A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660

by Hutton, Ronald

  Why was this? In part it was due to the remarkable skill of Covenanter propaganda. The invading Scots denied that they were rebels, insisting instead that they were petitioners, loyal to their king but asking him for better government. They likewise told the English that they came as friends and liberators, simply to ensure that public opinion in England could be freely expressed through a Parliament once more. At the same time they released a clandestine stream of propaganda into England, warning its people of a conspiracy to subvert both Protestantism and liberty, throughout the British Isles, of which the king was a tool or dupe. By contrast, Charles’s actions were of a kind suited to produce the worst impressions. Once again, his dislike of debate had prevented his government from being able to inform his subjects, systematically, of why it was in their interests to fight the Scots.

  On dismissing the Short Parliament, he had commenced desperate talks with the Spanish, to borrow some of their soldiers – from the most feared Catholic army in Europe, and the one still occupying his sister’s realm – to crush the Scots. These came to nothing, but news of them leaked. At the same time, the queen was mobilizing Catholic support for her husband at home. In character, his Personal Rule had reduced the executions of priests to a tiny number, but had fined Catholics in general with a new efficiency to swell royal coffers. It was doubtful, therefore, how much gratitude they owed him, but many rallied to the call of Henrietta Maria in the hope of earning Charles’s favour. All this did much to lend credence to the Covenanter charge of a popish conspiracy, as did the fact that for some years the king had entertained a papal envoy at court, the first since the Reformation. These developments all lent new weight to those who had always argued that Arminianism was itself a means of reintroducing Catholicism by stealth. The sense that royal religious policy menaced traditional norms and freedoms was reinforced by Charles’s decision to allow Convocation, the assembly of the Church of England, to carry on sitting once the Short Parliament had dispersed, when customarily the two institutions sat side by side. The Convocation concerned enacted a series of measures to reinforce Arminian control of the Church.

  Most important of all, perhaps, was the extent of the king’s military failure. Because of the superiority of English resources, the Scots had only managed to inflict shattering defeats on the English thrice before, in 685, 1297 and 1314; and in all those cases they were fighting on home ground. Never before had they forced the English to sue for peace on their own soil. To an age in which many people believed profoundly that worldly events reflected the direct will of an interventionist God, this unique humiliation strongly suggested that Charles was peculiarly lacking in divine favour. This was particularly evident because the king had stirred up the struggle with the Covenanters for religious reasons, and the taint of it was extended to the churchmen who had abetted him in both kingdoms: the twin campaigns of 1639 and 1640 acquired the enduring nickname of ‘the Bishops’ Wars’.

  To those with more secular instincts, it indicated that the government was in dangerously incompetent hands. This is probably the single greatest reason for the Long Parliament’s comprehensive rejection of the policies and personnel of the former regime. A settlement might have been reached in 1641 in which Charles accepted a new financial system, new guarantees for his subjects’ rights, a non-Arminian Church, and new ministers chosen from the critics of the old. This chance was, however, prevented by the Scots, without whose support Parliament would be at the king’s mercy again, and who wanted it to take two key initiatives in return. One was to reform the Church of England to make it more Scottish, getting rid of bishops and the Elizabethan liturgy. This would, of course, safeguard the Covenanters’ Kirk, but it split the Long Parliament between those, mostly traditional Puritans, who wanted to take this step, and many others, especially in the Lords, who wanted to retain the Elizabethan Church. The other initiative was to ensure that the man whom the Covenanters regarded as their most dangerous enemy, the Earl of Strafford, was pushed out of public life, preferably by being executed.

  Had Charles been prepared to sack Strafford immediately, and have him locked up, there would have been no crisis, and the earl would probably have survived. Instead he insisted that, in law, Strafford had done no wrong, and chose to make the matter a test of his own authority and view of government. Technically, Charles was correct, and so the Commons adopted against Strafford the very dubious mechanism of an Act of Attainder, that declared people traitors who had rebelled or conspired and then fled so that they could not be put on trial. This had never been used before against somebody who was actually available to be tried. It is possible that the Parliament would not have passed it had not mobs of Londoners intimidated the Lords, and the king not alienated waverers by trying to frighten the Parliament with the covert threat of using his army to cow it. Charles had the right to veto the Bill but, faced with the will of the two Houses and angry crowds, his nerve gave way again. Strafford was beheaded in May 1641, breaking Charles’s record as a king who did not kill politicians and scarring the king’s conscience for the rest of his life. In a very real sense the blood that gushed from the earl’s neck was the first of the English Civil War; more than that, it started a cycle of violence that was to last for over 100 years. Not until the 1750s would the sequence of vengeance and counter-vengeance that commenced with Strafford’s death be fully played out.

  In the first stage of this feud, the king’s resentment was directed against the ‘junto’ or group of politicians who had proved most influential in obtaining the death of the earl, led by figures such as the Earl of Warwick and Lord Saye and Sele in the Lords, and John Pym and John Hampden in the Commons. Even before the calling of the Long Parliament, these men had developed a commitment to limit and constrain royal power in England. Whether this was an inevitable ambition on their part may be doubted. All were associated with an evangelical Protestantism bordering on or shading into Puritanism, and had Charles turned out to be a Protestant zealot, with a love of preaching and a hatred of Catholicism, they would probably have cheerfully supported a stronger monarchy. As it was, the king’s Arminian beliefs had alerted them to the dangers of its existing strength; conversely, the Arminians, aware of their minority position in the Church and dependence on royal favour for advancement, had worked for a more powerful Crown. After Strafford died, moreover, the ‘junto’ had an additional reason for working to constrain royal freedom of action: that Charles would never forgive them for the judicial murder of his loyal servant.

  Once again, Charles tried to learn from mistakes. He had been too rigid before; now he made a series of sensational surrenders to buy off most of his critics. In England he consented to the greatest constitutional changes for almost four centuries: agreeing that no more than three years could henceforth pass without a Parliament in session; that the Long Parliament could only be dissolved with its own consent; and that the Tudor Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, whereby the royal council had sat as judicial tribunals, be abolished, along with the regional councils. He took a new set of ministers and advisers drawn from opponents of the Personal Rule who were not in the ‘junto’, and appointed non-Arminian bishops, leaving Laud shut up in the Tower of London. On the strength of these, the Scots went home and both armies were paid off by the English Parliament. In the late summer the king went to Scotland himself, gave a bonanza of honours to the leading Covenanters and signed away virtually all royal powers over the Scottish Kirk and state. He hoped that in return the Scots would give him a free hand to deal with the English; which seemed more likely because of the disappointment of the Covenanters with their English allies for failing to carry out the expected reform of the Church of England. As he returned south in the autumn, Charles could have real hopes that the Long Parliament would grant him a new financial settlement and then go home, leaving him to consolidate his power anew. So it might have done, had he been ruler of only two kingdoms; but, like everybody else in Britain, he had forgotten the Irish.

  Straff
ord’s final achievement had been to unite the different religious and ethnic groups in Ireland against himself so effectively that they all helped to feed ammunition against him to his enemies in Britain. Once he was dead, their brief alliance dissolved. The Catholics, especially those of English descent, applied to the king again for security for their lands and religion and opportunities to gain office. To grant these would have secured the peace of the land, but Charles dared not do so for fear of infuriating most of the English, Scots and Protestant Irish. What he did instead was to assure some Catholic leaders privately of his personal goodwill, while putting Ireland under the rule of a panel of aggressive Protestants allied to the Long Parliament. Those who held to the old religion now began to fear a renewed attack on it, and this was accentuated in the summer, when the Long Parliament casually pronounced final judgment in a legal case, brought by a settler called Sir Henry Stewart, which concerned events on Irish soil. The matter was a small one, and its implications probably not discerned at Westminster; but they were immense, for the English Parliament had just extended its authority to the other kingdom, and the Parliament concerned was vehemently hostile to Catholicism. Some Catholics now began to plot a rebellion to win real security for Irish self-government and for their own religion and property. It was intended to repeat the success of the Scots in winning back control of their own affairs, and was launched upon an almost wholly unsuspecting Irish government, and Protestant population, in October.

  It proved to be a terrible mistake, for in two vital respects it fell short of the Covenanters’ achievement. It failed to capture the whole land, and in particular left the capital, Dublin, in the government’s hands. Furthermore, whereas the Covenanter rebellion had been almost bloodless, the Irish Rebellion of 1641 precipitated the greatest civilian massacre in the history of the British Isles. On joining it, local Catholics often took the opportunity to seize back lands occupied by Protestant settlers, and to rob them to exact compensation for the profits lost from it. The settlers increasingly resisted, and were killed, while others who were driven off, stripped of their possessions, died of exposure. Soon slaughters of local Catholics were commencing in retaliation. The total number of those who died in October to December 1641 will never be known: it could come to anything from 3,000 to 12,000. Fearing that they would be caught up in the Protestant counter-attacks, for the first time in history the Old English, the Catholic descendants of medieval settlers, joined the native Irish en masse against the government. As a wave of panic-stricken refugees burst upon English shores, the rumoured figure of Protestant deaths alone reached 100,000. The British in general clamoured for bloody retribution, and both Scots and English prepared to send over armies. In England this development precipitated an acute new political crisis. By all traditional rights, the power to raise and control the force sent from England lay with the monarch; but Charles’s opponents in Parliament dared not entrust him with it for fear that, having put down the Irish rebels, he would turn it upon those whom he detested at home. For the last two months of the year, the ‘junto’ and its allies fought to convince the Long Parliament that the king was not fit to exercise one of the sovereign’s oldest rights, convincing a slight majority of the Commons and a minority of the Lords. Eventually, they decided to put further pressure on Charles to submit by preparing for a legal attack upon his queen.

  His response, in January 1642, consisted of two successive panic reactions. The first was to attempt to break his enemies, once and for all, by arresting their five leading figures in the Commons, including Pym and Hampden, and charging them with treason. The attempt failed, and the corporation of London and a clear majority of the Commons now concluded firmly that the king could not be trusted. His second was to flee London for the provinces, determined not to return except with an army to protect himself. This in itself forced his opponents left behind in the capital to raise soldiers to defend themselves against him. Both were literally afraid for their lives, Charles now convinced that the ‘junto’ intended to destroy both him and the monarchy and his enemies believing that their monarch was either involved in, or being manipulated by, an international Catholic conspiracy to annihilate Protestantism and English liberties. Both were wrong, but these rival strains of paranoia brought about the complete collapse of the English political system.

  By handing his opponents London, the king almost lost the conflict at the start, for by late summer his enemies had used its resources, and those of the rich surrounding counties, to mobilize a much larger and more compact strike force. Charles’s adherents were still scattered across the realm. He was saved by the Welsh, whose loyalty gave him a compact area of solid support. He was able to cross England to Shrewsbury, and settle there, with the Welsh covering his back and sending reinforcements, to gather the soldiers pouring in from many parts of England. By October he had an army as large as that of Parliament (as his enemies now termed themselves): the Irish had precipitated, the Welsh had ensured, and the Scots had failed to prevent, a conflict which was to go down in history as the English Civil War.

  CIVIL WAR AND REVOLUTION

  (1642–49)

  The Course of the Civil War

  The Great Civil War of the English state ended in the victory of the Long Parliament, but four years were needed to achieve that, from the summer of 1642 to that of 1646, with isolated castles in Wales and in the Bristol Channel holding out for the king until 1647. This pattern of events begs two major questions: why did the king lose, and why did he take so long to do so? In recent years a brisk debate has broken out over the first of those, between Malcolm Wanklyn and Clive Holmes. The former held that the outcome of the war had depended on the achievements and errors of commanders; while Holmes argued that it was inevitable as Parliament had better resources and exploited them more effectively. Who seems to be the more correct?

  It may be proposed that Parliament had three enormous advantages, the lack of any of which would have doomed it to defeat. The greatest was that the Scottish Covenanters came to its rescue when the war seemed to be turning against it, for fear that a victorious Charles would then seek revenge upon them for their humiliation of him in 1640. This gave Parliament the resources of a complete extra kingdom, the only one with a land frontier with England across which troops could easily be moved. Most of the north of England was controlled at that time by the Royalists, so that the king’s war effort was effectively being stabbed in the back. The Scottish army which invaded at the opening of 1644 was enormous, containing 22,000 infantry alone when the total size of any single English force raised on either side in this war was less than 18,000 men. Its arrival was the decisive factor in the loss of most of the north to the king within eight months. Ever after that, the total manpower available to Charles was smaller than that at the disposal of his enemies. In most battles, and all the largest, his supporters were henceforth facing superior numbers.

  The second major reason for Parliament’s victory was its firm control of London and the south-eastern quarter of England. The capital now contained 400,000 people in a land in which no other city had more than 20,000, and was the centre of the nation’s commerce and financial credit. It also had the established institutions of government and the central law courts, and the printing industry. To hold it gave not only huge material advantages but great prestige at home and abroad. The London and Middlesex militia provided a constant pool of manpower to reinforce armies in emergencies, while the presses meant that all through the war Parliamentarian newspapers and pamphlets outnumbered those published by Royalists by at least three to one. The wealth of the whole region meant that London, the south-eastern counties and East Anglia could each raise a separate field army. It was also the biggest industrial area of the nation, especially in armaments, while within a month of the outbreak of fighting, Parliament had secured the land’s three main magazines of arms and ammunition, at London, Hull and Portsmouth. For the first year of the war, the king’s operations were repeatedly halted for lack of mili
tary supplies. London was also the core of the national trading system, and indeed Parliament always controlled the main ports of the south and east coasts, from Hull around to Poole, plus Plymouth, Gloucester and Pembroke, each of which could jam a local commercial network.

  The third great advantage that Parliament held was the royal navy, whose support was won because its popular admiral, the Earl of Warwick, was a firm Parliamentarian, and then confirmed by a large pay rise for the sailors. This put the seas around Britain at Parliament’s disposal. Its warships could disrupt trade from Royalist ports and cut Charles’s communications with the Continent, especially important as he desperately needed to import weapons and munitions to make up for his initial shortage of them. It also meant that when his adherents conquered territory, they found it impossible to take all the seaports. Places such as Pembroke, Plymouth, Lyme and Hull could stand up to siege indefinitely because they could be constantly supplied and reinforced by the navy. By contrast, Royalist ports were always in danger of being attacked from both land and sea at once, a factor which led to the loss of several, including Tenby, Warrington and Liverpool. More generally, Parliament’s sea power meant that whereas East Anglia and Kent were far enough from the king’s quarters to be safe from attack, there was no part of Royalist territory which was secure because Parliamentarian warships could always get around behind it. Parliament could garrison its hinterland lightly and turn it into a source of supplies, money and recruits. The king’s most remote areas, on the other hand, had to be kept filled with soldiers to guard them against an amphibious operation. These garrisons ate up a lot of resources on the spot, denying them to the field armies.