wrote that many of his contemporaries were ‘of opinion that this abuse of the Lord’s Day was a principal procurer of God’s anger, since poured out on this land, in a long and bloody civil war’. The vicar of Enmore in Somerset declared from the pulpit that ‘whatsoever the king is pleased to have done, the king of heaven commands us to keep the Sabbath’.

  In the same period it was determined that the plain communion table should be moved from the middle of the church to the eastern end where it was to be railed off; it then more closely resembled the altars of the old faith. The priests now bowed towards it, and some of them employed the sign of the cross to bless it. William Prynne had already satirized the Eucharistic rite when the celebrant . . .

  came near the bread, which was cut and laid in a fine napkin, and then he gently lifted up one of the corners of the said napkin, and peeping into it till he saw the bread (like a boy that peeped after a bird-nest in a bush), and presently clapped it down again, and flew back a step or two, and bowed very low three times towards it . . . then he laid his hand upon the gilt cup . . . so soon as he pulled the cup a little nearer to him he let it go, flew back and bowed again three times towards it.

  This was a keen burlesque of the services imposed by Laud.

  The archbishop was concerned to augment the beauty and holiness of the rites of the Church, thus inducing respect if not awe. He had previously complained that ‘’tis superstition nowadays for any man to come with more reverence into a church, than a tinker and his bitch into an alehouse’. It soon became a serious offence for a minister not to bow his head at the name of Jesus. Choirboys came in two by two, and were instructed never to turn their backs upon the altar. Music returned to the cathedrals.

  Laudianism, however, was not popery. The archbishop had a distaste for Roman Catholicism that was quite genuine. He was hoping to create a truly national Church devoid of the zealotry and intolerance of the puritans as well as the Mariolatry and superstitions of the papists. He had no appetit
e or aptitude for theological argument and, on the everlasting debate between free will and predestination, he said only that ‘something about these controversies is unmasterable in this life’. He was indifferent towards Geneva and Rome, and looked only towards the king.

  Laud was also attempting to fashion religious developments of a structural kind; he appointed only bishops who were of firmly anti-Calvinist persuasion. Charles himself believed that the episcopacy was the fundamental buttress of his sovereignty; no bishop, as his father had said, implied no king. It was believed essential to augment clerical power. The corporations of cathedral towns were called upon to appoint more clerics as justices of the peace, and were further obliged to attend Sunday service in their ceremonial robes. Within a short time Laud was joined by two bishops in the king’s council; Bishop Juxon of London, who had been only the king’s chaplain two years before, was appointed as lord treasurer of the kingdom. The last cleric to fill the post had been promoted in the reign of Henry VII (1485–1509). England might be considered to have re-entered the world of medieval polity.

  A series of ‘visitations’ to the various parishes followed in order to investigate cases of clerical disobedience and nonconformity. In Manchester, for example, twenty-seven clerics were charged with failing to kneel at the time of communion. Richard Mather of Toxteth, near Liverpool, admitted that he had never worn the surplice. ‘What!’ exclaimed the Visitor, ‘Preach fifteen years and never wear a surplice? It had been better for him that he had gotten seven bastards!’