A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660

by Hutton, Ronald

  The Tudor model of politics collapsed in the 1620s, leaving the ruler of England unable to work with Parliaments, and therefore to wage war or have new laws made. The revisionist historians of the 1970s and 1980s were correct that this development was not the product of a greater will to power on the part of either the monarchy or the House of Commons. It was, rather, the result of the strains produced by the accession of a new, foreign, royal family and the creation of a triple kingdom, combined with those of a financial system in prolonged and severe decay; by 1600, indeed, it was the most backward and inefficient system in Europe, other than that of Scotland. Charles I had opened his reign with a war effort which was seriously underfunded: the decline of the value of the Tudor subsidy had accelerated in the new century by a further third to a half between 1610 and 1628. What seemed to be votes of huge sums by Parliaments were producing thoroughly inadequate results.

  The essential problem was not, therefore, one of growing strength and ambition on the part of different components of the body politic, but of growing confusion, weakness and anxiety. This was not a peculiarly English problem: as contemporaries realized, all too vividly, representative institutions across Europe were starting to collapse during the period because they were ceasing either to restrain or to satisfy the needs of rulers. This compound of difficulties was worsened by the tensions generated by religious differences and by the accidents of fortune and the misjudgements of leaders. There should be no doubt that the problem represented by the Spanish seizure of the Palatinate was particularly difficult and that the policies adopted by both James and Charles in response were diplomatically, militarily and politically flawed. Here the opponents of revisionism come into their own in emphasizing that genuinely important ideological issues were generated by these practical difficulties. There is no doubt that by 1629 the familiar mould of English politics had been broken. Everybody now understood that it had either to be mended or to be replaced; and even a repair job would take considerable ingenuity and effort.

  The Personal Rule of Charles I

  The years in which Charles I governed England without a Parliament, between 1629 and 1640, represent one of the periods of British history over which the least agreement has been achieved by specialists. To be precise, the disagreement has until recently consisted of most of the other experts ranging themselves against the views of one, Kevin Sharpe. Professor Sharpe has, however, produced the fullest overall study of the subject to date. In the traditional view of the period, formulated by Samuel Rawson Gardiner in the late nineteenth century, the Personal Rule was a time of unpopular, inefficient and at least potentially despotic government, brought to an end by public opposition. The big question is whether that view is unjust and inaccurate: Kevin Sharpe has argued that it is, while his critics pronounce it to be substantially correct. What is perfectly clear is that the Personal Rule was a unique period in English history. Politically, it was the quietest decade of the seventeenth century, and indeed the last period of internal peace for 100 years. It was also the first of a series of experiments to replace the system of government which had broken down in the 1620s, and accordingly the one which attempted to make the fewest changes to that system.

  As the name ‘Personal Rule’ suggests, the king himself was central to it. Charles I was probably the smallest man ever to rule England or Scotland, standing five feet tall or a little less. His speech was afflicted by a stammer, certainly due to nerves, because it cleared on those few occasions when he lost his fear of speaking. To make all this worse, he grew up in the shadow of the kind of elder brother whom we can all do without: Prince Henry, of normal height, equipped with perfect diction, limitless self-confidence and enormous popularity. Henry died in 1612, to general horror and disappointment, leaving his runt of a sibling to take over. No wonder Charles suffered from crippling shyness and had only limited interpersonal skills. He tried to remedy these shortcomings by cultivating rigid self-control, presenting an exterior of freezing calm and dignity to the world. Whereas most former monarchs had sought to gain respect by flamboyance and communication, Charles preferred to deploy silence and reserve as political tools; he had three locks put on his private apartments. He wanted a daily routine as regular and predictable as possible, which incorporated a lot of prayer, as he tried to gain further reassurance and advice from the God who had intervened to put him on the throne. As part of this persona, he was a conviction politician of terrifying rigour, viewing the art of the possible as the pathway to Hell. If, as king, he was directly responsible to his God, then to act against his own conscience, which he took to be God’s bidding, was to risk damnation. Accordingly he felt bound in honour to listen to any advice, and then to ignore it and follow his own inclinations. His greatest curse, as person and ruler, was that he couldn’t understand the feelings of others. This mattered in general politics, as he could only view those who opposed his policies as deluded or wicked. It also counted in individual situations, such as that of Lord Cottington, one of his ministers, who asked the king for time off from his duties to attend his own wife’s funeral, and was refused.

  The second member of the cast list for the Personal Rule was Charles’s French wife, whom the English called Henrietta Maria. In many respects she was an excellent consort. It was an unusually happy royal marriage, the queen being small, affectionate, fertile (she produced three sons and two daughters who survived childhood) and loyal. She was vivacious and fun-loving, rescuing the court from being as dull as Charles would have made it left to himself. She became a magnet for dashing young nobles, including some who were at times opposed to royal policies and ministers, so broadening the viewpoints represented among courtiers. Her single enormous trouble was her Roman Catholic religion, which meant that to many British Protestants their king was literally sleeping with the enemy. Had the queen been tactful about her beliefs, the problem would have been reduced, but she was proud of them and did her best to convert any courtier willing to listen, with occasional success. Again, personal tensions between the royal couple would have served to diminish fears of her influence over her husband, but their obvious love for each other only enhanced them. Despite her personal virtues, Henrietta Maria was a public relations disaster.

  Ranged around the king and queen were the bulk of the royal ministers: the Earl of Portland, Lord Cottington, Lord Finch, Sir Francis Windebank, Bishop William Juxon and Sir John Coke. All were efficient, hard-working administrators with different views on most aspects of policy; all that distinguished them from earlier ministries was a lack of the more evangelical sort of Protestant with whom Puritans might identify. Charles gave them the security that Mary and the young Elizabeth had accorded to their servants, ending the feuding between factions that had gone on since the 1590s. In addition, two other figures were associated with the regime: William Laud, whom Charles made his Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, and Thomas Wentworth, who was sent first to run the north of England and then to govern Ireland. Their letters did much to provide previous generations of historians with their basic picture of the period, as they talked of the need for the king to rule with ruthless efficiency and without truckling to popular opinion, of the disease of constant opposition and disaffection in the realm, and of the corruption and laziness of the royal ministers. Wentworth summed up their view of politics in 1632 by describing himself as ‘a sailor in a storm’. It is time now to see whether this view was correct.

  Charles I was a ruler who believed in learning from mistakes. His father had been criticized for timidity, untidiness, loquacity and a respect for too many points of view; on becoming king Charles was therefore warlike, dignified and withdrawn, and inclined to adopt and follow a single viewpoint. After the disasters of the late 1620s he drew some new lessons: to avoid making war and calling English Parliaments until the whole structure of government was overhauled and repaired; to ensure that his actions remained within the bounds of customary law; and never again to have a single all-powerful favourite. Being Charles, he ri
gidly implemented each objective. As almost nobody in his government was an ideologue, it is hard to know what, if any, theories underpinned his new way of ruling. The exception was Wentworth, who believed that the prerogative powers of the Crown needed to be reasserted, having been whittled away by subjects’ rights since 1600. How much his view was shared by the king’s other advisers, we cannot now tell. The 1630s was certainly a great decade for parliamentary government, producing the only completely successful Parliaments of the reign, in Scotland and Ireland. Only in England was the king now allergic to them, but there his allergy was very plain. His behaviour suggests that he would not call one there unless an emergency rendered him absolutely desperate for money. This ran counter to the beliefs of all his ministers, including Wentworth, who urged him to summon Parliament when the Crown was at its strongest and could afford the time and trouble to wear down opposition. The king’s attitude does raise doubts as to when, under any normal circumstances, he would have been willing to face an English Parliament again.

  An immediate initiative was launched to make central and local government both more standardized and more efficient, which generated a snowstorm of paper but only limited practical results. The militia became no more effective, and attempts to spur JPs into greater efforts soon faltered; the Privy Council could not cope with the amount of feedback it was now demanding even had local government been willing to provide it. The great success story was finance, the Tudor system being worked with enough ruthlessness to raise the regular income by a third, to £900,000, providing a regular surplus. Every branch of the revenue was made to yield more, and a series of one-off expedients was adopted, based on the king’s medieval rights as monarch, feudal lord and landowner, which helped to halve the royal debt. The problem of defence was solved by Ship Money, a rate which Tudor monarchs had levied on coastal counties, during emergencies, to pay for the navy. In 1635, Charles’s regime extended it to the whole nation and made it an annual levy. The result was an administrative triumph, as in five years the rate provided almost twice the amount yielded by all the parliamentary taxation of the 1620s. All of it was dutifully spent on ships, greatly increasing the quality of the royal navy and the Crown’s prestige abroad. Dutch fishermen agreed to pay Charles for licences to ply their trade in the North Sea, while the French removed their own fleet from Atlantic waters.

  The problem with the levy was, of course, its legality, as it was by no means obvious that it could either be imposed upon the whole nation or demanded without any military emergency to be countered. The official justification was the threat presented to English merchants by North African pirates, but that was less serious than in previous years when the money had not been demanded. When a Buckinghamshire squire called John Hampden mounted a legal challenge to it, Charles scrupulously asked all of his twelve judges for an opinion. The result was embarrassingly close, seven of them finding firmly in favour of the king. In some counties it seems to have reduced payment, but in others it did not, and Ship Money was now firmly established in case law.

  Charles’s prime foreign policy objective remained what it had been in the 1620s: to get back the Palatinate for his sister and her family. Once again, two successive strategies were attempted: to persuade the Spanish to hand it back and the French to help reconquer it. By 1637 enough Ship Money had come in for England to look like an effective naval power again, and a treaty was drafted with France for joint offensive operations. It might have worked, for France itself was now locked into an open and prolonged struggle with Spain, and Charles had a fleet capable of harrying coasts and seaways. He was apparently on the verge of showing Europe that he could wage war effectively without needing to reckon with Parliaments.

  In religious affairs, his plan was to produce a Church of England that was better supervised, managed, funded and repaired than at any time since the Reformation. His problem was that he was Supreme Governor of the most badly defined, slackly administered, deeply divided and volatile Church in Europe. Any attempt to exert greater central control over it was going to worry a lot of people, and any attempt to define or enforce its beliefs and practices would trouble a lot more. In one sense, the king’s solution was simple: as noted earlier, he completely identified himself with the Arminian faction in the Church, whose tastes for beauty, ceremony, order and sacramental worship all accorded with his own. They were shared fervently by his favourite churchman, William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633, a man who, like a plump white mouse, scurried around the corridors of power, gnawing at one political, religious or social issue after another. He and the king both wanted to bring as many clergy as possible under the direct control of the national Church. Since the Reformation, the number which were outside its formal structure had multiplied steadily: now ‘lecturers’ appointed to preach by urban corporations and wealthy parishes were to hold formal parish livings, only nobles were allowed to hire personal chaplains, and the children of foreign Protestant refugee congregations had to attend the Church of England.

  Charles and Laud also aimed to re-endow that Church by better management of its lands, an increase in the tithes levied on laity to pay parish ministers, and an augmentation of the salaries of the poorest clergy. They intended to enforce use of the ceremonies prescribed in the official Prayer Book of 1559, and decrease the multitude of individual interpretations of its liturgy which had hitherto abounded in the parishes. Communion tables, which had stood in various different places within parish churches, were to be moved to the east end, like a Catholic altar, and railed in. King and archbishop wished to get churches better repaired in general, as fit houses for ritual, and to shift the emphasis of worship from preaching to catechizing and ceremony: to ensure a more communal, standardized and inclusive national religion. A strict observance of Sunday as a day of prayer and charity alone, associated especially with Puritanism, was officially condemned, and all clergy expected to announce that games, dances and feasts could be held after evening service. Finally, the royal intention was to make the clergy better behaved, educated and pious, and more independent of the laity: a spiritual elite which would help the king rule for the good of all his subjects.

  In enacting this programme, king and primate had to reckon with the ramshackle structure of the Church of England, which was to a great extent a patchwork of semi-independent dioceses. Durham, Peterborough, Salisbury and Exeter were in the hands of bishops who were largely unsympathetic to the reforms, and in several of the others the physical and ritual changes were only selectively enacted. On the other hand, Norwich, and Bath and Wells, turned out to have prelates who actually went much further than Laud had asked in enforcing them. The one at Norwich, Matthew Wren, was so zealous that the king actually moved him to a less populous and sensitive see. To some extent, Laud could iron things out by sending in his own, metropolitan, visitation to inspect what was happening, but this often lacked the local knowledge and the follow-up muscle of the diocesan machinery.

  Nor was leadership from the top as determined as it might have been. The number of ministers deprived for refusing to conform was small compared with that under James: less than twenty in all. Charles himself stopped any increase in the tithes of the City of London, rather than offend the people on whom he most relied for loans, while Laud did not enforce the official ceremonies comprehensively on Oxford University, of which he had been made chancellor. Nor was anyone hanged or burned for opposition. The government did try to cow any potential opposition in 1637 by holding a spectacular show trial of the three most vociferous critics of the reforms, a minister, a lawyer and a doctor called Henry Burton, William Prynne and John Bastwick. All were fined and imprisoned after having their ears cut off on a public scaffold. This was the most brutal punishment inflicted by the Personal Rule, and indeed Charles’s reign was notable for a lack of political executions: there were none in its first sixteen years, which was a record not reached for almost two centuries before. This abstinence certainly reflected the king’s own mildness of tempe
r, but the mutilation inflicted on the three men was still counter-productive, its squalid and humiliating nature arousing public outrage.

  The impact of the changes is difficult to ascertain. Clergy, unsurprisingly, often found aspects of them attractive. Puritans, with equal lack of surprise, deplored them as running directly counter to all that they had wanted from the Church; as an Arminian, Laud regarded Puritanism as the force within English Protestantism to which he was himself most vehemently opposed. Local public opinion became hostile when popular ministers were punished for nonconformity, when good lecturers were sacked because no parish living could be found for them, or when the changes to ritual and church decoration were expensive or destroyed long-established custom. Otherwise there is little evidence of reactions, and where it does survive the most common pattern is one of division and uncertainty.

  It may be suggested, however, that there was one important group which, collectively, might have found much to concern them: the English ruling class. One of the features of the Reformation had been, after all, an enormous shift of wealth and power from churchmen to the richer laity. The nadir of the Church’s fortunes had been reached under Elizabeth, when its members were weakest – politically, socially and economically – in relation to the nobility and gentry. James started to reverse the process, favouring churchmen at court and putting some into local government, for example as justices. Charles greatly accentuated the change. He became the first ruler since 1558 to give a high political office to a prelate, making William Juxon, Bishop of London, his Lord Treasurer. As part of the religious reforms, gentry were forced to renegotiate leases of church lands, and some saw their family seats in the chancels of parish churches demolished in order to move the communion table there. Former archbishops had entertained local landowners as a part of their function as leaders of county society; Laud scorned to do so. When the gentry of particular counties petitioned against aspects of the reforms, their requests were flatly rejected, on the grounds that laity had no business to intervene in ecclesiastical affairs. Squires who had formerly thought the local parson pompous and intractable, tended to find him unbearable after the Laudian initiatives had reinforced the clergy’s sense of independence and importance. Laud himself set a spirited example of the way in which churchmen might campaign for a better society. Gentry hauled into the royal council’s Court of Star Chamber accused of enclosure found him there, rebuking them. Those brought before the parallel Court of High Commission for moral offences confronted him again; and all this was in addition to his religious role. At a basic level, a richer and more powerful Church could only be reconstituted at the expense of lay landowners, irrespective of their religious views. None the less, it is possible to find examples of individual nobles and gentry who liked the reform programme in its own right; and had it been given time to settle down, and been associated with a prosperous and successful royal regime in all other respects, then most might have been reconciled to it.