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

by Peter Ackroyd

  On the morning of 23 August, the duke was staying at the house of Captain Mason on Portsmouth High Street; Mason was a naval administrator as well as an officer. Buckingham was at breakfast with his colleagues and some representatives from La Rochelle; after the meal was over, he came down into the hall of the house. He stopped to converse with one of his officers when a man, who had been standing in the passage, stepped forward and plunged a knife into his chest with the words ‘God have mercy upon thy soul!’ Buckingham staggered back but, crying out ‘Villain!’ managed to draw the knife from the wound. He tried to pursue his assailant but fell against a table before dropping to the floor.

  A great outcry went up among those assembled. The foreigners were suspected, and men cried out, ‘A Frenchman! A Frenchman!’ Others shouted, ‘Where is the villain? Where is the butcher?’

  ‘I am the man. Here I am.’ John Felton, with his sword in his hand, came forward. He might have been killed where he stood, but some of Buckingham’s officers surrounded him. The wife and sister-in-law of the dead man rushed to the corpse. ‘Ah, poor ladies,’ Dudley Carleton informed the queen, ‘such was their screechings, tears and distractions that I never in my life heard the like before, and hope never to hear the like again.’

  The news reached the king while he was at prayer in the royal chapel. When it was whispered in his ear his face betrayed little emotion and he stayed in his place until the service was over. Then he hurried to his private apartments, closed the doors and wept. It was reported that the king used to refer to him as ‘my martyr’. Charles believed, in other words, that his favourite had been murdered for carrying out his orders.

  Under examination it was revealed that John Felton had served in the disastrous expedition to Rhé, and that Buckingham had denied him promotion. The insult was compounded by the fact that Felton’s wages had not arrived. When he asked the duke how he was supposed to live, Buckingham is supposed to have replied that he could hang himself if he had not the means to survive. Felton returned to London, where he brooded on his misfortunes; he read the latest pamphlets, which accused Buckingham of poisoning the former king and of being the source of all the grievances of the realm. Four days before the assassination he purchased a tenpenny knife at a cutler’s shop on Tower Hill; he then visited a church in Fleet Street and asked the cleric for prayers as ‘a man much discontented in mind’. He made his way to Portsmouth, largely on foot, where he performed the deed. He had sewn certain messages in the crown of his hat, among them one in which he announced himself to be an executioner rather than an assassin: ‘He is unworthy of the name of a gentleman or a soldier, in my opinion, that is afraid to sacrifice his life for the honour of God, his king, and country.’ He had been the righteous killer of a reprobate who had brought Charles and England into jeopardy.

  In that opinion, he was almost universally sustained by the response of the people. The joy at Buckingham’s death was widespread and prolonged. Celebratory healths to Felton were drunk in the taverns of London, and congratulatory verses passed from hand to hand. When he was taken through Kingston on his way to the Tower, an old woman cried out, ‘God bless thee, little David.’ When he arrived at the Tower itself, a large crowd had gathered to greet him, calling, ‘The Lord comfort thee! The Lord be merciful to thee!’ Charles was much offended by these manifestations of popular sentiment, and he wrapped himself more deeply in the mantle of cold authority.

  The day before Felton’s arrival at the Tower, Buckingham’s funeral had taken place at Westminster Abbey in a hurried and apparently graceless manner with approximately one hundred mourners. But even this ceremony was mere theatre. The body had been privately interred the night before, to avoid any demonstrations against it by the London crowds. The poet and dramatist James Shirley wrote an appropriate epitaph:

  Here lies the best and worst of fate,

  Two kings’ delight, the people’s hate.

  Felton himself, after due trial, was executed at Tyburn; his body was then displayed in chains at Portsmouth dressed in the same clothes he wore when he killed the duke.

  The king now took sole charge of the administration. It was reported by his secretaries that he dispatched more business in two weeks than Buckingham had managed in three months. He told his privy council that he would postpone the opening of parliament until the following year. He retained the same ministers as before, but of course he did not trust them as much as he had trusted the duke. There would be no more royal favourites except, perhaps, for Henrietta Maria, who, after the death of Buckingham entered a much more intimate relationship with her husband; it soon became apparent that, after the initial discord, the royal family was at last a happy one. The poet and courtier Thomas Carew claimed that Charles had ‘so wholly made over all his affections to his wife that he dare say that they are out of danger of any other favourite’. Carew’s friend, William Davenant, composed some dialogue at the time for a play entitled The Tragedy of Albovine, King of Lombardy:

  ‘The king is now in love.’

  ‘With whom?’

  ‘With the queen.’

  ‘In love with his own wife! That’s held incest in court.’

  Six children followed this reconciliation.

  Buckingham had not sailed for La Rochelle, after all. Yet in the early autumn of the year a third expedition was sent to the besieged town; it was no more successful than its predecessors. The fleet dared not take the initiative, and its fire-ships were sunk by French ordnance. When the English did eventually land, they were repelled with firmness by the French besiegers. The king’s promises of assistance had come to nothing. So in October 1628, the authorities of the town signed a treaty of surrender to the French king; their great walls were demolished. Whereupon Louis XIII announced a policy of toleration to his Protestant subjects, who were to enjoy freedom of worship throughout his kingdom. The fears of the Protestants had been based upon the mistaken belief that their religion was in danger of being extirpated, and it could be said that the foreign policy of Charles I represented a thorough misunderstanding of the policy of Louis XIII.

  In the absence of Buckingham the king was more uncertain and irresolute than ever. Should he make a treaty with France against Spain, or a treaty with Spain against France? There was no question of waging outright war against either nation. The king did not have the resources to do so, or any realistic prospect of raising money by other means. In any case the zeal for war was rapidly ebbing in the country. There might be some delay in signing the relevant treaties, but a period of peace had become inevitable.

  A day after the assassination of Buckingham a prominent courtier, Sir Francis Nethersole, remarked that ‘the stone of offence being removed by the hand of God, it is to be hoped that the king and people will now come to a perfect unity’. Yet the opening of the parliament in January 1629 did not bode well for national harmony. The abiding issue was still that of religion. A royal declaration had been issued in the parliamentary recess that ‘the Church has the right to decree ceremonies, and authority to decide controversies of religion’. But what Church? William Laud, now bishop of London, had helped to draw up the proclamation and in the same period a number of his supporters had been promoted to vacant sees. These were the Arminians or ‘high churchmen’ who rejected the precepts and practices of Calvinism.

  For parliament this was a direct challenge to the old and familiar creed of the Church. Sir John Eliot told his parliamentary colleagues that the prelates, with the king’s authority, might ‘order it which way they please and so, for aught I know, to bring in Popery and Arminianism, to which we are told we must submit’. Another member, Christopher Sherland, said of the Arminians that ‘they creep into the ears of his Majesty, and suggest, that those that oppose them, do oppose his Majesty…’

  It had become a confrontation, therefore, between the Calvinists of the old Church and the Arminian bishops of the new. The recently appointed prelates declared that theirs was the true creed of the Church of England and conde
mned their opponents as puritan, synonymous with zealotry and nonconformity. It was claimed, for example, that the Calvinists were ready to take up the cause of individual conscience against the precepts of the established faith and the prerogative of the sovereign. The Arminian bishops were in turn accused by their opponents of preaching passive obedience and the divine right of kings. The Calvinists believed in predestination, grace and the gospel; the Arminians put their faith in free will, the sacraments and deference to ceremonial order. It was not conceived by any contemporary that these were controversies that could stir a civil war, but this was the moment when members of parliament and members of the court party began to take sides.

  The Commons, animated by the speeches of Eliot and others, affirmed that they alone had the right to determine the religion of the country. John Pym, who had already earned the king’s wrath, stated that ‘it belongs to the duty of parliament to establish true religion and to punish false’. The members resolved that the faith they espoused was that agreed in the reign of Elizabeth ‘and we do reject the sense of the Jesuits and Arminians’. The king, perhaps justifiably, considered this to be a breach of his prerogative in spiritual matters; he was, after all, ‘supreme governor’ of the Church of England. The Commons had also laid aside matters of ‘tonnage and poundage’, the customs duties destined for the king’s purse, thus depriving him of his traditional revenue. Charles adjourned parliament on 25 February for a week. Both sides were in fact vying for mastery.

  This was the point when Eliot decided to appeal to the country in the face of an obvious threat. If the king took the further step of dissolving parliament, its future would be uncertain. If he could obtain his revenues elsewhere, there was no reason at all why he should ever summon it again. He had had, in any case, enough of parliament; he called it ‘that noise’. The Arminians were eager to avoid parliaments, also, for the simple reason that they believed they would be persecuted by them; they were of course wholly justified in their suspicion. Eliot had already said of them that ‘they go about to break parliaments, lest parliaments should break them’.

  So all things were leading to a final quarrel. On 2 March the Speaker, Sir John Finch, announced to the Commons that it was the king’s wish that they should adjourn for a further eight days. Such a request had in the past always been accepted. Now the members stood up shouting, ‘No! No!’ Finch moved to rise from his chair, thus abruptly ending the session, but some of the members barred his way and thrust him back to his seat. ‘God’s wounds,’ Denzil Holles told him, ‘you shall sit till we please to rise.’ Eliot then announced that the members would have the privilege of adjourning themselves after he had read out a declaration of their intentions.

  ‘What would any of you do,’ Finch asked, ‘if you were in my place? Let not my desire to serve you faithfully lead to my ruin.’ He was in an impossible situation, with incompatible loyalties to parliament and to the king. Some members, realizing the gravity of the approaching confrontation, rose to leave. But the serjeant-at-arms was ordered to close the doors; when he hesitated, another member locked the doors and put away the key.

  Eliot once more demanded that the declaration he had prepared should be read. ‘I am not less the king’s servant for being yours,’ the Speaker replied. ‘I will not say that I will not put the reading of the paper to the question, but I must say, I dare not.’ Eliot then spoke out in a ferocious attack upon the evil councillors that surrounded the king; he also assaulted Arminianism as an open door to popery.

  Knocks were heard on the outer door. The king had ordered the serjeant-at-arms to bring away the mace, thus depriving the proceedings of any authority. Sir Peter Heyman then turned upon the Speaker. ‘I am sorry’, he told him, ‘that you must be made an instrument to cut up the liberties of the subject by the roots … The Speaker of the House of Commons is our mouth, and if our mouth will be sullen and will not speak when we have it, it should be bitten by the teeth and ought to be made an example; and for my part I think it not fit you should escape without some mark of punishment to be set upon you by the House.’ This was one of the first indications of the arbitrary and authoritarian impulses of some parliamentarians.

  Talk of punishment was vain, however. It was whispered that the king had sent a guard to force its way into the chamber and end the proceedings. So Denzil Holles swiftly proposed three resolutions. Anyone who tried to introduce popery or Arminianism into the kingdom would be considered a capital enemy. Anyone who should advise the levying of customs duties, without the authority of parliament, would similarly be considered as an enemy. If any merchant should voluntarily agree to pay the duties of ‘tonnage and poundage’, he would be ‘reputed a betrayer of the liberty of England and an enemy to the same’. The resolutions were thereupon adopted. Having delivered his message to the nation, Holles asked that the house now adjourn itself, to which there were immediate calls of ‘Ay! Ay!’ The doors were thrown open and the triumphant parliamentarians streamed out to announce the news. They would not meet again for another eleven years.

  Two days later the king announced the dissolution of parliament, and at the same time nine of its members were arrested. Sir John Eliot was the particular object of the king’s wrath; Charles blamed his angry tirades against Buckingham for the favourite’s death. In his speech to the Lords Charles did not censure the majority of the Commons, but reserved his anger for ‘some few vipers amongst them that did cast this mist of undutifulness over most of their eyes’. It was reported that he was afterwards in very good spirits.

  A few days later was published His majesties declaration of the causes which moved him to dissolve the last parliament, in which he declared that the men whom he imprisoned had ‘more secret designs which were only to cast our affairs into a desperate condition, to abate the powers of our crown and to bring our government into obloquy that in the end all things may be overwhelmed with anarchy and confusion’. He was not alone in this belief. Many considered that the members had gone too far in their opposition to the king. Even a fervently Protestant MP, Simonds D’Ewes, considered that the events of 2 March represented ‘the most gloomy, sad and most dismal day for England that happened in five hundred years last past’; he also blamed the turmoil on ‘diverse fiery spirits in the House of Commons’.

  The immediate aftermath of the dissolution was one of dismay and bewilderment. The majority of the merchants refused to pay the customs duties demanded of them, on the grounds that a future parliament would condemn them as betrayers of the kingdom; so they simply declined to trade. Their recalcitrance lasted for two months until the prospect of financial ruin weakened their resolution.

  The nine members of parliament arrested after the scenes in the chamber remained in prison. They could no longer appeal to the Lords or the Commons but they could take their case to the courts; they could appeal to the rule of law in a fundamental attempt to question the powers of the king. They claimed parliamentary privilege, and in particular ‘freedom of speech in debate’ that had been asserted by the Speaker since the late sixteenth century; four of them, including Eliot, refused to answer questions on anything pertaining to parliamentary business. The king wished them to be tried for conspiracy and treason, but the judges were reluctant to do so. The question of privilege was vexatious, and Charles eventually asked them to cease speaking in riddles.

  At the beginning of May the imprisoned men sought to obtain their release on the grounds of habeas corpus, according to the precepts of the ‘petition of right’. After much argument and debate the judges decided that the prisoners had indeed the right to bail; the king then demanded that they reach no verdict until they had consulted their colleagues on the judiciary. This was essentially an appeal for delay, so that the long legal vacation could intervene; the men would therefore languish in gaol for the duration of the summer. At the beginning of October the prisoners were taken from the Tower to Serjeants’ Inn, where they were promised their release as long as they signed a bond of good behaviour; mo
st of them refused to do so, on the grounds that this would implicitly justify their arbitrary imprisonment for the last eight months. They were intent upon inflicting the maximum embarrassment on the king and his officers.

  The Venetian ambassador wrote that ‘affairs grow more bitter every day, and by these disputes the king has made his people see that he can do much more than they may have imagined’. The imprisoned members were testing, piece by piece, the lengths to which Charles would go. When the chief judge of the exchequer made it clear that he was inclined to support parliamentary privilege, the king suspended him from office. It was clear that the guilt of the prisoners was simply to be assumed. The king’s action seems to have clarified the opinion of the remaining judges, who declared that the defendants were indeed punishable by law.

  The members of parliament had reached the end of the legal process. Three of them, including Eliot, were once more imprisoned at the king’s pleasure; the others were detained for shorter periods before being released. It had been a victory for the king, in theory, but it had gravely impaired his authority and reputation. He had revealed himself to be inclined to arbitrary and perhaps illegal measures in order to sustain his sovereignty; he saw treachery and conspiracy in what others considered to be justifiable dissent; he was wilful, and even implacable. Yet those who supported him put a different interpretation upon his actions. Charles had conducted himself in the manner of a true sovereign; he was determined to rule the country without the intervention of enemies or malcontents. He was guided by God. This may be considered to be the tone or principle of the next period of his reign.

  15