New peerages and promotions were also for sale, either through courtiers, or directly from the Crown. During the next thirteen years the total of peers rose from eighty-one to one hundred and twenty-six with the number of earls more than doubling. There was blatant racketeering: in four years the royal favourite George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, pocketed over £24,000 from the sale of nine Irish peerages, eleven baronetcies, four knighthoods and the Lord Chancellorship of Ireland. Arrangements were made for buyers to pay by instalments, which must have galled purchasers once prices began to plummet in response to the Crown’s growing liabilities. Baronies fell from £10,000 in 1621 to £4,000 in 1628 and Buckingham was always glad to arrange bargains for his toadies. Charles I halted the sale of titles in 1629, but opened shop again in 1643 to finance the royalist war effort.
Trafficking in titles was (and still is) a murky and venal business, but a thriving one thanks to customer demand. The Stuarts enjoyed, initially, a seller’s market, for the enlargement of the landowning order had made its members more conscious than ever of rank. The purchasing of peerages and baronetcies was one symptom of a wider mania which gripped the Jacobean and Caroline gentry and aristocracy. Others included faked pedigrees and the erection of massive memorials lavishly adorned with shields with multiple quarterings, which announced that here were no parvenus, but families of ancient and honourable blood. As Francis Bacon suggested, the advancement of many caused consternation among the occupants of Olympus, who feared the dilution of their prestige. This did not occur, although arriviste gentry were ridiculed by contemporary playwrights.
There is no reason to believe that James I’s trade in peerages had any permanent effect on the status of the nobility within society, or that it devalued the mystique of titles. Its political consequence was to give colour and substance to the widespread perception of the court as profoundly corrupt. The court comprised the great offices of state and the households of the King and Queen, and it attracted sycophants, string-pullers and tricksters who enriched themselves through bribery and clandestine dealing in offices and titles. Bureaucrats, particularly in the legal administration, collected fees for their services and every office was a potential goldmine. Those in the right place and with the right friends could make easy fortunes: in 1607 Sir Simonds D’Ewes paid £5,000 for a chancery clerkship and during the next twenty-three years made £32,500 from fees.7
Antipathy to James I’s court focused on two royal favourites, his Scottish toyboy Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and his successor, George Villiers, who engrossed royal patronage for himself and his cronies and bullied the aristocracy. In 1626 the Earl of Bristol told the Lords that Buckingham’s ‘power is such that I cannot get leave for any message to be delivered to the King’. The eighteenth Earl of Oxford refused to be browbeaten and Buckingham warned him that he would ‘do him all the mischief he could’.8 Buckingham’s assassination in 1628 was welcomed by all outside the court; he was the last in a line of amoral and rapacious royal favourites which stretched back through the Duke of Suffolk to Piers Gaveston.
*
The tone of Charles I’s court was marginally more honest and certainly more decorous than his father’s. Nonetheless, it continued to attract censure from landowners of all ranks. Collectively they were known as the Country Party, which suggests backwoodsmen who blamed the court’s malfeasance for all that was going wrong with the country. This was certainly true before 1640, but afterwards the Country Party was primarily concerned with the curtailment of the royal prerogative and the recovery of the old balance of power between Crown and Parliament. Recalling those times, Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton believed that what had been at stake was whether or not the ‘supreme magistracy’ of the nation rested with the King alone.
Clarendon thought Puritanism cemented Parliamentary opposition to Charles. He was correct insofar as the King’s opponents were as much exercised by the future of Protestantism as they were with the division of executive authority. By 1642 they had reached the conclusion that Charles had forfeited his right to be regarded as the defender of Protestantism. The Country Party was, therefore, engaged in a mission to save the nation’s faith as well as its subjects’ right of consent in government. Both causes were represented as the Lord’s work by Puritan preachers and pamphleteers, many of whom were funded by landowners. Robert Rich, second Earl of Warwick, instructed his preacher Samuel Marshall to persuade the voters of Essex that by plumping for Country Party candidates they were fulfilling God’s purpose.9
Extremes of paranoia and fractiousness characterised the religious life of Charles’s three kingdoms. In England and Scotland Protestants (of various creeds) were in the overwhelming majority, but in Ireland they were outnumbered three to one by Catholics. Each faith claimed a monopoly of the only truth and with it the means of salvation and, with varying degrees of sectarian passion, they denounced their rivals as perverse and beyond divine grace.
Confessional differences were routinely settled by battle, massacre and assassination; since the 1540s the Continent had endured intermittent holy wars between Catholics and Protestants. In England small groups of Catholic gentry had plotted to murder Elizabeth I and, in 1605, overthrow the Church and state at a stroke. The discovery of the Gunpowder Plot confirmed the need for the coercive recusancy laws which excluded all Catholic landowners from political life and public office. For Protestant patriots, Catholics were a fifth column dedicated to a malevolent Pope and his French and Spanish allies. Among those tainted was Queen Henrietta Maria, whose Catholic court was seen as a viper’s nest of real and crypto-Papists. Her co-religionists made up between 1 and 2 per cent of the English and Scottish populations, but their enemies believed they possessed a superhuman capacity for subversion and mayhem.
United in their fear and loathing of Catholicism, Protestants were divided over theology and the perfect formula for Church government. Doctrinal quibbling strayed into the world of political theory, in particular the nature of the social hierarchy. Defenders of episcopacy in England and Scotland justified it as an integral part of the overall, divinely ordained hierarchy, so that attacks on the bishops were indirect threats to the secular order. Theoretically, power flowed upwards in the Scottish Presbyterian Church where congregations chose their ministers and were represented in the Church’s general assembly. The Kirk’s national structure made it a theocracy in waiting with the potential to supersede the power of the landowning order traditionally exercised through Parliament.
In 1638 the Kirk needed Scotland’s landowners to take on Charles I and neuter local episcopalians. Within a few years, radical Presbyterians were arguing that a general assembly whose members were distinguished by their godliness should have a greater authority than a Parliament whose members were distinguished by ancestry and wealth. According to the Calvinist dogma of predestination, God chose his elect randomly and without reference to earthly status. This spiritual elite was identified by its members’ exemplary piety, continence and evangelical fervour.
The Calvinist spiritual elect included noblemen and squires who used their social authority to promote their creed, directing a propaganda machine whose agents declared that Parliament was being guided by the hand of God and whipped up London mobs in its support. Royalists were horrified; a section of landowning order was breaking ranks and flirting with dangerous and fissile forces which might easily turn on them. In the process, noblemen devalued themselves. Lord Brooke attracted royalist sneers by his contacts with a ‘synod’ of tinkers, cobblers and millers with whom, as a devout Puritan, he discussed theology.10
Early in 1642 Brooke was distracted by other matters. Parliament had proposed him as one of a new batch of lords lieutenants, each with control over their county militia. The post of lord lieutenant was an Elizabethan invention devised to coordinate national defence and was always filled by a senior peer with local influence. As relations between Charles and Parliament deteriorated, the latter sought the insurance of control over t
he future raising of troops. In areas where sympathetic noblemen were scarce, Parliament appointed men of lesser rank including a judge.
Charles prevaricated in the face of a blatant encroachment on his prerogative and, once it was clear that his traditional military powers had slipped from his grasp, he resorted to a medieval prerogative, commissions of array, which ordered landowners to muster able-bodied men for the royal army. It was too late, for during the summer of 1642 men like Brooke were using their powers to muster an army for Parliament. Or, as their propaganda and some of their banners claimed, ‘For King and Parliament’; the two were still inseparable.
Aristocrats had to choose sides during the summer of 1642. Thirty peers backed Parliament, between fifty and sixty were royalists and thirty were neutral, either by conviction, infirmity or absence abroad.11 The rest of the landowning class was divided in similar proportions. The intellectual Lord Falkland chose the King out of emotional attachment, although royal policies had dismayed him. Francis, Lord Dacre, had opposed the King before the war, but shrank from fighting against him. He retired to his house on the Pevensey marches and his yacht anchored offshore. Dacre was left undisturbed in his neutrality and entertained friends of all political complexions. His calculated indifference was shared by many of his Sussex neighbours.12 In the Midlands zealous royalists discovered a large body of knights and gentlemen who wished only to be left alone, or were sincerely perplexed by the rival causes. Sir John Hotham, the governor of Hull, feared that civil war might lead to social revolution once the masses had been drilled and taught how to fight. ‘I honour the King as much as I love Parliament,’ he declared, but, after judging their cases, he plumped for the latter.13
Hotham had predicted that the civil war would bring massive upheaval and suffering. News-sheets and pamphlets had given lurid accounts of the destruction caused on the Continent by the Thirty Years War of 1618–48 and similar miseries were expected in Britain. The pessimists were right. During the summer of 1642, the hungry Parliamentarian garrison of Coventry invaded Lord Dunsmore’s park and killed all the deer. Royalist soldiers slaughtered most of Bulstrode Whitelock’s herd at Fawley in Buckinghamshire and stole his hounds, which they presented to that noted dog lover, Prince Rupert. Whitelock also lost his carriage, horses and household goods, and he later discovered that his books and manuscripts had been torn up to make spills for the soldiers to light their pipes.14 Hundreds of landowners of all ranks shared his misfortunes. They endured private plundering by soldiers and official theft committed by their leaders who commandeered cash, food and fodder to sustain their respective war efforts.
10
A Circular Motion:
Revolution and
Restoration 1642–60
What is now called the War of the Three Kingdoms was a human catastrophe. It lasted from 1642 until 1652 and modern calculations suggest that in England, Wales and Scotland a quarter of a million people died out of a population of about six million. Losses were higher in Ireland, where some 618,000 died, two-fifths of the population.1 Famine and plague were the biggest killers and more than half the casualties were civilians. Some were massacred: Montrose’s Royalists slaughtered the inhabitants of Aberdeen in 1644, Prince Rupert’s cavaliers did the same in Leicester in 1645 and Cromwell’s New Model Army followed suit at Drogheda and Wexford in 1650. Cities and towns were pummelled by siege artillery, houses were demolished or burned, livestock and crops were commandeered, women raped and looting was endemic. There was nothing romantic in the war between Roundheads and Cavaliers.
Destruction and depredation were inevitable given the nature of the war. At every stage it was a contest for resources with each side often desperately endeavouring to pay, feed and equip permanent field armies and garrisons. The fighting, therefore, resolved itself into a series of sieges and campaigns designed to gain strategic control of a region and extract whatever matériel it could yield. Parliament held a trump card in London and with it the machinery of government, and it was strongest in the rich and well-populated South and East. The royalists predominated in the poorer and less populous North, South-West and Wales. This territorial base was gradually chipped away and the royalist war effort collapsed after reverses at Marston Moor in 1644 and Naseby in 1645. Parliamentary mopping-up operations continued into the following year.
Each side had courted allies, principally to acquire manpower. Presbyterian Scotland provided Parliament with troops in 1644 in the mistaken belief that a thankful England would adopt Presbyterianism. Charles secured Catholic and Episcopalian Scotland through James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, whose Irish and Highland army played havoc with the Kirk’s levies during 1644 and 1645. The King also negotiated with Irish Catholics and Protestants, but got only a trickle of soldiers who were too late to affect the outcome of the conflict. Gaelic royalists used the war as an opportunity to revive old clan feuds: Campbell levies murdered Macdonnell’s in Ulster and Montrose’s MacDonald clansmen massacred Campbells in Scotland. The ‘civilising’ policies of Charles’s predecessors collapsed under the pressure of military necessity.
In 1647 the fugitive King snatched at another Caledonian straw by an accommodation with the Kirk in which he compromised his Anglicanism by pledging the introduction of Presbyterianism in England in return for an army. It was trounced at Preston in 1648 by Cromwell, who attributed his victory to ‘the hand of God’. Charles fell into Parliamentarian hands and, at the army’s insistence, was tried with making war on his subjects, found guilty and publicly executed in Whitehall in January 1649. The past died with him: the monarchy, the House of Lords and the Anglican Church were abolished and a republic established.
Cromwell, now commander-in-chief of the republic’s army, proceeded to extirpate royalist resistance in Ireland and Scotland. In 1651, he again thanked God for a further and decisive victory over the Scots at Worcester, who were fighting to restore Charles, Prince of Wales (the future Charles II), to his father’s throne. Royalist outposts in Virginia and the Barbados hung on until 1652, the last surrendering after being threatened with an amphibious landing and the sort of treatment that had been meted out in Ireland.2
By then, the three-year-old British republic was firmly established and winning respect and fear abroad, and so it could afford to be magnanimous even to stubborn royalists. Francis, Lord Wylloughby, the governor of the Barbados, was allowed to keep his sugar plantations there and elsewhere in the West Indies, which had been given to him by the Prince of Wales. They were a reward for his defection: until 1647 he had been an active Parliamentarian on the battlefield and in the House of Lords, but had switched sides after falling foul of the Presbyterian faction in the Commons. His religious sympathies were also Cromwell’s, which may explain why Wylloughby was permitted to return to England.3 In spirit he remained loyal to the exiled Prince of Wales, but he tempered his behaviour to the times and survived. Other peers followed his prudent example.
Wylloughby came home to a nation undergoing an experiment in government. By a majority of fifteen votes the Rump Parliament created a new polity which was called a ‘Commonwealth or Free State’ and embraced England, Scotland and Ireland. Executive power was held by ‘the people in parliament’ and whomever they chose to be ministers in a council of state. The House of Lords had ceased to function, although peers were allowed to keep their titles, and, if they were considered trustworthy, to continue to exercise limited power in their localities. This sidelining of the aristocracy was in large part a security measure: about half the nobility had been active royalists and many were unreconciled to the new regime at a time when the Prince of Wales was at large and conspiring with the Scots to restore the monarchy. Public safety as much as republican ideology dictated that the monarchy and House of Lords perished together.
Where did this leave those aristocrats who had either been Parliamentarians or, like Wylloughby, made terms with the republic to save what they could of their estates? Their prestige was intact, but their influence over publ
ic affairs had been severely curtailed. Their local powers were largely taken over by Cromwell’s dozen major-generals, satraps who took over the supervision of provincial government in 1655. This further pruning of the traditional political power of the aristocracy was possibly a manifestation of Cromwell’s dictum: ‘I know what I would not, not what I would.’
Marginalising the aristocracy in national politics may also have been an attempt to defuse the dangerous popular discontent that had been recently expressed by Levellers and other radicals, which is discussed later. Or, notwithstanding the fact that the aristocracy had played a significant part in the original rebellion against the King, the nobility was again identified with the Crown, and, therefore had to be kept in a political limbo. Given the royalist plots of the 1650s, this was a sensible precaution.
Yet republican polemicists spared the aristocracy the vituperation that was levelled at hereditary monarchy. Peers continued to receive the deference due to their rank in a society in which the traditional hierarchy was maintained. In Scotland, Cromwell continued James VI’s modernisation policies by paring down but not abolishing the nobility’s ancient feudal powers, including hereditary jurisdictions and the right to demand armed service from tenants.
A now ornamental aristocracy existed in a society which still revered the outward shows and tokens of status. The republic’s rulers remained deeply attached to those principles of personal honour which bound together its upper ranks. When the successful Parliamentarian general Lord Fairfax was rewarded with the lordship of the Isle of Man, it was publicly declared that he deserved it as a man whose honour equalled that of the Stanley earls of Derby, its previous owners, who had been royalists. Gentlemen dominated the government of the republic and expected to be treated as such. When Cromwell dissolved the Rump Parliament in 1653, Sir Arthur Haselrig complained that his escort of musketeers had insolently refused to remove their hats in the presence of their superiors. The republican elite dressed richly, rode in coaches with outriders and sat for fashionable portraitists as if they had been noblemen.4
Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present Page 12
