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

by Peter Ackroyd

  John Pym and his supporters were now seized with anxiety and alarm. They even convened parliament on Sunday morning, at the beginning of August, to debate the nature of the threat. They begged for a delay to the king’s journey, and he consented to a pause of one day. He had in the interim been engaged in talks with the Scottish commissioners and, according to the Venetian ambassador, the Scots were boasting that ‘they would do all in their power to place the king in his authority once again. When he appeared in Scotland, all political differences would be at an end, and they would serve their natural prince as one man in such a cause.’

  As the king prepared to go on his journey a crowd gathered in Westminster entreating him not to leave. It may be that his presence in London acted as a form of reassurance, at a time of great disorder, or it may be that some in the crowd suspected his intentions. He went to parliament on the morning of his departure in a mood of ill-concealed hostility and impatience. He named a commission of twenty-two men who would administer affairs in his absence; among them was the earl of Newcastle, a notable enemy to the parliamentary cause.

  The Commons immediately retired to their chamber and debated the means ‘of putting the kingdom into a posture of defence’. An ‘ordinance’ was passed, the first of its kind, appointing several key parliamentarians to attend the king in Scotland; they were of course to be spies rather than companions, hoping to supervise his actions. An ordinance had in the medieval period been a device by means of which the king could make a declaration without the consent of parliament; now the two houses were issuing ordinances without the consent of the king. Another confrontation seemed to be inevitable.

  Charles was greeted in Edinburgh with every sign of acclamation. He at once proceeded to gain the approval of the Scots. He attended the services of the Scottish Church with an outward display of piety, and agreed to the demand of the covenanters that bishops be excluded from the reformed Church. He attended the sessions of the Scottish parliament, and agreed to the terms of an Anglo-Scottish union whereby his powers over parliament and the army were severely circumscribed. Some at Westminster believed that they might obtain similar benefits, but it occurred to others that Charles had simply managed to neutralize the Scots in any future conflict.

  In these months parliament had begun to govern; it paid the army, and it issued orders to royal officials such as the lieutenant of the Tower. It had made decrees about the liturgy and the forms of religious worship. Laud had been impeached and imprisoned, while Strafford had been executed; various of the supposed ‘evil counsellors’, among them Lord Keeper Finch, had fled. The judges and sheriffs who had supported the king’s exactions had been summoned to parliament and asked to explain their conduct. The Star Chamber, the northern council and the high commission, the seats of Charles’s rule, had been abolished. Laud’s judicial victims, such as Prynne and Bastwick, had been liberated and brought back to London in triumph. Most importantly, perhaps, it had been decreed that the present parliament could not be prorogued without its own consent.

  It is possible, however, to see these developments in another light. Parliament had acted in an arbitrary and imperious manner. It had misinterpreted the polity or unwritten constitution of the country, and arrogated powers to itself that it had never before possessed. It had illegally hounded Strafford to death. It had colluded with the king’s enemies and an alien army. It had organized mobs to intimidate its opponents. It had proposed a new system of religion to be enforced upon an unwilling people. It had passed a bill ensuring its permanence. In the process the king had been stripped of his royal prerogative and had suffered a severe defeat in all the matters that touched him most closely. He had always said that his enemies wished to relegate him to the status of the doge of Venice. He was not mistaken.

  22

  Worse and worse news

  Parliament reassembled on 20 October 1641, determined to wring from the king the same concessions that the Scottish parliament had already obtained from him. This was the period when the title of ‘King Pym’ came into general use. John Pym had started his career, perhaps surprisingly, as a receiver of Crown lands, and he was in general a good man of business. He was the great orchestrator of parliamentary affairs and had the ability to direct various men and factions towards one end; he was an effective, if not eloquent, debater but his real energy and power lay in his handling of parliamentary committees. By his use of such committees, in fact, he proved that parliament could govern as ably as the king. He sat close to the Speaker in the Commons, together with the other parliamentary leaders, and it was reported that ‘the Speaker diligently watches the Eye of Pym’.

  He was shrewd, and tireless, with a fierce hatred of popery and a genuine commitment to what he considered to be the true religion; his maiden speech was an attack upon one of his colleagues who had branded a Sabbath bill as a ‘puritan’ bill, and in another speech he declared that ‘no impositions are so grievous as those that are laid upon the soul’. He possessed a round face, full lips and heavy jowls; he also sported a curling moustache and short pointed beard. Yet he was not necessarily of a severe disposition; he was known for his cheerfulness and conviviality.

  At the beginning of this session a letter was delivered to him as he sat in his place in the Commons. A gentleman had hired a messenger on Fish Street Hill, and given him a shilling to deliver the missive. When Pym opened it a rag dropped out that was, in the words of Clarendon, ‘foul with the foulness of a plague sore’; it was a rag that had covered a plague wound. It was accompanied by a letter that denounced Pym for treason and threatened that, if the plague did not kill him, a dagger surely would. It ended with ‘repent, traitor’.

  Pym and his colleagues were now intent upon stripping Charles of his prerogative power, namely his ability to appoint his officers and councillors without reference to parliament. Yet they had first to deprive the upper house of its majority in favour of the king, and so they moved to expel the thirteen bishops who sat there. A bill was passed by the Commons to disqualify any cleric from accepting secular office, but naturally enough it was delayed by the Lords themselves.

  Pym tried to raise the temperature of the debate with news of fresh army plots and of a furore in Edinburgh, where three covenanter lords had fled the king’s court in fear of their lives; this became known as ‘the incident’. The king then fervently declared before the Scottish parliament that he had played no part in any such plot to assassinate them and asked for ‘fair play’. The fact that the principal conspirator had been Will Murray, the groom of the king’s bedchamber, served to throw doubt upon the king’s protestations of innocence. Whether true or not, the rumours only deepened parliamentary alarm about the king’s intentions; it simply confirmed the fact, known by all, that he could not be trusted. Yet, in turn, why should he trust those who conspired against his throne? It still seemed very likely, in the early days of the parliament, that any attempt at more radical reform would come to nothing. Many members were now of the opinion that the changes in religion, in particular, were coming on too fast. Here were the makings of the king’s party.

  Just at that moment, at the very beginning of November, news reached parliament that a rebellion had broken out in Ireland. The information was brought to the Commons by seventeen privy councillors, and Clarendon reported that ‘there was a deep silence … and a kind of consternation’. It aroused all the fears of the Protestants of England, and one courtier who had been asked to remain at Westminster and report on parliament, Edward Nicholas, wrote to the king in Edinburgh that ‘the alarm of popish plots amaze and fright the people here more than anything’. It was reported that papists were storing weapons and stocking gunpowder. A pamphlet circulated with the question ‘Oh ye blood-thirsty papists, what are your intents?’ The rebellion came as a cataclysmic shock, but the conditions for it had been slowly gathering.

  There were three defined elements in Irish society. The New English were the Protestant settlers who had established themselves after the
Reformation; they controlled the Dublin parliament and were intent upon imposing English ‘standards’ upon the natives. The Old English had arrived before the Reformation, some as early as the twelfth century, and had become so acclimatized that they identified themselves with Ireland rather than with England; many of them were Catholic while some merely conformed in public to the Protestant Church of Ireland. They owned about one third of the best land. The third group, known by their masters as the ‘mere Irish’ or ‘natives’, made up the largest part of the population but, like most of the downtrodden of the earth, have left little record of their loyalties or beliefs.

  But the Irish and the Old English had much cause for grievance. The Crown had in previous years confiscated one quarter of the land that had been held by the Anglo-Irish gentry and by the native Irish; it had already been decided, in the reign of James I, that no landowner could have the title to his land unless he could prove that he held proper feudal tenure. If he could not provide these credentials, his lands might be confiscated and planted with new English or Scottish settlers. Thus James had presented the citizens of London with 40,000 acres in County Derry, the territory therefore becoming known as Londonderry. The six counties of Ulster had also largely fallen into the hands of Scottish Presbyterians. The dismal state of the Church of Ireland, and the zealous work of Jesuit missionaries, had in any case emboldened the Catholic cause. The Catholics had good reason for resentment; they were unable to educate their children, and their priests, given no benefices, were forced to rely upon the charity of their parishioners. Fines could also be imposed upon those who did not attend Protestant services.

  Many forces were therefore at work in the revolt. The Irish Catholic leaders, who included the Old English, drew up a remonstrance in which they claimed to be rising up for the safety of their religion and for the defence of their lives and estates. They were aware of the proceedings of the English parliament, and of the concessions made by the king to the Scottish Presbyterians, and so felt all the more keenly the injustice to their native religion; they feared also that the reformers or ‘puritan faction of England’ had so deep a detestation of Catholicism that they would impose more restraints upon, and exact new duties from, them. They might even go further and in a statement of Irish grievances it was suggested that the Scots and English, combined, might ‘come into Ireland, with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other, for to plant their puritan, anarchical religion among us, otherwise utterly to destroy us’. Why should Irishmen not rise up in their own defence before it was too late? This was a grand irony of the period. The negotiations between England and Scotland had the result of forcing Ireland into revolt. Charles had found it impossible in practice to administer three kingdoms, when each one had pledged its loyalty to a separate religion.

  On 23 October 1641, they rose up against their English masters. A rebellion in Dublin on the previous day had been partly discovered and quelled, but insurrection spread through the land. Parties of armed men would ravage an English-owned plantation, and then retire to their own territory; others would actively supplant the English owners and replace them with the former proprietors. The English fugitives sought refuge in the nearest army garrison, where they remained in fear and consternation.

  The more radical members of the Commons were already preparing a remonstrance to the king with the purpose of appealing for renewed public support, when news of what was called an Irish ‘massacre’ invested their efforts with fresh urgency. The most frightful reports had reached them. It was stated that many thousands of Protestants had been killed, that women had been raped and mutilated, that babies had been burned. A pamphlet, ‘Worse and Worse News from Ireland’, revealed the list of war crimes. A letter read out to the House of Commons alleged that the Irish rebels in Munster were engaged in

  exercising all manner of cruelties, and striving who can be most barbarously exquisite in tormenting the poor Protestants, wheresoever they come, cutting off the privy members, ears, fingers and hands, plucking out their eyes, boiling the heads of little children before their mothers’ faces, and then ripping out their mothers’ bowels, stripping women naked, and standing by them being naked, whilst they are in travail [labour], killing the children as soon as they are born, ripping up their mothers’ bellies as they are delivered …

  The more sober truth was that approximately 5,000 English Protestants had been killed, and that an equal number of Irish Catholics had fallen in the course of the English counter-attack.

  On 5 November Pym rose from his seat to pledge his life and estate to the cause of suppressing the rebellion but added that ‘unless the king would remove his evil counsellors, and take such counsellors as might be approved by Parliament, we should account ourselves absolved from this engagement’. A bill was then passed that ‘supplicated’ the king to employ only men acceptable to parliament. On 8 November Pym told the Lords that, if the king rejected their supplication, he and his fellows would have to ‘resolve some such way of defending Ireland from the rebels as may concur to the securing of ourselves’. Parliament, in other words, would be in charge of organizing and directing its own Protestant army that might in turn be employed to defend its own cause. The king would become merely a figurehead or talisman.

  This was the occasion for the debate on a document that later became known as the ‘Grand Remonstrance’, a lengthy tract of some 204 clauses that anatomized the history of abuses perpetrated by the ‘malignant party’ close to the king. These evil counsellors had set out ‘a malignant and pernicious design of subverting the fundamental laws and principles of government, upon which the religion and justice of this kingdom are firmly established’. It was a catalogue of errors and abuses that was designed to inflame the temper of the nation, and thus to check the resurgence of loyalty towards the king.

  Violent objections were raised to what amounted to a manifesto; some believed that it was an act of treachery against the king, while others believed that the Commons had no right to produce such a remonstrance without the agreement of the Lords. Sir Edward Dering, the royalist member for Kent, said that ‘when I first heard of a remonstrance I presently imagine that like faithful councillors we should hold up a glass to his majesty … I did not dream that we should remonstrate downward, tell stories to the people and talk of the king as a third person’.

  Pym sensed that a royalist party was acquiring more support. He agreed that certain clauses of the remonstrance might be amended or deleted but ‘it is time to speak plain English, lest posterity shall say that England was lost and no man durst speak the truth’. The final debate took place on 22 November and went on through that winter afternoon; it continued in candlelight until one o’clock in the morning. When the house finally divided Pym had gained the victory by eleven votes. It was said that the decision was like that of a ‘starved jury’, alluding to the custom of depriving jurors of meat and drink until they had reached a verdict. But the narrowness of the result meant that the king had created a sizeable party.

  As soon as the division was announced some of the royalists entered their protestations. One member, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, accused the majority of being ‘a rabble of inconsiderable persons, set on by a juggling Junto’. When a motion was introduced that the remonstrance should be published at once, the tempers of the opposing sides erupted. Some waved their hats in the air while others, according to Simonds D’Ewes, ‘took their swords in their scabbards out of their belts and held them by their pommels in their hands, setting the lower part on the ground’. Sir Philip Warwick wrote that ‘I thought we had all sat in the valley of the shadow of death; for we, like Joab’s and Abner’s young men, had catched at each other’s locks and sheathed our swords in each other’s bowels’. The significance of the occasion is marked by Oliver Cromwell, who said on leaving the chamber that ‘if the remonstrance had been rejected, I would have sold all I had the next morning, and never have seen England more’.

  * * *

  Edward Nicholas wrote to
the king on the first day of the debate on 8 November, that ‘it relates all the misgovernment and unpleasing things that have been done by ill counsels (as they call it) … if your majesty come not instantly away [from Edinburgh to London] I trouble to think what will be the issue of it’. So Charles returned to London from Edinburgh seventeen days later and, on his entrance into the City, he was met by a cavalcade. He told those assembled to greet him that he would maintain the good old laws and the Protestant religion. He would do this ‘if need be, to the hazard of my life and all that is dear unto me’.

  It is likely that the welcome from the City was a genuine one. The ‘former tumults and disorders’, as Charles called them, were no better for commerce than the new taxes that were being imposed by parliament upon the merchants and men of business. A fund of loyalty for the king also existed among the prosperous sort who were averse to the radicalism of his opponents; they disliked the spectacle of apprentices and minor tradesmen quoting Scripture at them, and they feared any uprising of the multitude. The Venetian ambassador had already reported that anonymous placards had been posted in the streets of the city, naming the lords of the puritan Junto as traitors and the authors of sedition.

  Charles knighted the lord mayor amid cries of ‘God bless and long live King Charles and Queen Mary’, the name by which Henrietta Maria was often known, after which he rode in procession, accompanied by 1,000 armed men, to the Guildhall for a great banquet. The conduits at Cornhill and Cheapside ran with claret as the bells rang and the bonfires blazed. It was a ceremony of ancient provenance and it emphasized the virtues of the traditional order. No guests from the Commons were invited to the feast at the Guildhall.