Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution

by Peter Ackroyd

  ‘What do the Arminians hold?’

  ‘All the best livings in England.’

  Yet the Calvinists, and the puritans, did not go gently into the dark. The victory of the Laudian cause in the king’s counsels, more than anything else, stirred the enmity between opposing religious camps that defined the last years of his reign. It should be added, however, that these doctrinal discontents wafted over the heads of most parish clergy and their congregations who attended church as a matter of habit and took a simple attitude towards the gospels and the commandments.

  Within a few weeks of the dissolution of parliament Charles finally determined to banish his wife’s priests and ladies-in-waiting from his court. While parliament had still been in session the queen’s religious counsellors advised her to go on a pilgrimage to Tyburn, in bare feet, in order to pray for the souls of those Catholics who had been executed there. It was soon murmured she had offered up her prayers for the cause of dead traitors rather than of martyrs.

  Resentment, and even anger, had already risen between husband and wife. She was merry enough with her French followers but in the presence of the king she was sullen and morose; she apparently took no delight in his company. They quarrelled over her wish to distribute some of her lands and houses among her entourage. ‘Take your lands to yourself,’ Charles himself reports her as saying. ‘If I have no power to put whom I will into these places, I will have neither lands nor houses of you. Give me what you think fit by way of pension.’

  ‘Remember to whom you speak,’ the king replied. ‘You ought not to use me so.’

  They continued to argue and, in the king’s own recollection of the scene, ‘then I made her both hear me and end that discourse’. The court, too, had ears.

  At the beginning of August, after a meeting of the privy council, Charles called for the queen. She declined the invitation on the grounds that she had a toothache. So with his council in attendance he proceeded to the queen’s private chambers where he found her French attendants, according to a contemporary letter-writer, Mr Pory, ‘unreverently dancing and curvetting in her presence’. He summarily brought the party to a close, and took Henrietta Maria to his own chambers where he told her that he was sending the French attendants back to Paris ‘for the good of herself and the nation’. The queen was momentarily bewildered but then, in a fit of temper or frustration, broke the windows in the chamber with her bare hands in order to speak to her people in the courtyard below. Whereupon the women ‘howled and lamented as if they were going to an execution’.

  The loudest protests could not prevail against the king’s angry will. For some days the French refused to leave the queen’s court. At that point Charles lost all patience. He commanded Buckingham ‘to send all the French away tomorrow out of the town; if you can, by fair means – but stick not long in disputing – otherwise force them away, driving them away like so many wild beasts until you have shipped them, and so the devil go with them! Let me hear of no answer but the performance of my command.’ He could use a peremptory tone even with his favourite.

  Eventually, under the escort of the Yeomen of the Guard, the French boarded the vessels for their return. As they went down to the Thames by the river stairs of Denmark House, a crowd of Londoners hooted and jeered at them; one of them threw a stone that knocked off the hat of Mme de Saint-Georges. The whole episode incensed the French king, who told the English envoy that his sister had been cruelly treated. It was not a propitious moment to alienate Louis XIII.

  The dissolution of the parliament, for example, led ineluctably to urgent attempts to raise money for the king’s war against Spain. A loan of £100,000 was requested from the merchants of London, with the crown jewels as security. The appeal was denied. In the following month it was proposed that the freeholders of the various counties would provide a ‘free gift’ to the Crown; the clergy were ordered ‘to stir up all sorts of people to express their zeal to God and their duty to the king’. Charles also decided that he must continue to levy the customs revenues of ‘tonnage and poundage’ even though parliament had not given its consent. When contributions to the ‘free gift’ were about to be collected in Westminster Hall, the cry was raised of ‘A parliament! A parliament!’ Throughout August and September the refusal to contribute to the king’s coffers became widespread. It was then decreed that the king’s plate should be sold.

  In the middle of August 200 pressed soldiers and sailors made their weary way from Portsmouth to London in order to demand the money still owed to them. By chance or design they came upon the duke of Buckingham’s coach; they stopped it and pleaded for redress. Buckingham promised to deal with their demands later in the day, but he escaped by way of the Thames and returned to the security of York House. This was in any case a time of deep distress among the general populace. The great nineteenth-century historian of prices, Thorold Rogers, stated that ‘I am convinced, from the comparison I have been able to make between wages, rents and prices, that it was a period of excessive misery among the mass of the people and the tenants, a time in which a few might have become rich, while the many were crushed down into hopeless and almost permanent indigence’. The condition of England now looked to some to be beyond repair. One contemporary asked, ‘Is it not time to pray?’

  13

  Take that slime away

  The king’s war against Spain and the imperial forces was not going well. Christian of Denmark had depended upon subsidies from his nephew, Charles, but of course no money was forthcoming; on 27 August 1626, his demoralized forces were defeated by the armies of the Catholic League at Lutter in Lower Saxony. As a result the Protestants of north-west Europe could become the prey of the imperialist armies. On hearing the news of the battle Charles abandoned his summer progress and returned to London where he told the Danish ambassador that he would defend King Christian ‘even at the risk of his own crown and hazarding his life’. The king’s council wished to send four regiments, each comprising 1,000 men, to Denmark, but how were they to be paid?

  After the failure of the ‘free gift’ proposed for the king, and the small sums of money raised by the sale of his plate, the time had come for more severe and aggressive measures. In the autumn of 1626 the king imposed what was essentially a forced loan, and demanded from the counties the equivalent of five parliamentary subsidies. His decision was in part prompted by his deep reluctance to call another parliament. He would manage his finances without the meddling of certain malicious members. He wrote to the various lords-lieutenant of the counties ordering them to put forward the names of their local dignitaries, with details of the amounts they could afford; he also wrote to the peers, asking them to be generous in their financial support. He condemned those who cried out against the loans as ‘certain evil-disposed persons’; he declared that he must have the money to subsidize himself and his armed forces and that the duty of all true subjects, in the absence of parliamentary agreement, was ‘to be a law unto themselves’. He might have added, in a phrase of the period, that ‘need knows no law’.

  The general response of the country seems for once to have been favourable. The exigencies of the country, and the possible defeat of the Protestant cause, prompted most communities into payment. It was granted that, in an emergency, the king had the right to call upon special aid. The people of Thetford in Norfolk, for example, ‘were all very willing to yield’. By November the forced tax had raised something close to £250,000, sufficient for the king’s immediate requirements. Charles himself admitted that the money had been ‘more readily furnished than I could have expected in these needy times’.

  The judiciary was uncertain about the legality of any forced loan, however, and refused to sign a paper of consent to its imposition. The king called in the chief justice and dismissed him from his office as a warning and encouragement to others. He threatened to sweep all recalcitrant magistrates from their benches, but in so doing he damaged the authority of the judges as well as his own. It was reported that from this ti
me forward they were no longer considered to be impartial or disinterested, and it was long remembered that the king had demanded the resignations of those who refused to accede to his requests. If they possessed opinions of their own, they were to be treated with contempt.

  Some were still unwilling to pay the forced loan. The wealthier of these recalcitrants were summoned before the privy council, where they were either dispatched to prison or confined in private houses away from their homes and families; the poorer of them were pressed into the army or navy, where their bodies might serve instead of their money. Among those who refused payment were five knights, who decided to challenge the legality of the loan in the courts and were subsequently placed in their county prisons. They would become the cause of much discontent against the king.

  Another opponent acquired great popularity in later years. John Hampden, a Buckinghamshire squire and former member of parliament, was summoned at the end of January 1627 to explain his refusal to pay the forced loan. ‘I could be content to lend,’ he replied, ‘but fear to draw on myself that curse in Magna Carta which should be read twice a year against those who infringe it.’ He was claiming, in other words, that the king had challenged the fundamental rights and liberties of the people. He was consigned to the Gatehouse prison at Westminster for a year and was so strictly held that, according to a contemporary account, ‘he never did afterwards look like the same man he was before’. Fifteen years later, in the same prison, Richard Lovelace wrote that:

  Stone walls do not a prison make,

  Nor iron bars a cage …

  Hampden’s mind remained at liberty. He became a celebrated parliamentary commander in the eventual civil war.

  Charles’s angry will may have begun to cloud his judgement. On the urgent submissions of the duke of Buckingham, it was now proposed to send a naval expedition against France in order to help the rebellion of the Huguenots against Louis XIII. For some months an unofficial maritime war had been taking place between the two countries, leading to the seizure of goods and ships in mutually escalating fashion. At the beginning of December 1626, an order was issued for the capture of all French vessels found in English waters. Three weeks later it was discovered that six or eight ships purchased by Louis from the Low Countries were now at Le Havre ready to sail against England; they had to be either taken or destroyed.

  The king was at this time contemplating a war against both France and Spain. To fight against one power was serious enough, but to fight against two at the same time might have been considered akin to folly. In the spring of 1627 new levies of men were dispatched to Portsmouth. It was the old story. Many of them were described as ‘base rogues’; there was no clothing for them, and the surgeons had not been paid. Their lordships in the council were happy to issue general orders without caring to follow them up; they were incapable of estimating military costs, and were often ignorant of local geography. They sent regiments to be billeted without informing the relevant county authorities. They were preparing to send wheat to the proposed army in France, but provided no means to grind it. The absence of any working bureaucracy proved fatal. The confusion could have been prevented only if local self-government had been somehow rendered compatible with national conscription. How could a war in Europe be maintained by the men and administrative machinery of the parishes and counties? A national army raised to fight overseas could be managed only by some form of central administration. The conditions of Stuart England made that impossible. So chaos ensued. The pressed men appeared at Portsmouth:

  With an old motley coat and a malmsey nose,

  With an old jerkin that’s out at the elbows,

  And with an old pair of boots drawn on without hose,

  Stuffed with rags instead of toes.

  The talk of a further expedition against France meant that London, according to Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, ‘was full of soldiers, and of young gentlemen who intended to be soldiers, or as like them as they could; great licence used of all kinds, in clothes, in diet, in gaming’. It was a city of dice and whores.

  On 11 June the king himself reviewed the fleet at Portsmouth and dined aboard the admiral’s vessel, where all were merry. The jokes and antics of the king’s fool, Archie, were said to have been memorable. The notion of English superiority at sea, despite the failure at Cadiz, persisted. The fleet sailed on 27 June 1627, with two principal purposes. The first was to contest the ambition of Richelieu, the pre-eminent minister of Louis XIII, to make his sovereign the master of the sea. That role was reserved for England. The second aim of the enterprise was to transport certain regiments to the port of La Rochelle, on the Atlantic coast of France; the Huguenots of that town had taken over its administration and were engaged in a struggle for their religious liberty with the French king. The neighbouring island of Rhé was already under royal control. Buckingham’s strategy was to occupy that part of it which managed the approaches to La Rochelle.

  So on the afternoon of 12 July the men leapt into the landing craft, covered by the fire from their ships. Buckingham was everywhere among them, encouraging them and urging them on. Yet his bravado was not enough. The men themselves were ill-disciplined, and not all of them were inclined to fight; some lingered on board and others did not take up the positions assigned to them. Those who reached the shore were in no hurry to move against the enemy. Buckingham went among them with his cudgel to drive them forward. All this was to no avail.

  The French seized the opportunity and rode down upon the English bands, threatening to drive them into the sea. Yet somehow a line of defence was established and the French forces, in difficult and swampy terrain, decided to retreat to the safe fortifications of the citadel of St Martin. Buckingham then ordered that the fort should be placed under siege.

  The siege turned into a blockade, but the suffering multiplied on both sides. The women and children within the fort cried out for mercy and for pity, where none were available, while Buckingham’s men were worn down by disease and lack of rations. He sent urgent messages to London for more troops and more supplies but the exchequer was, as always, empty. As winter came closer, the English forces grew weaker; they were now practically without food, money, or ammunition. It was reported in the middle of October that the English officers on Rhé were ‘looking themselves blind’ by scanning the seas with their telescopes for the sight of English ships.

  A last desperate assault was made upon the fort, but it was discovered that the scaling ladders were too short. There was nothing for it but to retreat. Yet even this was bungled. On 30 October the English were about to cross by wooden bridge to a smaller island from which they hoped to embark upon their ships; but it was not properly defended. Under prolonged fire the infantry and cavalry were lost in confusion. Many of them were shot down, while others drowned. It was estimated that 4,000 Englishmen had been killed, while the rest eventually made their weary way back to Portsmouth or to Plymouth. La Rochelle had not been relieved. A contemporary, Denzil Holles, observed that ‘every man knows that, since England was England, it received not so dishonourable a blow’. It was written of Buckingham himself:

  And now, just God, I humbly pray

  That thou wilt take that slime away.

  It was the second signal disaster, in the space of two years, under the duke’s command. His flags were now hanging in the cathedral of Notre Dame as a token of the nation’s shame. The people were soon calling him ‘the duke of Fuckingham’. Yet the king greeted his favourite with a cheerful face and effectively placed all the blame upon his own shoulders. ‘In this action you have had honour,’ Charles told him, ‘all the shame must light upon us here remaining at home.’ In truth Buckingham was not entirely culpable. He was a brave man but he was no strategist, a failure compounded by his scant attention to detail. Much of the fault, however, must lie with the administration at home that signally failed to provide the requisite money and supplies to its army overseas.

  The king called a council of war in which he pressed
for money to finance another expedition to La Rochelle which he had bound himself in honour to defend. His advisers counselled him once more to call parliament. It was the only way to raise money without a thousand complaints and legal challenges. Despite the fact that he expected only remonstrance and debate and petition from its members, he suffered himself to be persuaded.

  The atmosphere of parliament in 1628 was not promising. At the beginning of February, a month before the members met, letters had been sent out by the king explaining the necessity for ‘ship-money’ to furnish another fleet. ‘Ship-money’ had been a medieval device by which at times of crisis the navy was supplied with boats from the maritime towns; Charles now wished to extend ship-money over the entire country, and to raise it in terms of coin rather than craft. He ordered that the relevant county officials should ‘proceed according to the true worth of men’s lands and estates’. The fresh attempt to levy taxes, on a dubious legal principle, provoked furious discontent. Many of the towns and counties refused to pay. Lincolnshire rejected ‘the unusual and unexpected charge’; Somerset excused itself on the grounds that it ‘will be a precedent of a charge which neither they nor their predecessors did ever bear’. Charles, realizing that his will would be openly flouted and his orders disobeyed, conceded the matter a few days later. He had decided ‘wholly to rely on the love of our people in parliament’.

  He was deluding himself. Love was in short supply at Westminster. The king and favourite had not prepared the ground adequately for further demands upon the nation’s resources, and the court had made little effort to pack the Commons with its natural supporters at a time of crisis. A large number of those who met on 17 March 1628 were local men with local grievances; those who had refused to support the forced loan, for example, were almost sure of seats. A dependant of the duke of Buckingham, Sir Robert Pye, was named for one of the constituencies. The rallying cry went up for ‘A Pye! A Pye! A Pye!’ To which his adversaries called out ‘A pudding! A pudding! A pudding!’ and others joined in with ‘A lie! A lie! A lie!’ It was believed that the ‘patriots’ might trump the ‘court party’, and that parliament would not last eight days. It was even suspected by some that Charles and Buckingham had engineered such a result. If the parliament did not vote funds to the king, he would dismiss it and blame it for weakness and incapacity at a time of national danger.