A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660

by Hutton, Ronald

  In the last analysis, the question of how popular the Personal Rule was, until its last year, is impossible to solve. The channels that could have expressed public opinion – Parliaments and newspapers – were both missing. It proves nothing to follow the example of some scholars and cite the private grumbles of Puritans, such as the over-quoted Robert Woodford of Northampton, as examples of a general response, as Puritans were the very people whom one would expect to be most offended by the reforms. It is certainly true that opposition could be very well concealed: Sir Symonds D’Ewes was a conscientious collector of Ship Money who never seems to have expressed any doubts about it to his friends, but in private notes he called it illegal and a ‘fatal blow’ to liberty. He was, however, still an unusual individual, more politically aware and more Puritan than most, and it is again uncertain to what degree he can be treated as representative.

  What is clear is that the Personal Rule was not a single period. Between 1629 and 1636 English government still ran on fairly normal early Stuart lines, with some new initiatives and changes of emphasis. From 1637 it turned into something novel, as Ship Money and the religious reform began to bite and the gap between Parliaments slowly became more and more unusual. From that year onwards, however, the regime was also becoming locked into a crisis in Scotland, which was to drive it into ever less popular courses and greater humiliations, and eventually to bring it down; and it is impossible to tell the story of these years without that external factor, or to judge how English government might have fared without it. It can be concluded that the Personal Rule was always intended as a stop-gap period of recuperation, rather than as a permanent way of governing. There is every sign that Charles now feared English Parliaments, but none that he wanted to dispense with them on principle. What he seems to have hoped is that firm and successful government would eventually restore the loyalty of his people and silence his critics. By doing what he took to be his God’s will, he expected that he would enable that God to make sure that things turned out well. In the last analysis, it may be suggested that historians cannot know where the Personal Rule was leading, because the ruler did not know himself.

  The Collapse of the Stuart Monarchies

  At the end of the 1720s, the satirical author Jonathan Swift had one of his characters sum up the political history of England during the previous hundred years as ‘only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice and ambition could produce’. In many respects that is a reasonable judgement. In the first four decades of the seventeenth century, England had probably been the most peaceful monarchy in Europe. Between 1640 and 1720, it suffered two civil wars, five invasions, three revolutions, six rebellions and thirteen changes of regime which involved some measure of physical force. The source of all this instability, as Conrad Russell first emphasized in the 1980s, lay in the union of three Crowns created in 1603, and the propelling force for it came from the kingdom which had been the least troublesome for most of the early Stuart period: Scotland.

  Just as the arrival of James I in England created serious strains for that polity, so the removal of James VI from his ancestral kingdom produced problems for the Scots. On the whole, he handled these with the same flair that he had brought to ruling Scotland before. He only actually returned for one visit, but he stopped his countrymen feeling abandoned by giving English money and offices to many of them, and a high profile for them at his new court. He also employed money saved by the removal of his household on to an English budget as a slush fund to placate the nobles he had left at home. This mattered, because the Scottish aristocracy was under economic pressure. During the sixteenth century, much of it had rented out lands on long leases to gentry, in an attempt to provide long-term financial security; a policy which backfired when the rents agreed were hit by the great inflation which affected Europe in the later part of the century. At the same time, both James and Charles greatly enlarged the size of the noble estate by creating many new titles. James also attempted to bring the two British kingdoms closer together, especially in the vital matter of religion. After his removal to England he persuaded the Scottish Parliament and the General Assembly of the Kirk to accept bishops again, although with less power over other churchmen than in England. Subsequently, he also got them to allow certain ecclesiastical ceremonies, and the observance of traditional festivals such as Easter and Christmas, which had been abolished in the more radical Scottish Reformation but retained in the English one. Those latter reforms, however, aroused so much opposition that James’s government in Scotland did not enforce them on ministers who found them unacceptable.

  That should have set up a boundary mark for Charles, of the point beyond which the Scots could not safely be pushed or cajoled, but it was one which he chose to ignore. The new king was not only absentee, but unknown, having left Scotland at the age of three and never been back; and he immediately took steps which highlighted the dangers of rule by a non-resident stranger. He tried to strengthen the royal finances by raising taxes and restricting the gifts to nobles. He tried to strengthen the Kirk by revoking all royal grants of land made since 1540. It was not his serious intention to take back all the estates concerned, but to force the laity to renegotiate the terms on which it held former Church land, so that the Kirk could get better endowments from them. It was far from clear that the king had the legal right to do this at all, and although the whole scheme eventually proved unworkable, and collapsed in a mire of disputes, it had given a bad shock to the nation’s political elite. Then Charles plunged Scotland into his wars with Spain and France, ruining its trade in conflicts which did not serve its own national interests at all. Through all this, the Scots remained loyal, biding their time until their new monarch turned up to be crowned and they could meet him at first-hand. He did so in 1633, and showed himself arrogant and insensitive, making clear in particular his preference for the English mode of worship and churchmanship, and especially the Arminian, which to Scots looked particularly popish.

  After this, a growing number of Scots who were unhappy with Charles’s way of ruling waited for an opportunity to confront him over it; and he now supplied them with the perfect one. The Reformation had left Scotland, unlike England, with no single liturgy, and Charles’s tidy mind could not allow this situation to continue. Between 1634 and 1637 he therefore had a national Prayer Book compiled, by a few Scottish bishops who consulted him and a few Scottish advisers at his court. It placed a heavier emphasis on ceremony than had hitherto been the custom in many parts of the reformed Kirk, and would make Scottish practice in some respects more similar to the English; though at one point it actually adopted a formula for the sacraments that was closer to Catholicism than contemporary English worship. As such, it was bound to cause major controversy, though had Charles been prepared to wear down opposition by long and detailed discussion in a Parliament and General Assembly, as his father had done, he might well have got at least most of it accepted. The crucial point was that he didn’t try, but imposed the book by direct royal decree, with every expectation that it would be enforced on all ministers. Once again, the legality of this action was dubious and his own Scottish Privy Council was unhappy about it, but Charles was not interested in its opinion. His behaviour in this regard was accompanied by another initiative, to give bishops a leading role in Scotland’s government to an extent not known even before the Reformation. It seemed to many Scots that churchmen were now being used as royal agents to control both kirk and state on behalf of a monarch ruling without proper concern for consent.

  As a result, when the Prayer Book was introduced in 1637, riots and protests erupted across the Central Lowlands, the area of greatest population and wealth and the seat of government. The Privy Council hoped that these would induce Charles to change his policy, but he at first refused. The result was one of the key documents of Scottish history: the Nat
ional Covenant signed by the protestors in February 1638. It was a defiant restatement of collective pride, emphasizing the unique virtues of the Kirk and arguing that it could only be reformed with the participation of Parliament and General Assembly. It called on the king to return it to its earlier condition, leaving open whether this should be as it was in 1625 or before. The Privy Council was generally favourable to the document, and even some bishops thought it had merit. Slightly less than half of the political nation had apparently gone over to the malcontents, for the Covenant was supported by thirty-nine out of eighty-one Scottish peers.

  Charles responded by cancelling his projected alliance with France in order to deal with the Scots, sending them a negotiator, his closest surviving domestic relative, the Marquis of Hamilton. Hamilton worked hard to persuade the Covenanters that the king was reasonable, and to persuade the king to be so. He told Charles, as tactfully as possible, that if he did not agree to what the Covenant asked then he would have to fight its supporters, and – prophetically – that this would risk his rule over all three kingdoms. The king, however, was not prepared to agree, as such a surrender would effectively broadcast his loss of control over the Kirk. The result was the worst of both worlds: the king allowed Hamilton to call a General Assembly to discuss reform, while the Covenanters became convinced that Charles could not be trusted. Nor could he; he was already planning a military strike against Scotland, and only agreed to the Assembly when he found that an army could not be ready that summer.

  As a result, the elections became a party contest between Covenanters and Royalists, and the Covenanters won, as the result of a factor which had never occurred to the king. He had expected the nation, at worst, to split in half like the nobility. Instead, two other groups overwhelmingly backed the Covenanters: the lesser landowners, or lairds, and the townspeople. These were the most nationalist and most fervently Protestant social blocs, and the lairds had become rich on the profits of the lands leased from the nobility. They represented most of the voters, were concentrated in the richest parts of Scotland and surrounded the seats of government; as the Scottish Crown had never kept a standing army, its representatives were helpless if these people turned nasty. The General Assembly that they voted in was overwhelmingly Covenanter, and persuaded by its leaders that the king was opposed to their wishes. Accordingly, they broke royal control of the Kirk by deposing the bishops altogether, which was an effective declaration of war. War was, of course, what Charles had planned if the Covenanters did not back down, and he now simply activated the plan for an invasion that he had suspended in 1638.

  The obvious question is, what Charles I thought he was doing. As he never spelled it out or drew up a blueprint, it can only be surmised from his actions. From the start, he had behaved as if his Scottish kingdom was a half-civilized backwater, to be tidied up as swiftly as possible and turned into an appendage to England. He appears to have expected the Scots to obey him in all things, and believed that his possession of two larger and richer kingdoms would enable him to steamroller them if they refused. In view of what he took to be his overwhelming superiority in resources, he could hardly have seen the need to give up what he took to be his most important duty, to run a national Church as he believed right. He was about to become the latest in a long line of rulers, from the Romans to the Tudors, to underestimate the people of Scotland.

  One of Charles’s worst weaknesses as a ruler was his fear of having royal policies debated and questioned in public, even if to do so would strengthen them and win them support. This was almost certainly why he would not submit his Scottish Prayer Book to a Parliament or General Assembly and he now became the first English monarch, since Parliaments were first instituted in the realm, to launch a full-scale war without calling one to gain political and financial support. Instead he relied on his regular income, and borrowing, to fund it, and the new strength of the royal fiscal system allowed him to do so for one year. The army that he led to the Scottish border in 1639 was deficient in training, discipline and equipment, but the expeditionary forces launched by Elizabeth usually had been no better; and Charles’s was much larger than those. His problem was that he had not expected to face much resistance at all, having relied on attacks from Ireland and the navy, and risings by loyal Scots, to break up the Covenanter war effort before he invaded. Instead, these diversionary measures had all failed, and he found himself faced by an army almost as large as his own, raised by imposing on Scotland the efficient Swedish system of local committees to raise money and recruits.

  This was the turning point of his reign. Had he decided to attack, he might very well have won. Had he sat still, in the strong position that he occupied at Berwick, his opponents would probably have run out of supplies within a few weeks, and disintegrated. In either case, his three kingdoms would have been at his mercy, to consolidate his policies in each as he chose. Instead he lost his nerve. His generals and counsellors were shocked by the strength of Scottish resistance – which they now overestimated instead of underestimating it as before – and he was not the leader to inspire them to fight despite their reservations. Both sides were glad to make a deal whereby they called off the war and agreed to talk the whole dispute out again from the beginning. The problem was that as soon as winter came they both got their courage back. A new General Assembly of the Kirk confirmed the acts of the last, and added a condemnation of bishops as contrary to Scripture itself. Then a Scottish Parliament, likewise dominated by Covenanters, endorsed these reforms and filled the gaps opened in the government by the eviction of the bishops with their own supporters. In retaliation, Charles decided to fight again.

  The regular financial system could not sustain a second year of war, and so the king reluctantly agreed to call a Parliament to obtain funds. When it met in April 1640, however, the Commons asked for concessions in return, such as the abolition of Ship Money, and after a few weeks of bargaining Charles lost patience and dissolved it, earning it the enduring nickname of ‘The Short Parliament’. Realistically, as Conrad Russell has pointed out, the king now had no alternative to giving the Covenanters all that they wanted, abandoning his policies in Scotland to keep them intact in England. Charles, however, still wanted to renew the war, and one councillor in particular agreed with him. He was Thomas Wentworth, who had been sent to rule Ireland on the king’s behalf for most of the 1630s. His actions there had made a sharp contrast with those of previous Stuart royal deputies, who had traditionally snubbed the Old English settlers and allied with New English incomers in order to steal more land from the native Irish. Wentworth, recognizing that Ireland had no settled land law, used this weakness to grab estates from all three groups in order to enrich the Crown, the Church and himself. In the process he made the kingdom pay for itself at last and raised from it a powerful army for royal service. He cowed opposition with trumped-up charges, and earned himself the nickname of ‘Black Tom Tyrant’. As Charles decided to renew the war with Scotland in 1640, he called over Wentworth, encouraging him with the title of Earl of Strafford, as just the kind of hard man the hour demanded. Strafford (as he now was) lived up to his reputation, persuading his master that the Irish army could be used to make up for the expected deficiencies of the English one, landing in Scotland to take the Covenanters in the rear.

  Once again the Scots pulled off a masterstroke, this time by carrying out a pre-emptive strike. They invaded England in August, with an army well recruited and supplied by the same revolutionary system of local committees. Strafford’s Irish forces were not yet ready, and nor was Charles. His regular fiscal system was indeed collapsing without parliamentary aid, and a third of his soldiers had no weapons. His army broke in half, as he sent the portion of it which was fully equipped up to meet the Scots, who outnumbered and outgunned them, and broke them in the first engagement. The Covenanter army then sat down on top of London’s coal supply, at Newcastle and Durham. Of all Charles’s councillors, only Strafford now wanted to go on fighting. The king was forced to ag
ree to a truce on terms by which he became responsible for paying the upkeep of the occupying Scottish army as well as his own, and agreed to call an English Parliament in order to make a lasting peace settlement. When what was to be known as the Long Parliament met in November, Charles still expected its Members to supply money to enable him to beat the Scots. Instead, they refused to proceed with the war, furiously condemned his whole system of government since 1629, and forced him to abandon his existing ministers.