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

by Peter Ackroyd

  On 16 March the members of the Commons issued a proclamation claiming supreme power for parliament within the nation. When Lords and Commons ‘shall declare what the law of the land is, to have this not only questioned and controverted, but contradicted, and a command that it should not be obeyed, is a high breach of the privilege of Parliament’. At the same time the members issued an ordinance requiring the leaders of the local militias to be appointed by them; these men would in turn raise forces on behalf of parliament. An Act was then passed to levy new taxes for that cause, much to the horror of the regional communities.

  The members of parliament were becoming unpopular. Clarendon wrote that ‘their carriage was so notorious and terrible that spies were set upon, and inquiries were made upon, all private, light, casual discourses which fell from those that were not gracious to them’. It seemed to many that they had become despots rather than representatives, inquisitors rather than champions. As a supporter of the Crown Clarendon may have been a biased witness, but he mentioned the case of one member of the Commons who was expelled from the house and sent to prison for having said that parliament could not provide a guard for itself without the king’s consent.

  There was as yet no necessity for war. The local communities of the realm were at peace; the borough sessions, the leet courts and the quarter sessions still met. Bread was weighed and the quality of ale was measured. In the wider world it still seemed possible that a political solution could be reached. Neither side appeared to have the power, or resources, to raise and command an army. No one wanted to be found guilty of having started a civil war. Nobles on both sides were eager for some form of compromise.

  The king, in the company of his son, made a slow journey to York. Charles heard an oration at Cambridge as the cry of ‘Vivat rex!’ came from the scholars; the sheriff, however, did not appear to greet him. The prince of Wales reported to his sister that their father was ‘disconsolate and troubled’. The king’s reception in Yorkshire was not designed to reassure him. He had arrived at York with only thirty-nine gentlemen and seventeen guards, but the gentry did not flock to his side; the recorder of York, in his address of welcome, urged him ‘to hearken unto and condescend unto’ his parliamentary opponents. Margaret Eure, the Yorkshire gentlewoman mentioned before, expressed the wish: ‘Oh that the sweet parliament would come with the olive branch in its mouth. We are so many frighted people; for my part if I hear but a door creak I take it to be a drum. Things stand in so ill a condition here as we can make no money of our coal-pits.’ This may be said to summarize the mood of the nation, a compound of fear and dismay. No one could quite believe what was happening. Surely a solution could be found? The participants seemed to be sleep-walking towards disaster.

  The king himself still professed a measure of optimism, saying that he could easily assemble an army of 16,000 men. He declared that he would raise a force in Cheshire and descend upon the rebels in Ireland. He wrote to parliament explaining that he had ‘firmly resolved to go with all convenient speed into Ireland, to chastise those wicked and detestable rebels’; he added that, for this purpose, he intended to raise a force of 2,000 foot and 200 horse which should be armed ‘from my magazine at Hull’. He may of course have had a different enemy in mind.

  Here lay the problem. Hull was in the hands of parliament represented by its governor, Sir John Hotham. Hotham knew, as well as anyone, that the king may have required arms for ‘wicked and detestable rebels’ closer to home than Ireland. He also knew that the king would soon ride out and demand obedience. The members of parliament had already anticipated this action, and had told him not to open the town gates except by their authority. The members stated later that ‘the king’s supreme and royal pleasure is exercised and declared in this high court of law and counsel [themselves], after a more eminent and obligatory manner than it can be by personal act or resolution of his own’. They could not have declared in a clearer or more unambiguous manner that they were the masters now.

  In the last week of April Charles approached Hull with a company of 300 horsemen, preceded by a message that he had come to dine with the governor. Sir John Hotham resolved with the municipal leaders to curtail any triumphant entry; when the king arrived he found the gates shut and the drawbridge raised with a guard upon the ramparts. He demanded entrance as their lawful sovereign, but was told by Hotham that ‘I dare not open the gates, being intrusted by the Parliament with the safety of the town’. Charles replied that ‘I believe you have no order from the Parliament to shut the gates against me or to keep me out of the town’. To which Hotham answered that the king’s force was so great that ‘if it were admitted I should not be able to give a good account of the town’. It seems that Hotham then told him that he might enter with a company of twelve men. He refused the condition as an affront to his person and, to the sound of a trumpet, proclaimed Hotham to be a traitor. His dignity, and his self-respect, had been deeply injured.

  When he returned to York he sent a message to parliament acquainting the members with the insult given to him by Hotham ‘who had the impudence to aver that Parliament had directed him to deny His Majesty entrance’. The two houses stated in reply that ‘Sir John Hotham had done nothing but in obedience to the commands of both Houses of Parliament’ and that ‘the declaring of him a traitor, being a member of the House of Commons, was a high breach of the privilege of Parliament’. They also ordered the sheriff of Yorkshire to ‘suppress’ any further forces raised by the king. All parties prophesied a world of woe.

  24

  Neither hot nor cold

  In the spring of 1642 the two houses resolved that ‘the king, seduced by wicked counsels, intends to make a war against the Parliament’. So they began to prepare men and arms. In May a levy of 16,000 soldiers was ordered. The trained bands of London were secured for service, and were mustered in Finsbury Fields; the weapons at Hull were transferred to the Tower. A forced loan, to be repaid at an interest of 8 per cent, helped to fill the coffers of the parliamentary treasury with coin or with plate. In the course of this spring parliament nominated the earl of Warwick to be lord high admiral of the English fleet. He worked quickly to gain the loyalty of his men, and ships that supported the cause of the king were promptly boarded and overpowered. Clarendon later observed that ‘this loss of the whole navy was of unspeakable ill consequence to the king’s affairs’. A king of England without sovereignty of the sea could scarcely be considered a king at all.

  Men and money were also arriving for the king at York. Members of the nobility and the clergy, together with the gentry and the scholars of both universities, sent him jewellery and plate as well as ready money. Some ventures were less successful. The queen dispatched a vessel from Holland containing ammunition and sixteen pieces of cannon, but it was captured off Yarmouth. Just as parliament had sent out a ‘militia ordinance’ to recruit troops, so the king now sent out ‘commissions of array’ to raise a volunteer army. These commissions were formal documents, written in Latin and impressed with the great seal, sent to every city and county in the nation; they named certain leading men who would secure their territory for the king and at the same time gather men and money for the royal cause. Yet the soldiers on either side had not yet necessarily been raised to fight; they might be used to deter the other side from violence or to provide support in any subsequent negotiations.

  The contradictory commands of the militia ordinance and the commissions of array caused much disquiet. While walking in Westminster on a May morning a notable moderate and former soldier, Sir Thomas Knyvett, was approached by two men of parliament who brought with them an order ‘to take upon me, by virtue of ordinance of Parliament, my company and command again’. He told his wife that ‘I was surprised what to do, whether to take or refuse’; he accepted it, however, since this ‘was no place to dispute’. Then a few hours later ‘I met with a declaration point blank against it by the king’. He consulted with others in the same predicament, and they agreed that they woul
d be obliged to follow their consciences in the matter. Meanwhile, Knyvett wrote, ‘I hold it good wisdom and security to keep my company as close to me as I can in these dangerous times, and stay out of the way of my new masters till these first musterings be over.’ These are the words of a modest and relatively impartial man caught between the two factions. His voice, like that of many others, would soon be muffled by the increasingly rebarbative tones of those urging stronger and stronger action against their opponents. One Londoner who refused to follow the lead of parliament was advised ‘to leave the town lest his brains were beaten out by the boys in the streets’.

  Events now had a momentum of their own, each move prompting a counter-move and each rumour producing a further reaction. Bulstrode Whitelocke, a parliamentary supporter, remarked later that ‘it is strange to note how we have insensibly slid into this beginning of a civil war, by one unexpected accident after another, as waves of the sea, which have brought us thus far’. Many volumes have been written on the social or religious ‘cause’ or ‘causes’ of the civil war, but one principal motive may simply have been that of fear. Pym and his colleagues knew that, if the king were to prevail, they could all suffer a traitor’s death.

  One parliamentarian, Lord Wharton, wrote in June 1642 to the chief justice who was with the king at York. He asked him how it was that the kingdom did not contain one person of prudence and skill ‘to prevent the ruin coming upon us’? His colleagues at Westminster were not disloyal, and he knew that those about the king ‘wish and drive at an accommodation’. So why could not an agreement be reached by both sides? Thomas Knyvett believed, two years later, that ‘the best excuse that can be made for us, must be a fit of lunacy’.

  At the beginning of June parliament, guided by Pym’s opportune and careful management, delivered ‘nineteen propositions’ to the king; among them was the wish, or command, that the king dismiss his forces and accept the validity of the militia ordinance. He was to accept the religious reforms outlined by the members of parliament and to exclude popish peers from the Lords. His principal officers should be appointed only with the approval of parliament, and all important matters of state must be debated there. The document became in the words of one parliamentarian, Edmund Ludlow, ‘the principal foundation of the ensuing war’. Ludlow said that the question came to this: ‘whether the king should govern as a god by his will and the nation be governed by force like beasts; or whether the people should be governed by laws made by themselves, and live under a government derived from their own consent’.

  The king of course rejected the demands out of hand with the words ‘nolumus leges Angliae mutari’ – we do not wish the laws of England to be changed. He said that acceptance of parliamentary demands would ensure that he became ‘but the outside, but the picture, but the sign, of a king’. The propositions were ‘a mockery’ and ‘a scorn’. Yet some still held back from confrontation. A parliamentarian, Sir Gilbert Pickering, wrote to a friend that ‘there are now some overtures of accommodation … and most men think they smell the air of peace. Yet provide for war.’ Seventeen counties sent forth petitions for such an ‘accommodation’ between the two sides.

  At the beginning of July it was reported that the royalists had mustered in Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire; it was soon known that the king had placed himself at the head of a force of cavalry. On 11 July parliament declared that the king had already begun the war, thus diverting any blame for beginning the conflict. On the following day the earl of Essex was placed in charge of a parliamentary army, and the king promptly declared him to be a traitor. The first blood was shed three days later, when a townsman of Manchester died from wounds inflicted by a group of royalist troopers. The two sides now competed to seize control of the munitions of the local militias.

  A ‘committee of safety’ was set up by parliament which, through the summer and autumn, began to organize soldiers, weaponry and supplies; it was a high command in another sense, since it oversaw military strategy and communicated between parliament and the commanders in the fields.

  The two sides were now beginning to acquire a definite shape. The early supporters of the king were prompted by loyalty and by the doctrine of obedience. Sir Edmund Verney expressed it best by saying of the king that ‘I have eaten his bread and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him’. Verney lost his life, shortly after writing this, in the first great battle of the conflict. His sense of honour overrode all other considerations. It was a question of what was known as ‘the old service’ or ‘the good old cause’.

  A majority of the peers and the greater landowners supported the king, since his privileges guaranteed their own. Twice as many families of the gentry also took the king’s part. The puritan gentry, of course, were parliamentarians. A puritan divine, Richard Baxter, anatomized the situation very well. He claimed that ‘on the parliament’s side were the smaller part, as some thought, of the gentry in most of the counties, and the greatest part of the tradesmen and freeholders, and the middle sort of men, especially in those corporations [towns] and counties which depend on clothing and such manufactures’. An element of popular or lower-class royalism, still to be recognized today, was evident in the zeal of porters and watermen, butchers and labourers, for the king’s cause in the larger towns and cities; the language of the street often condemned ‘parliament dogs’ and ‘parliament whores’. They wore red ribbons in their hats as a sign of their allegiance.

  Religious dissenters overwhelmingly took the side of parliament, of course, while the Roman Catholics and those of orthodox faith supported the king or, for fear of reprisals, remained neutral. The universities and cathedral cities were largely for the king, although the clergy were often opposed by the aldermen, while the dockyards and chief ports were for parliament. A great number of towns, however, wished to stay out of the conflict altogether.

  In the most general terms the north and west were sympathetic towards the king while the south-east, and London in particular, supported the parliamentary cause. Yet all of the counties were divided. The north of Lincolnshire was largely royalist, for example, while the south remained generally for parliament. It has been recorded of Derbyshire that the belt of iron and coal in the eastern stretch of the county was royalist while the lead areas of the north supported parliament. This may be an aspect of human society rather than of geology; the lead areas contained many independent small masters, while the areas of coal and iron depended upon larger enterprises controlled by a single master or landlord. In other counties the wooded areas containing isolated and self-sufficient parishes harboured the puritan cause, while the communal villages exploiting ‘mixed’ farming took the royalist side.

  More subtle calculations have also been made. It has been estimated that the royalists were slightly younger than the parliamentarians, this statistic boosted by the fact that many young men joined the king in a spirit of bravado as well as patriotism; in parliament itself the royalist members had been on average eleven years younger than their puritan colleagues. It is clear that the judges of the land were divided in their allegiance, some of them worried by the constitutional pretensions of the king, while the staff of the various offices of the state were more likely to be active parliamentarians. The lawyers, too, had a long history of hostility towards the courtiers.

  The majority of the population were neither hot nor cold; they may have been indifferent to the opinions of either side, but they were alarmed and intimidated by the change that had come over the kingdom. The partisans on both sides had provoked the conflict, and it was they who would end it. The rest stood by and waited. They did not care about the form of government, according to one member of parliament, Arthur Haselrig, as long ‘as they may plough and go to market’. Some said that the affair should be decided by a throw of the dice.

  Sir William Waller, the parliamentary general in the west, wrote to his royalist counterpart, Sir Ralph Hopton, that ‘my affections to you are so un
changeable that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person; but I must be true to the cause wherein I serve’. He declared that he hated a war without a true enemy but ‘I look upon it as opus domini [the work of the Lord] … We are both on the stage and we must act those parts that are assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour, and without personal animosities.’ This is one of the noblest sentiments uttered in the period.

  There was not a town or county that remained undivided by opinion and argument; factional conflict was everywhere apparent from the largest town to the humblest parish. Some sportsmen named their packs of hunting dogs ‘roundheads’ or ‘cavaliers’, and the children in the streets would engage in mock battles under those names.

  Many families were also split in their allegiances, although it was sometimes believed that this was a convenient ploy to save family property if one or the other party finally prevailed. First sons were likely to be royalist, while younger sons remained ‘neutral’ or ‘doubtful’. Yet not all family differences were settled amicably. Sir John Oglander, who took no part in the conflict, wrote in his commonplace book that ‘thou wouldest think it strange if I should tell thee there was a time in England when brothers killed brothers, cousins cousins, and friends their friends’.

  On the afternoon of 22 August Charles rode into Nottingham, where the royal standard was taken from the castle and fixed in the ground beside him. It was a silk flag with the royal arms and a motto, ‘Give Caesar his due’; it was suspended from a long pole that was dyed red at the upper part, and was said to resemble a maypole. The king quickly scanned the proclamation of war, and corrected certain words. The declaration was then read in an uncertain voice by the herald, after the trumpets had sounded, but all threw their hats into the air and called out: ‘God save King Charles and hang up the roundheads.’ The standard was blown down that night in the middle of a storm. Clarendon reported that ‘a general sadness covered the whole town, and the king himself appeared more melancholic than he used to be’. The civil war had begun.