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

by Peter Ackroyd

  When the king opened proceedings he declared that ‘these are times for action’; he wanted money, and was not interested in ‘tedious consultations’. He then piled insult upon insult by claiming that he did not intend to threaten them ‘for I scorn to threaten any but my equals’. It was becoming clear that the major confrontation would not be with Buckingham, the object of the previous parliament, but with the king himself.

  The mood of the Commons was not helped by the captivity of the five knights who, in the previous year, had been imprisoned for declining to pay the forced loan to the king. It was pleaded on their behalf that to refuse an illegal loan was no crime; if there was no crime, they could not remain in prison. The knights brought forward writs of habeas corpus to free themselves from illegal detention and declared that, according to Magna Carta, ‘no man should be imprisoned except by the legal judgement of his peers or by the law of the land’.

  The king’s defenders stated in return that the knights were imprisoned at the especial command of their sovereign, and that no other cause was necessary. There followed suitable obfuscation from the judges of the case. They decreed that they would not give the prisoners bail, but that the crown prosecution should at some stage show cause for their further detention. It was an ambiguous judgment but contemporary observers interpreted it as a victory for the king. He would now be able to commit his subjects to prison without due cause. No redress against his sovereign will was permitted.

  Sir Edward Coke therefore brought in a bill that prohibited anyone from being detained in prison without trial for more than two months; but this was not enough to avert the growing anger of the Commons. If the king could imprison his subjects for not providing him with money, as he had done in the case of the dissenting knights, where would his dominion end? ‘Upon this dispute,’ Eliot declared, ‘not alone our lands and goods are engaged, but all that we call ours. These rights, these privileges, which made our fathers free men, are in question.’ Thomas Wentworth, soon to become one of the most prominent men of the age, stood up to argue that there should be no more illegal imprisonment, no more pressing of men for foreign service, no forced loans and no billeting of soldiers on unwilling households.

  At the beginning of April a committee of the Commons agreed three resolutions to be put to the king. No free man might be consigned to prison without cause; everyone had the right to a writ of habeas corpus; every prisoner was to be freed or bailed if no cause could be shown for his detention. The king was growing impatient. He wished the members to vote him financial supply without any delay. He did not understand why they were so insistent upon their so-called liberties. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘why should any hinder them of their liberties?’ Parliament was not to be moved. The members decided to draw up a bill on the liberty of persons and property before even considering any matters of money.

  Charles seemed to believe that this was no longer a simple matter of grievances to be redressed in the ancient fashion, but an attempt to limit royal sovereignty. A message came to the Commons that the king had taken note that ‘this House pressed not upon the abuses of power but upon power itself’. ‘Power’ was a grand word, but what was its meaning? The debate continued, with the king suggesting that all would be well if only the monetary supply was granted. It was a question of relying upon ‘his royal word and promise’. On 5 May a parliamentary remonstrance was presented to him on the matters under dispute. The king, in reply, was willing to pledge that he would not act in the manner he had done in the past; but he refused to allow that any of his future actions could be determined by parliament. The uses of ‘power’ could be curtailed, in other words, but ‘power’ itself remained his to wield as he saw fit.

  This was not a satisfactory conclusion. The royal promises were too vague. No fundamental principles had been agreed. It was still not clear whether the king was above the law or the law above the king. A committee was drawn up to prepare a ‘petition of right’ which itself became an important statement of constitutional principle; the notable historian, Thomas Babington Macaulay described it as ‘the second great charter of the liberties of England’. It cited the statutes passed in the reigns of Edward I and Edward III; it deplored the fact that ‘your people have been in diverse places assembled and required to lend certain sums of money unto your majesty’, and demanded that ‘no freeman be taken or imprisoned’ without due process of law. It also complained that ‘great companies of soldiers and mariners have been dispersed into diverse counties of the realm’. The petition really contained nothing novel or radical, despite the king’s autocratic sensitivities, and can most profitably be interpreted as a conservative document essentially restating what many considered to be the ancient constitution of the country. It can be concluded, however, that the king was not trusted in the same way as some of his predecessors.

  By the end of May, after much debate, the petition had been adopted by both the Commons and the Lords; to sweeten what might be for Charles a bitter pill it was also agreed to offer the king five subsidies. In other circumstances he would no doubt have rejected the petition as a sheer abrogation of his rights and duties, but his foreign policy was in disarray. La Rochelle had still received no aid from England, despite the promises the king had made, and the fall of key German towns to the imperialist forces meant that English intervention in north-western Europe had for all practical purposes come to an inglorious end.

  So the king was in urgent need of the money from parliament if he was to retain any shred of honour in foreign policy. Yet he prevaricated. He asked the judges certain leading questions concerning the petition, to which they gave cautious replies. ‘Gentlemen,’ he told the assembled parliamentarians before granting them his answer, ‘I am come here to perform my duty. I think no man can think it long, since I have not taken so many days in answering the petition as you spent weeks in framing it…’ His impatience was clear. With his finances in parlous state, and his foreign devices wrecked, all these men could do was debate and debate about the ‘rights’ of the people. The king then announced his reply to the petition. He declared merely that ‘right should be done according to the laws and customs of the realm’. His words gave no comfort at all, since it was still the privilege of the king to judge what those ‘laws’ and ‘customs’ actually were.

  The men of parliament were neither impressed nor reassured. When they met to consider their answer they remained seated for a while in a profound and melancholy silence; when certain members did eventually rise to their feet, their speeches were often interrupted by their tears. Sir John Eliot summoned up their spirits with the stern declaration that at home and abroad all was confused and uncertain. Our friends overseas had been defeated, and our enemies had prospered. The cause of Protestantism in Germany, and the recapture of the Palatinate, had been sacrificed as a result of the king’s obsessions with a war against the French king. One member, Humphrey May, was about to interrupt him; but the rest of the house called out to Eliot, ‘Go on! Go on!’

  ‘If he goes on,’ May said, ‘I hope that I may myself go out.’

  ‘Begone! Begone!’

  But May stayed to listen to Eliot’s oratory. ‘Witness [the journey] to Cadiz! Witness the next! Witness that to Rhé! Witness the last! And I pray to God we shall never have more such witnesses!… Witness all! What losses we have sustained! How we are impaired in munition, in ships, in men!’ At the close of his impassioned peroration he demanded a statement of grievances, or ‘remonstrance’, to be addressed to the king.

  It seems that he was about to name Buckingham as the source of all regal problems, but he was stopped from doing so by the Speaker. The king then sent a message, absolutely forbidding the members further to discuss matters of state on pain of instant dismissal. In the face of this command, touching the liberties of parliament, one member after another rose to speak; others sat on the benches and wept. Joseph Mead, the contemporary writer of newsletters, reported that ‘there appeared such a spectacle of passions
as the like had seldom been seen in such an assembly, some weeping, some expostulating, some prophesying of the fatal ruin of our kingdom … I have been told by a Parliament man that there were above an hundred weeping eyes; many who offered to speak being interrupted and silenced by their own passions.’ It was a sensitive and tearful age, in which political and religious controversy were not to be distinguished from personal passion. Eventually Sir Edward Coke rose to ask, ‘Why may we not name those that are the cause of all our evils? The duke of Buckingham – that man is the grievance of grievances.’ At that remark the Commons erupted in acclamations. It was said that, when one good hound recovers the scent, the rest come in with a full cry.

  On 7 June Charles, now aware of the danger to his favourite and acutely conscious that his financial needs must be satisfied, took his seat upon the throne in the Lords. In front of the peers, and the members of the Commons who crowded to the bar, he ordered that his previous inconclusive answer to the ‘petition of right’ should be removed and that new words take its place. ‘Soit droit fait comme il est désiré.’ This was the usual formula of assent that conferred legality on parliamentary measures: ‘Let right be done as is desired.’ He then added that ‘now I have performed my part. If this parliament have not a happy conclusion, the sin is yours. I am free from it.’ The result was delight in parliament itself, and celebration in the streets beyond; the bells were rung and the bonfires were kindled.

  Yet the general satisfaction did not prevent parliament from pressing still further against the king. The remonstrance against Buckingham was presented to Charles on 17 June, to which he responded with a few words. He would consider their grievances ‘as they should deserve’. Buckingham himself was not disturbed by the charges against him and is reported to have said that ‘it makes no matter what the Commons or parliament do, for without my leave and authority they shall not be able to touch the hair of a dog’.

  The Commons, not happy with the royal reception of their remonstrance, then went into committee on the question of the king’s finances. The king ordained that the parliament should end in the next week. Whereupon a second remonstrance was prepared declaring that the king’s collection of customs duties and other taxes without parliamentary assent was ‘a breach of the fundamental liberties of this kingdom’. Before the debate could commence the king prorogued the assembly.

  So ended the parliamentary session. It has sometimes been seen as one of the most significant in the history of that institution. The members had reminded the king that he was not permitted to violate the liberties of his subjects, and they had obtained from him the recognition of those rights they believed to be most important. Yet the celebrations on the street were perhaps premature. Three days after the conclusion of the proceedings, the king ordered a recall of the second answer he had given ‘to be made waste paper’. He also ordered the reprinting of his first unsatisfactory answer, together with a series of qualifications to his second answer. In his closing speech to parliament, he had said that ‘my meaning … was not to grant any new privileges but to re-edify your old’, which could mean anything or nothing.

  He prevaricated in his usual fashion, therefore, and as a result diminished the respect in which he was held. It was difficult to believe now in his good faith. One contemporary diarist, John Rous, noted that ‘our king’s proceedings have caused men’s minds to be incensed, to rave and project [scheme]’. It could of course be claimed, on his behalf, that he was merely protecting the power and authority of the sovereign. It is worth noting that the young Oliver Cromwell, member for the town of Huntingdon, was also part of this parliament.

  On the evening of 13 June, thirteen days before the prorogation, Buckingham’s physician and astrologer was noticed leaving the Fortune Theatre in the northern suburbs of the city; his name was Doctor Lambe. A crowd of apprentices recognized him and began to cry out, ‘The duke’s devil! The duke’s devil!’; they pursued him towards a cookhouse in Moorgate Street where he paid a group of sailors to guard him. By the time he left the cookhouse the mob had grown in size; he told them that he ‘would make them dance naked’, no doubt at the end of a rope. Still the people followed him, but at Old Jewry his guard beat them off. The crowd was now intent upon violence and, forcing him towards the Windmill Tavern in Lothbury, they beat him senseless with sticks and stones. One of his eyes was kicked out as he lay upon the cobbles. He was taken to a compter or small prison in Poultry where he died on the following morning.

  A couplet was soon being repeated everywhere:

  Let Charles and George [Buckingham] do what they can

  Yet George shall die like Dr Lambe.

  When the rhyme was discovered among a scrivener’s papers he confessed that he had heard it from one Daniel Watkins, who had in turn heard it recited by an illiterate baker’s boy. A Suffolk cleric recalled that ‘about September 3 I had related to me this foolish and dangerous rhyme, fruit of an after-wit’. So poems and ballads, commonly known as ‘libels’, circulated throughout the kingdom; they were often left on stairs or nailed to doors or pinned to gates. Some were even put in the open hands of conveniently placed statues. When the attorney general prosecuted a group of minstrels for singing scurrilous ballads about Buckingham, he referred to these ‘libels’ as ‘the epidemical disease of these days’. They are evidence of the political consciousness of the nation and of the ‘lower sort’, otherwise largely unheard. Even the baker’s boy had opinions about the king and ‘George’.

  The temperature of the nation was also being raised by the publication of printed ‘courants’ or ‘corantos’ in ever-increasing quantity; these were regular newsletters or news pamphlets that were circulated in taverns and in marketplaces together with the ‘libels’ that accompanied any great movement in the affairs of state. While many were printed, others were written by hand. The written varieties were considered more reliable, perhaps because they seemed to be more immediate or perhaps because of the authority of the correspondent. One of the writers of these papers called himself ‘your faithful Novellante’ or newsmonger; this is of course the derivation of the ‘novel’.

  In a similar movement of information any great stir in the county towns also reached the capital. The newsletters often deliberately helped to provoke controversy or division, so that, for example, the growing polarization between ‘court’ and ‘country’ – between ‘courtiers’ and ‘patriots’ – can only have been assisted by their partisan accounts. Ben Jonson’s masque, News from the New World, portrayed a writer of newsletters declaring that ‘I have friends of all ranks and of all religions, for which I keep an answering catalogue of dispatch wherein I have my Puritan news, my Protestant news and my Pontifical news’.

  Manuscript copies of the proceedings and debates of parliament of 1628, known as ‘separates’, were also issued at this time in perhaps the first example of parliamentary reporting. The great speeches of Sir John Eliot and others were thus available to the public, reinforcing the conclusion that parliament had indeed come to represent the will and voice of the people. It is perhaps significant that these papers were often to be found in the libraries of the gentry.

  After parliament had been prorogued, the king gave orders that all the gunpowder in London should be taken under royal control. The impression of overweening authority, close to arbitrariness, was further strengthened by the investiture of William Laud as the bishop of London in the following month. His exaltation of the king’s authority, and his demand for exact conformity, did not endear him to the ‘patriots’ of the kingdom who were eager to curb the royal prerogative.

  The king also elevated Sir Thomas Wentworth to the peerage. Wentworth had previously taken the part of parliament but, after the publication of the ‘petition of right’, he came to accept the king’s position on matters of sovereign control; he had arrived at the conclusion that the Commons were not fit to manage the affairs of the nation. He was condemned for abandoning his principles but he believed that parliament, not he hi
mself, had changed. He was soon to say in a speech that ‘the authority of a king is the keystone which closes up the arch of order and government’. With men such as Laud and Wentworth around him, what might the sovereign not dare to undertake? The atmosphere of the city was uneasy. It was reported that the citizens were filled with alarm, and were taking up arms for their own defence. It was rumoured that the duke and the king were ready to confront their enemies. No one knew what might happen next.

  14

  I am the man

  The plight of La Rochelle, still besieged by the forces of Louis XIII after the forced withdrawal of the English army, was extreme. Its inhabitants were reduced to eating grass and boiled cow-hides. It was reported that they cut off the buttocks of the dead, lying in the churchyard, for sustenance. The honour of the king, and of Buckingham, determined that they must once more come to the aid of the city. So in the spring and summer of 1628 a fleet was fitted out at Plymouth. The normal delays ensued. ‘I find nothing’, Buckingham wrote, ‘of more difficulty and uncertainty than the preparations here for this service of Rochelle.’ He was so despised at home that he had been asked to wear protection in order to ward off any attempt at assassination. He replied that ‘a shirt of mail would be but a silly defence against any popular fury. As for a single man’s assault, I take myself to be in no danger. There are no Roman spirits left.’