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

by Peter Ackroyd

  The court case lasted from November 1637 until the following summer and was watched with extreme interest by the political nation. It was a test of power between sovereign and subject, and was considered to be one of the most significant cases ever put to judgement. The prosecution essentially rested upon two points. The Crown contended that all precedents, from the time of the Anglo-Saxons, allowed the king to gather money for his navy; Hampden in turn maintained that previous methods of taxation had in no way resembled the recent writs for ship-money sent to the inland counties. The Crown also defended the reasonableness of its claim for financial assistance in the face of foreign danger; by the time any parliament could be assembled to debate the matter, the country might have been attacked or even invaded. Hampden argued that the writs had been sent out six months before any ships were fitted, and there had been ample time for an assembly at Westminster; the writs were in any case contrary to statutes forbidding any tax without the consent of parliament.

  The court was packed with spectators. A squire from Norfolk had come to London simply to attend the trial but when he arrived ‘at peep of day’, the crowd was already so great that he could get only 2 or 3 yards from the door of the court. Those who did obtain entrance seem largely to have taken Hampden’s part. When one of his counsels, Oliver St John, opened the defence he was according to a puritan observer, Robert Woodford, ‘much applauded and hummed by the bystanders, though my lord Finch [the chief justice] signified his displeasure for it’; at the close of St John’s argument, ‘they adventured to hum him again’. The argument continued beyond the walls of the court, where debates between the opposing sides could become very fierce. The vicar of Kilsby, in Northamptonshire, had exhorted his congregation ‘to pay his majesty’s dues’; whereupon the parish constable told him that the king’s taxes were worse than the pharaoh’s impositions upon the Israelites. Conversations of a similar kind took place all over the realm.

  The judges deliberated and eventually gave a decision in favour of the court, seven against five. It was the smallest of all possible majorities for the king. Nevertheless the words of the chief justice in his support were repeated throughout the country. Finch declared that ‘acts of parliament to take away his royal power in the defence of the kingdom are void’. Or, as another judge had put it, ‘rex est lex’ – the king is the law. The ancient rights of Englishmen were of no importance, and the declarations of Magna Carta or the ‘petition of right’ were inconsequential. Neither law nor the parliament could bind the king’s power. Clarendon, in his History of the Rebellion, states that ‘undoubtedly my Lord Finch’s speech made ship-money much more abhorred and formidable than all the commandments by the council table and all the distresses taken by the sheriffs of England’.

  When a judge at the Maidstone assizes read out the judgment of the court in London the people, according to a contemporary, Sir Roger Twysden, ‘did listen with great diligence and after the declaration made I did, in my conceit, see a kind of dejection in their very looks…’ A justice of the peace in Kent wrote in a memorandum that ‘this was the greatest cause according to the general opinion of the world was ever heard out of parliament in England. And the common sort of people are sensible of no loss of liberty so much as that hath joined with it a parting from money.’ The opposition to ship-money became much more fierce than before; some refusing to pay now cited the arguments made by those judges who had favoured John Hampden.

  In the middle of the trial, on 9 February 1638, the king issued a proclamation to Scotland in which he stated that ‘we find our royal authority much impaired’ and declared that all protests against the new prayer book would be deemed treasonable. The king’s response was characteristic. Any attempt to curb his power was of course treachery and he believed that, if he made any compromise or accommodation, he would be fatally weakened; he did not want to become as powerless as the doge of Venice and he informed his representative in Scotland, the marquis of Hamilton, that he was ‘resolved to hazard my life rather than suffer authority to be condemned’. He was not simply referring to his authority but to the concept of ‘authority’ itself. Yet he could be wily and secretive at the same time, and told Hamilton that ‘I give you leave to flatter them with what hopes you please’. Since the leaders of the prayer book rebellion were essentially traitors, they could be deceived and betrayed with impunity.

  In response the commissioners in Edinburgh, representing the petitioners, drew up a national covenant in which the precepts of the Kirk were re-established. Among its declarations was one that the innovations of the new prayer book ‘do sensibly tend to the re-establishing of the popish religion and tyranny, and to the subversion and ruin of the true reformed religion and of our liberties, laws and estates’. The people were in truth not rebelling against their king per se, but at the alliance of secular and religious authority that he had come to represent. The elect were now bound to God in solemn contract, as the Israelites once had been, with a clear moral obligation to fulfil His commands. ‘If thou walk before me, and serve me, and be perfect … I am willing to enter into covenant with thee’ (Genesis, 17: 1–2). The national covenant was carried in triumph through the streets, accompanied by crowds of women and children who alternately cheered and wept.

  The people of Scotland took their lead from the inhabitants of Edinburgh and signed the covenant in their hundreds of thousands, declaring that they would rather die than accept the new liturgy. They raised their right hands to heaven before they took up the pen. Many of the orthodox Scottish bishops fled to England, with the archbishop of St Andrews, John Spottiswoode, lamenting that ‘all we have been doing these thirty years past is now thrown down at once’. This came from the king’s attempt to master his subjects in the same way as he mastered his horse.

  The responses of others were mixed. The great minister of France, Richelieu, was inclined to support and even to aid the Scottish rebels on the grounds that trouble for the English king was always welcome. In turn Charles did not wish the world to believe that his authority had been spurned by some of his subjects; all his life he feared to appear weak. The English dissenters, already excited and agitated by the trial of John Hampden, welcomed the defiant actions of the Scots; many of them hoped that the Scottish example might be followed closer to home. The most impassioned denunciations of the king’s policy could be read in the verses and broadsides distributed in the streets of London.

  Laud wrote to Wentworth that ‘my misgiving soul is deeply apprehensive of no small evils coming on’. Wentworth himself was urging the king to stricter measures. He believed that, if the arrogance and bravado of the Scots were not ‘thoroughly corrected’, it would be impossible to know how far the evil of dissension might spread. Some people were already wary of the coming conflict. When in 1638 one of the godly in the Wiltshire village of Holt found a beggar at his door he refused to give him alms on the grounds that ‘shortly you will be pressed for war, and then you will fight against us’.

  When the general assembly of the Church of Scotland met in Glasgow Cathedral towards the end of November, the bishops were charged with violating the boundaries of their proper authority. The marquis of Hamilton attended in the name of the king, and he reported to his master that ‘my soul was never sadder than to see such a sight; not one gown amongst the whole company, many swords but many more daggers – most of them having left their guns and pistols in their lodgings’. The voting of course went against the orders and wishes of the king. Hamilton thereupon declared the assembly dissolved but, after he had left the church, the delegates voted to continue their debate. They also passed a resolution declaring that the Kirk was independent of the civil power, in effect stripping Charles of any religious supremacy he had previously claimed.

  For the next three weeks the delegates revised the whole form of the Scottish faith that had recently been imposed upon them. The new liturgy was abolished. The bishops were excommunicated. The king’s writ no longer ran in Scotland.

  Th
e preparations for war were now intensified. The king ordered a convoy of military supplies to be sent from the Tower to Hull while the marquis of Hamilton advised him to take in hand the further fortification of Berwick, Carlisle and Newcastle. The lords-lieutenant of the counties were ordered to organize and exercise their local militias for readiness in combat. The leaders of the Scots, in turn, divided their country into seven military regions from which recruits would be taken; the commissioners also requested that the Scots mercenaries, fighting for the cause of Protestantism in Germany, should come home for a more significant war. Their lord general, Alexander Leslie, knew that they would bring with them new forms of military training and expertise taught by Dutch and Swedish commanders. It was believed that they would be a far more professional force than their English adversaries.

  Omens were noticed and reported. A Yorkshire gentleman, Sir Henry Slingsby, confided to his diary an old prophecy that, after the victories of the Saxons and Normans, England would next be mastered by the Scots. Freak winds and lightning were seen. Henry Hastings reported to his father that, at eight o’clock one evening, the clouds dispersed to reveal apparitions ‘like men with pikes and muskets, but suddenly the scene being changed they appeared in two bodies of armed men set in battalion, and then a noise was heard and sudden flashings of light seen and streaks like smoke issuing out of these clouds’. The forces of war were gathering.

  18

  Venture all

  At the beginning of 1639 Charles sent out a summons for the soldiers of his kingdom to meet him at York. The peers of the realm were ordered to appear in person, together with the retinues that befitted their status. The trained bands – the local militia made up of citizens – of the north were required to attend under the command of the lords-lieutenant of their counties. The rest of the men were conscripted, mainly from the midlands; they were formerly ploughmen or carters or thatchers, and had no stomach for a fight. Neither trained nor organized, they were being sent to unknown regions of the country for a cause about which they knew very little or nothing.

  The men raised from Herefordshire attacked and wounded their officers before returning to their towns and villages. Other conscripts proceeded to pillage the hamlets through which they passed. They tore down the hated enclosures that parcelled up previously common land; they fired the gaols and freed the prisoners, many of whom had been detained for refusing to pay royal taxes; they attacked the undergraduates of Oxford; the more precise of them attacked the altars and communion rails of the churches. They were, as one royalist commander, Lord Conway, put it, ‘more fit for Bedlam or Bridewell’ than the king’s service.

  The peers and nobles, gathered about the king by old feudal bonds, were equally reluctant to risk their lives in the royal cause. Many of them pleaded sickness, and the majority of them travelled to York against their will. If the king lost, their lands and even their lives might not be spared by the Scottish covenanters; if he won, and became supreme, their liberties would be further at risk. The prospect of another parliament, for example, would recede even further into the distance. The puritan party, in particular, had no reason or desire to fight against their co-religionists in Scotland. It would be an act of faithlessness on an unparalleled scale. Many of them believed that the war was being fought on behalf of the episcopate, and that its principal aim was to restore the bishops to their authority in Scotland. So the war became known as bellum episcopale or the Bishops’ War. It was all the more hated by some because of it.

  Yet it was abhorred principally because it was an unfamiliar and unwelcome intrusion into the affairs of the nation. England had avoided foreign wars, and enjoyed domestic peace, for many years; no shots had been fired, and no drums heard, in the land. Yet that quiet was about to be shattered. Sir Henry Slingsby wrote that it was ‘a thing most horrible that we should engage ourself in a war one with another, and with our own venom gnaw and consume ourself’. The long period of peace also meant that the instruments of war had been degraded; the swords and muskets and pikes, laid aside, were now tarnished or broken. Horses were in short supply.

  At the end of March 1639, the king rode into York to meet his army. Charles and his principal officers were lodged at the King’s House, the residence of the lord president of the north, while other officers and gentry found room in the various inns of the city such as the Talbot and the Dragon. The king was also graciously pleased to watch his ‘cavaliers’ exercising on their horses in the meadows known as the ‘ings’. The ‘cavaliers’ were now a recognizable body of officers attached to the king’s cause; some of them were already professional soldiers who had seen service in the European wars, while others were the sons of gentlemen in search of martial glory. Many of them, however, earned a reputation as braggarts and as anti-puritan bullies given to drink and gaming. According to a pamphlet of the time, ‘Old News Newly Revived’, anyone with ‘a tilting feather, a flaunting periwig, buff doublet, scarlet hose, and a sword as big as a lath’ could be mistaken for one. They were now ready to fight what one of the king’s men, Sir Francis Windebank, in turn castigated as ‘those scurvy, filthy, dirty, nasty, lousy, itchy, scabby, shitten, stinking, slovenly, snotty-nosed, logger-headed, foolish, insolent, proud, beggarly, impertinent, absurd, grout-headed, villainous, barbarous, bestial, false, lying, roguish, devilish … damnable, atheistical, puritanical crew of the Scottish Covenant’.

  The king seems to have presumed, as Clarendon put it in his History of the Rebellion, that his calling together the peers of the realm with their retinues meant that ‘the glory of such a visible appearance of the whole nobility would at once terrify and reduce the Scots’. In that presumption he was quite wrong. He could not even rely upon the nobility itself. Alarmed by talk of collusion with the covenanters, the king demanded that the lords and gentry at York should take an oath of allegiance. Two of them declined, Lord Brooke and Viscount Saye refusing to do so on the grounds that it was unconstitutional to demand any such oath that had not been approved by parliament. Saye added that, since the crowns of England and of Scotland were now unified, he could not take it upon himself to kill a Scot. Charles remonstrated with him angrily: ‘My lord, there be as good men as you that will not refuse to take it, but I find you averse to all my proceedings.’ He ordered that both men be arrested.

  It was the talk of the city, and it seems to have been generally agreed that the peers had become martyrs to the king’s will. Charles was soon advised that they had done nothing illegal in refusing the oath; much to his chagrin he was obliged to release them. His authority had suffered another grave blow. It transpired soon enough that Viscount Saye had indeed been in secret discussion with the leaders of the covenant cause. They held the puritan creed in common, and their clandestine collaboration would be significant in the events of later months.

  On 1 May Charles advanced to Durham. His envoy to Scotland and now commander of his ships, the marquis of Hamilton, wrote to him that ‘your majesty’s affairs are in desperate condition. The enraged people here run to the height of rebellion, and walk with a blind obedience as by their traitorous leaders they are commanded … You will find it a work of great difficulty and of vast expense to curb them by force, their power being greater, their combination stronger than can be imagined.’ Hamilton, himself a Scot, declared that ‘next to hell I hate this land’. His discomfort was also heightened by his mother’s threat that, if he returned in arms to his native country, she would shoot him.

  Charles could not afford ‘expense’ of any kind. By the best estimate he had enough money to support his army to the end of the summer, but no longer. By the end of May, however, the lord treasurer announced that the revenue was exhausted. The knight marshal, Sir Edmund Verney, wrote to his son that ‘our men are very raw, our arms of all sorts naught, our victual scarce, and provision for horses worse’.

  The Scots were soon on the move. The drums were beaten, morning and evening, to summon the soldiers for divine service; they listened to two sermons each
day in support of their cause. When the men were not engaged in martial exercise, they studied the Scriptures or sang hymns or prayed aloud. It was a formidable force. At the beginning of June they set up an armed camp at Kelso on the Scottish borders. The king ordered the earl of Holland to march 3,000 men to the north and drive them out. So the earl led his cavalry forward to test the purposes of the Scots. The English forces climbed an incline from which they could see the enemy below them. Holland was about to order a charge when a cloud of dust could be seen approaching very quickly; this was taken to be the token of a larger Scottish army. The English retreated in order but in haste; discretion, as on many other occasions, surmounted valour. It was said that they were spared a slaughter by the elders of the covenant who only wished for the strangers to leave their country.

  The fiasco was a double blow to the English forces. They had not only been humiliated by the Scots but the Scottish lord general, Alexander Leslie, seemed to know in advance the movement of Holland’s men. It looked very much as if there was a spy or traitor in the camp. Sir Edmund Verney wrote once more to his son that ‘I think the king dares not stir out of his trenches. What counsels he will take, or what he will do, I cannot divine.’ It had become clear to everyone that the enterprise was a huge mistake.

  On 5 June Alexander Leslie arrived with an army of 12,000 men, and encamped on a hill about 11 miles from the king’s position. Charles was devoid of fear, or indeed of any other emotion except perhaps curiosity; he took a view of the Scottish forces through his telescope. ‘Come let us go to supper,’ he said, ‘the number is not considerable.’ Yet he could not afford to fight them. The Scots were well-disciplined and ready to fight for ‘Christ’s Crown and Covenant’; he had only an ill-organized and largely apathetic army already painfully aware of its lack of provisions.