Caualiers & Roundheads
Christopher Hibbert

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

TABLE OF PRINCIPAL EVENTS

AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

1 THE GATHERING STORM

2 TAKING SIDES

3 TRIAL OF STRENGTH

4 THE SPREAD OF WAR

5 LONDON AND OXFORD

6 FIGHTING IN THE WEST COUNTRY

7 BRISTOL AND GLOUCESTER

8 COLONEL CROMWELL’S MEN

PART TWO

9 SWINGS OF FORTUNE

10 ROADS TO MARSTON MOOR

11 FIGHTING LIKE BEASTS

12 THE NEW MODEL ARMY

13 LEICESTER AND NASEBY

14 DEATH THROES

15 OXFORD ABANDONED

16 SOLDIERS AND LEVELLERS

17 THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

18 THE DEATH OF THE KING

EPILOGUE

The Fate of Characters Whose End is Not Recorded in the Text

Some of the Principal Civil War Sites, Buildings, Memorials and Museums in England

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

About the Author

Praise

By the same author

The English A Social History 1066-1945

Copyright

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is a narrative history of the Civil War in England concentrating upon what happened rather than upon what brought it about, upon the minor engagements and sieges – in which most of the war’s casualties were incurred – rather than upon the major battles, and upon the impact which the fighting had upon the civilian population. I have at the same time introduced as much little-known, curious and illuminating detail as I have been able to find.

It is intended for the general reader not the student, although I hope the student to whom the field is new may perhaps find it a useful introduction to the works of those scholars listed in the bibliography to whom I am myself deeply indebted. No references to sources are given in the text; but, for any readers who might be interested in consulting them, annotated copies of the book have been deposited at the library of the National Army Museum, Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea and the Mugar Memorial Library, the University of Boston, Massachusetts.

For their help in a variety of ways I must express my thanks to Margaret Lewendon, Alison Riley, Dr Francis Sheppard and to Dr Peter Boyden who kindly arranged for me to study the Civil War Papers of Brigadier Peter Young in the National Army Museum. I am much indebted also to the staffs of the London Library, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the County Record Offices of England and Wales, in particular to Michael Farrar, Cambridgeshire County Archivist; Richard Childs, Principal Archivist, Sheffield City Council; Mrs J. Challinor, Derbyshire Library Service; H. A. Hanley, Buckinghamshire County Archivist; the staff of the Surrey Record Office; Miss S. J. Lewin of the Hampshire Record Office; Jim Grisenthwaite and D. M. Bowcock, Assistant County Archivists, Cumbria Record Office; R. P. Jenkins, Senior Assistant Keeper of Archives, Leicestershire Record Office; Mrs Patricia Gill, County Archivist, West Sussex Record Office; Miss Rachel Watson, Northamptonshire County Archivist; Miss Jane E. Isaac, Assistant Archivist, Suffolk Record Office; Miss Monica Ory, Deputy County Archivist, Warwickshire Record Office; Adrian Henstock, Principal Archivist, Nottinghamshire Archives Office; Mrs M. M. Rou, Devon County Archivist; James Collett-White, Bedfordshire County Record Office; Miss Kathleen Topping, Manager, Centre for Kentish Studies, West Kent Archives Office; A. M. Carr, Deputy Head of the Record and Research, Shropshire Cultural Services; and Miss J. T. Smith, Principal Archivist, Essex County Archives; to my agents Bruce Hunter and Claire Smith; to Richard Johnson of HarperCollins and to Charles Scribner’s, Sons, New York.

I am also most grateful to Hamish Francis for reading the proofs, to Katherine Everett for her help in choosing the illustrations, to Robert Lacey, my editor at HarperCollins, and to my wife for having compiled the index.

Finally I want to say how much I am indebted for his generous help to John Morrill, Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge and to Donald Pennington, sometime Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, for having read the typescript and having given me so much useful advice.

Christopher Hibbert

PROLOGUE

‘It is called superstition nowadays for any man to come with more reverence into a church than a tinker and a dog into an ale-house.’

Archbishop Laud

On a winter’s day in 1624 Lord Kensington, England’s ‘wooing Ambassador’ as he called himself, rode into Paris to present as alluring a portrait as he could of the twenty-three-year-old Prince of Wales. Without recourse to the hyperbole which envoys on such a commission as his had commonly to employ, Kensington, himself an extremely handsome man ‘of a lovely and winning presence’, was confident that he could draw a picture sufficiently appealing to recommend the Prince as a husband for the King of France’s daughter, Henrietta Maria.

He could honestly describe a courteous young man, kind and considerate, rather delicate, even feminine in appearance, it was true, and by no means tall, no more than 5 feet 4 inches in fact, but healthy, with limbs made strong by vigorous exercise, by riding, tennis and golf, a curious Scottish game, as Kensington had to explain, which required both skill and strength in wielding a crooked club to drive balls made of hard leather stuffed with feathers into certain holes made in the ground. The Prince was meditative and studious; he read often from a little book, written out by hand and containing – though Lord Kensington had never looked closely inside it – noble sentiments and spiritual advice; he was most regular in his religious observances. Yet he was a young man of action, too, and of physical courage; he hunted with splendid spirit and took a keen interest in military affairs, having once even asked his father for permission to go off and fight in the service of the Doge of Venice. He was renowned for his temperate tastes: he had a good appetite but never ate greedily, preferring plain food to rich; he enjoyed a glass of wine or ale but never drank to excess, often, indeed, contenting himself with a glass of water or fruit juice; there had never been the least suspicion of his misbehaving with any young ladies of the English Court.

Lord Kensington took care not to emphasize this demure chastity, which seemed to some of the more uncharitable gossips in England to suggest that the Prince might be ‘less than a man’. Nor did Kensington find cause to lay too much emphasis on the solemnity of his nature, the rarity of those occasions upon which a smile of amusement lit up his small, pale, wistful face or brought a gleam of pleasure into his sad, rather prominent eyes, the even rarer occasions upon which he had been heard to laugh. There was certainly no need to mention his flashes of petulant temper, his occasional obstinacy, his disconcerting reserve, the stammer that sometimes impeded his speech, Scottish in accent like his father’s, though not so strongly so.

He had been born in Scotland on 19 November 1600, twelve miles outside Edinburgh, in a bedroom overshadowed by the great stone tower of Dunfermline Abbey. His father was King of Scotland then, and although – as the son of the Queen of England’s cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, and as the great grandson of King Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret – King James was generally accepted as the rightful heir to the English throne, Queen Elizabeth had not yet nominated him as her successor. Nor had she done so until she was on her deathbed in March 1603 when, brought the long-awaited news at Holyroodhouse, King James rode fast for the English border, followed by his lively and handsome Danish wife Anne, and accompanied by numerous courtiers and retainers who hoped to share with him some of the profits of his inheritance. Prince Charles was left in the care of nurses and servants. He was three years old by then, but he had not the strength to walk and he could not speak.

His father suggested that he might walk if his weak legs and ankles were placed in irons, and that he might perhaps talk if a surgeon were to cut the ligament at the base of his tongue. But the child’s kindly Cornish nurse warned that these drastic measures might well do more harm than good. If he were left in her care, living in the country, nature and love would do their work; and so they did. His legs admittedly were still rather bowed, his stammer was troublesome in times of stress, but he had grown, as Lord Kensington assured the French King, into a man of presence and worth. He was not as clever as his father, Kensington might have added; he did not have his father’s political judgement, though he shared to the full his belief that monarchs ruled their kingdoms by divine right, as God’s lieutenants on earth. Yet while King James was slovenly in manner, unprepossessing in appearance and argumentatively dogmatic in speech, Prince Charles was, above all, the very personification of courtliness. ‘He is grown a fine gentleman,’ one of Lord Kensing-ton’s friends observed, ‘and beyond all expectation I had of him when I saw him last; and, indeed, I think he never looked nor became himself better in all his life.’ In earlier years he had occasionally revealed his jealousy of his elder brother, Prince Henry, a clever, handsome, athletic boy, their mother’s favourite, but this paragon had died at the age of eighteen twelve years before; and Prince Charles was now the undisputed heir to the English throne.

Complimentary as were the reports which Lord Kensington gave of the Prince of Wales in Paris, they were no more enthusiastic than those he sent back to London about the fourteen-year-old Princess, ‘the loveliest creature in France and the sweetest thing in nature’. She was certainly too vivacious to be considered plain; her face, always expressive of some emotion, of excitement, sorrow, happiness or anger, was appealing in its responsiveness and childish candour; yet it had to be admitted that, for all Lord Kensington’s excited pronouncements, she was no great beauty. Her eyes, so most of her portraits seem to suggest, were hooded by heavy lids; her upper lip, as even Van Dyck was to indicate, was noticeably protuberant in consequence of her projecting teeth. Her complexion was sallow; she was so small that the fringe of tight, black rings of hair that framed her face would scarcely reach her intended bridegroom’s shoulder. She walked about her rooms with the quick, sudden movements of a sparrow; she spoke quickly, too, and had a quick temper. She was a determined and uncompromising Roman Catholic.

Her marriage was celebrated on a platform outside the west door of Notre-Dame on May Day 1625, the duc de Chevreuse standing in for the absent Protestant bridegroom to whom he was distantly related. The next month at Canterbury her second wedding took place. Her father-in-law had died some weeks before on 27 March, so her husband was now King Charles and she was the Queen of England.

The people of London were ready to welcome her as such. Two days after her wedding she and her husband set out by barge from Gravesend followed by hundreds of boats whose numbers grew ever greater as they approached the roaring cannon of the Tower. The King and Queen, both dressed in green, stood by the open windows of the barge, bowing and waving to the cheering crowds. All the way from the Tower to Somerset House in the Strand, which was to be the new Queen’s London home, the cheering and shouting continued as the crowds of people jostled each other on the riverside stairs, peered down from the windows of the buildings on London Bridge upon the royal barge, clung to the sides of the surrounding boats.

The people’s enthusiasm for their young Queen Henrietta Maria did not, however, last long. It was soon noticed that she responded to their acclamations, if at all, with a sulky ill grace. When they crowded round her and stared at her, she turned away or even scowled at them. Particularly she disliked being watched with gaping curiosity when she had her meals at Whitehall Palace. ‘Divers of us being at Whitehall to see her being at dinner,’ reported one of the sightseers traditionally admitted to this intriguing spectacle, ‘and the room somewhat overheated with a fire and company, she drove us all out of the chamber. I suppose none but a Queen could have cast such a scowl.’

She took no trouble to learn English; she showed no inclination to talk to anyone except the French women who constantly surrounded her; she even refused to attend her husband’s coronation, choosing instead to peer down on the King from a window in Old Palace Yard as, under a dark and threatening sky, wearing white, not purple – the robes of innocence rather than of majesty – he walked towards the Abbey accompanied by his dear friend, the Duke of Buckingham.

It was only too clear that the Queen disliked England and the English people, that in particular she disliked the Duke of Buckingham, who patronizingly treated her as though she were a little inexperienced girl in need of his worldly advice, and that she shrank from a husband whom she could not yet begin to understand or even to like. Unhappy and homesick, she took a perverse pleasure in being so obviously a foreigner, in flaunting her Catholicism in the face of Protestant susceptibility.

Her husband’s reaction to her pert, combative and sometimes almost hysterical self-will, was a cold disapproving silence, occasionally broken by sudden flashes of rage. He complained to Buckingham of ‘all her various neglects’, the way she tried to avoid being alone with him, how he had to communicate with her through a servant.

Convinced that the cause of the unhappiness of his marriage was the ‘maliciousness’ of her French attendants, the King – who had conceived an aversion to foreigners which was never entirely to leave him – determined to be rid of them and, on the afternoon of 26 June 1626, accompanied by the Duke of Buckingham, he walked into the Queen’s room at Whitehall Palace. Her attendants watched in awed silence as he sharply told her to come outside with him for a moment. The Queen replied that if he had anything to say to her he could do so where they were. Angrily he took hold of her hand, pulled her after him to his own apartments, pushed her inside, locked the door and told her that he had had quite enough of her French friends: all of them were to be sent home. She burst into tears, then fell to her knees in supplication, then, losing her temper, ran to the window, smashed her fist through the glass and began to shout to the people gathered in the courtyard below. The King pulled her back, bruising her hands and tearing her dress.

The King’s unhappy marriage was but the most personal of the depressing problems that faced him on every side. The country had drifted into a war with Spain which dragged on for four years; and, before it was over, England was at war also with France. Then, in the summer of 1626, the Duke of Buckingham as Lord High Admiral led a disastrous expedition to relieve Huguenot rebels in La Rochelle who were being besieged there by the Catholic forces of the French King. The Duke brought his badly mauled army back to Plymouth ‘with no little dishonour to our nation, excessive charge to our treasure, and great slaughter of our men’. Distressed as he was by foreign affairs, the King was as deeply troubled by affairs at home.

His father had never disguised his impatience with Parliament, or rather with the country gentry, professional men and merchants who constituted the House of Commons. After dissolving one particularly difficult assembly, the so-called Addled Parliament of 1614, King James had declared that he was surprised that his ‘ancestors should have permitted such an institution to come into existence’. He could not govern indefinitely without Parliament, since he needed the money that only Parliament could provide; but he had always been insistent that the Commons had no right to question his policies, to interfere with his inherited prerogative powers. These privileges depended upon him, he had told the Speaker, denying that the Commons had any business meddling with matters of state; and when they had entered in their journal a protestation that their privileges did not depend upon the King but were the ‘ancient and undoubted birthright of the subjects of England’, he had dissolved Parliament, torn the protestation from the book with his own hand and ordered the arrest of those Members whom he took to be the troublemakers. Yet persistently as King James had maintained that his powers were absolute, laboriously as he had set them out in treatises on the Divine Right of Kings, regularly as he had informed Parliament that he was outside or above the law, he was shrewd enough never to lay claims to authority which the laws of the country or the Church of England would have good cause to deny him. Although he had frequently declared his belief that he had no duty to communicate with Parliament at all unless he wished to do so, in practice he had been in almost constant communication with it whenever it was sitting. His relations with the Commons, while often strained, had never reached breaking point; indeed, with the last of his Parliaments they had been perfectly agreeable.

His son had been brought up in the belief, as propounded in a little manual, Basilikon Doron, which King James had written for him, that kings, like fathers, derived their authority from God and from Him also derived their right to demand obedience and honour. A few months before his accession Charles had heard his father tell Parliament – and he himself clung resolutely to the belief throughout his life – that the King of England sat on Jesus’s throne on ‘this part of the earth’.

But Charles was neither so shrewd as his father nor so wary; he did not appreciate just how possessively Parliament regarded its right to approve taxation. He affronted Parliament by virtually ignoring it. Whereas it had been his father’s practice to make long speeches to both Houses, to send them frequent messages, to remind them constantly of his theory of kingship, he himself addressed them in the briefest, curtest way. He left them in no doubt that he regarded it as Parliament’s duty, as it was all his subjects’ duty, to recognize his absolute authority, to trust him to do what was best for them of his own goodwill. Miserable in his marriage to an unhappy and highly-excitable wife, dependent upon the wayward advice of the volatile and forceful Duke of Buckingham, he seemed driven by a nervous insecurity and sense of personal inadequacy to arrogate to himself privileges and rights which his father would never have claimed. ‘This King,’ wrote Lucy Hutchinson, daughter of the Lieutenant of the Tower of London and wife of a Nottinghamshire gentleman, ‘was a most excellent judge and a greate lover of paintings, carvings, gravings and many other ingenuities .…But a worse encroacher upon the civill and spirituall liberties of his people by farre than his father.’ Grave, reserved and fastidious as was his usual demeanour, those close to Charles learned to beware of the sudden outbursts of anger which erupted when he felt his authority or dignity questioned, to dread the obstinacy which was to bring about his downfall.

Moreover, he was wholly lacking in the bonhomie which had attracted men to his great-great-grandmother’s brother, Henry VIII, and which his father had often carried to such excess. For all his gentleness and constancy, the exquisite courtesy of his manner, his innate goodness, he was a man more revered and respected than liked. His constraint and lack of humour were barriers to intimacy that all but a very few found it impossible to cross. His slight stammer, which in another man might have been appealing, was in him merely a defect which made it the more difficult for him to put strangers and Members of Parliament at their ease, seeming to emphasize the atmosphere of melancholy that surrounded him.

This atmosphere was reflected in the normally sad expression of his face, an expression so well conveyed in Van Dyck’s Charles I in Three Positions that when Bernini saw it he described the countenance depicted as ‘doomed’. ‘Never,’ the sculptor said, ‘never have I beheld features more unfortunate.’

Underlying the melancholy there was a certain lack of sympathy in the King’s responses, a defensive rejection of an intimacy that might reveal him as less assured than he tried to be. Few men ever felt that Charles really liked them. Few servants ever felt that their services were truly appreciated; if they did not do their duty they were politely dismissed; if they did do their duty they were merely doing what was expected of them. They were treated well but rarely with a hint of warmth or affection.

Charles was a diligent man rather than an intelligent one; he understood books better than people, though he did learn and gain experience from people: as Philip Warwick, later to be one of his secretaries, said, like King Francis I of France he learned more by ear than by study. Moreover, he seemed incapable of making that sort of contact with his subjects which was to ensure for his eldest son, despite all his manifest faults, a far greater personal popularity and following.

The first Parliament of King Charles’s reign, in 1625, failed to provide him with the financial support he had asked of it, declining to grant him for more than a single year the right to collect those customs duties which his predecessors had been granted for life. Displaying more interest in religion at home than in the King’s differences with dynasties abroad, its members went on to urge stronger measures against Roman Catholicism, fresh support for Puritanism, and the public disgrace of a clergyman who had denied that the Pope was Antichrist. Charles replied by dissolving Parliament and appointing the clergyman one of his own chaplains.

The King’s second Parliament, in 1626, proved no more satisfactory than the first. In order to make it more tractable, he had rendered those Members who had previously proved most tiresome ineligible for election by appointing them sheriffs. This manoeuvre, however, merely resulted in the elevation to the leadership of the Commons of a Member far more dangerous than the relatively moderate men who had been excluded, Sir John Eliot, son of a rich Cornish squire. Emotional and vehement, Eliot harangued the Commons in a loud, harsh voice, protesting that he and his fellow Members were not creatures of the King elected to approve his policies and vote him supplies but men with individual consciences and a duty to act only in accordance with what they knew to be right. He demanded an inquiry into the conduct of his erstwhile friend and patron, the Duke of Buckingham, and went so far as to urge his impeachment.

Charles reacted as though in panic. He had Eliot arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. But when the House, refusing to be intimidated, declined to do any further business until Eliot was released, the King gave way, releasing Eliot, yet at the same time despatching a curt and provocative message to the House enjoining its Members to lose no more time in voting him the money for which he was tired of waiting.

On his return to the Commons, Eliot immediately returned to the attack. In the middle of a violent storm that dashed the rain against the windows of the chamber and hurled the waters of the Thames across the river steps, he demanded that the complaints of the Commons should be heard and registered before financial matters were discussed, at the same time attacking the Duke of Buckingham in the most extravagant terms. Eventually the Duke was impeached by the Commons. The King responded by dissolving Parliament in 1626 before the proceedings against Buckingham had been completed.

Unable now to raise money through the House of Commons, the King was reduced to finding other, more direct means of support. Disregarding Parliament’s refusal to grant him the Crown’s traditional customs duties, he ordered their collection; he imposed a capital levy, had those who refused to pay it imprisoned, and dismissed the Lord Chief Justice for questioning its lawfulness.

The immensely expensive failure of the Duke of Buckingham’s expedition to France in 1627, however, obliged the King to summon Parliament again in the hope that its Members would recognize the common danger. But the danger, as the Commons saw it, came not from the country’s enemies abroad but from what they took to be the tyranny of the King at home. They refused to grant money to him until they had set out their grievances, in particular their condemnation of taxation without Parliamentary consent and imprisonment without due legal process. They incorporated their grievances in a Petition of Right of 1628 which they presented to the King for his assent as though it were a statute. Declining to bestow such authority upon it, the King said that he would be graciously pleased to accord it his ‘royal word’. The Commons, unwilling to trust his word, expressed their dissatisfaction with the formula and returned with renewed vigour to the condemnation of the Duke of Buckingham, whom they saw as the chief source of all their misfortunes. In an attempt to save his dearest friend, Charles gave way and, calling upon the Commons to attend him in the House of Lords, he signified his formal assent to the Petition, adding with petulant self-justification, ‘This I am sure is full, yet no more than I granted you on my first answer. And I assure you that my maxim is that the people’s liberties strengthen the King’s prerogative and that the King’s prerogative is to defend the people’s liberties…I have done my part, wherefore if the Parliament have not a happy conclusion the sin is yours. I am free of it.’

Overlooking his ill grace and overcoming their irritation at his implied rebuke, the Commons rose to their feet and accorded him ‘such an acclamation as made the House ring several times’. Their cheers were repeated in the streets outside where ‘a general joy in all faces spread itself suddenly and broke out into ringing of bells and bonfires miraculous’. Yet, if the King was forgiven for the time being, the Duke of Buckingham was not; and the campaign against him, both inside and outside Parliament, gathered momentum. Hundreds of handbills were printed and passed from hand to hand in the streets: ‘Who rules the Kingdom? The King. Who rules the King? The Duke. Who rules the Duke? The Devil.’

As week passed week that summer of 1628 the rage of the people against Buckingham grew more and more intense. In June a physician and astrologer whom he was known to consult was battered to death in the street; and in August the Duke himself was murdered at Portsmouth by a lonely and embittered officer, John Felton, to whom he had refused promotion.

Charles was at prayers when the grievous news was given him. He remained kneeling, his pale face drawn and tight, as his chaplain continued with the service. When it was over, he went to his room and threw himself sobbing across his bed. He could never forgive the man whom he blamed for his death, that ‘wicked rebel’ Sir John Eliot who had so viciously attacked Buckingham in Parliament, comparing him to Sejanus, the evil counsellor of the Emperor Tiberius. The King ordered that Buckingham’s murderer should be ‘put to the question’ to force him to reveal his accomplices. The lawyers declined to sanction the use of torture, and Felton was executed at Tyburn, protesting that he had acted alone, ‘not maliciously but with love of his country’. Yet, in the King’s mind, Felton remained Eliot’s creature; Eliot’s was the ultimate responsibility. He would soon be made to pay for it.

Eliot took his seat in Parliament again in the January following the Duke’s death, determined to maintain the principle that the Commons had a right to criticize the King’s incompetent or misguided counsellors; but, sensing the advantages of allying the growing Puritan enthusiasm in the country with demands for political change, he and his friends changed the emphasis of their attack. They now moved against the King on religious grounds.

They had numerous and varied complaints: he had presented to a Crown living a clergyman who had declared that refusal to pay the King’s forced loans was not merely a crime against the state but a sin against God; he had transferred one of his High Church chaplains to the see of Chichester; he had appointed William Laud, a well-known opponent of the Puritans and advocate of the scandalous doctrine that the Roman Church was one of the true churches of Christendom, Bishop of London; he had appointed one of Laud’s closest allies, William Juxon, who was to succeed Laud as Bishop of London, Dean of the Chapel Royal; and he had given intolerable provocation to the Puritan gentry in the Commons by declaring that the affairs of the Church of England were nothing to do with Parliament.

Charles’s own position was clear enough. He had read with approval and admiration the Bishop of Chichester’s Appelo Caesarem which identified Popery with tyranny and Puritanism with anarchy, and which concluded, ‘poperie is originall of Superstition; puritanisme, the high-way into prophaneness; both alike [are] enemies unto piety.’ This stated his own views precisely. They were much like those of his father and of his father’s predecessor, Queen Elizabeth. In a speech to Parliament, in which he condemned the doctrines of the radical Puritans, he called for the Church’s return to the ‘purest times of Queen Elizabeth’s days’. He had abhorred the behaviour and beliefs of his own Queen’s priests; but he regarded with even more distaste the opinions of the Puritan landowners and merchants in the House of Commons and of the Puritan preachers whose disrupting, provocative sermons could be heard all over London. It was his firm belief, as it had been his father’s, that attacks on the bishops were attacks on the King, and that insults to the Book of Common Prayer must not be tolerated. When, in a later year, an unruly congregation in Essex knocked the Prayer Book out of the hands of their curate and kicked it about the church, he undoubtedly hoped, on turning to the House of Lords to condemn the outrage, that they would do more than merely insist upon the submission of the ‘poor and silly men’ who had committed it.

As Eliot and his friends in the House of Commons belaboured in ever stronger terms the High Church bishops for poisoning the purity of the true faith, accusing the Bishop of Winchester in particular of preaching ‘flat popery’ and refusing to confirm the Crown’s right to its traditional revenues until they had debated a resolution that ‘the affairs of the King of Earth must give way to the affairs of the King of Heaven’, the King decided he must také a firm line.

He sent orders to the Speaker to ask the House to adjourn. Its militant Members refused to accept the request, shouting defiantly ‘No! No!’ in the Speaker’s face. Sir John Eliot rose to insist that it was for the Commons to adjourn themselves. But, protested the Speaker, it had been the King’s command: the House must adjourn, there could be no more speeches, and if there were he would leave the chair. So saying, he stood up and prepared to leave the chamber; but immediately two of Eliot’s supporters sprang at him and forced him back into his seat. ‘God’s wounds!’ one of them, Denzil Holles, a childhood friend of the King and now the impetuous Member for Dorchester, bellowed above the roar, ‘God’s wounds! You shall sit till we please to rise.’ Another Member locked the door and put the key in his pocket.

In growing pandemonium, which on occasions came close to hysteria, the House passed resolutions against the religious policy of the Government and against both the levy and the payment of the customs duties, known as tonnage and poundage, without Parliamentary sanction. Each resolution was met by deafening shouts of ‘Aye! Aye!’ Then the doors were unlocked and the Members emerged, some of them elated by their bold defiance, many others, who would have slipped away earlier had the door not been locked, in evident apprehension.

Charles was at once appalled and indignant. Condemning the ‘undutiful and seditious’ behaviour of the Commons, and referring to its most unruly Members as ‘vipers’, he ordered the arrest of Sir John Eliot who was left to languish in the Tower where, suffering from tuberculosis, he died three years later, his pleas for release denied or ignored.

If few others could share the strength of the King’s feelings against Eliot and his indignation at the behaviour of his supporters in the Commons, there were those, even among the Puritans, who agreed with the diarist Simonds D’Ewes that ‘divers fiery spirits in the House’ had been ‘very faulty’. For D’Ewes himself the day of this fateful clash between King and Parliament in 1629 was the ‘most gloomy, sad, and dismal day for England that [had] happened in five hundred years’.

The Parliament which dispersed in such tumult in 1629 was the last which was to meet for eleven years; and the King contrived to persuade himself that his political troubles were over. So, too, were the unhappy years of his marriage. There had been a slight improvement in his relations with his wife after her French attendants had been sent home in 1626 and her household had come under the direction of kindly, sensible English ladies whose rooms were frequently visited by the tactful and attractive French ambassador who helped to bring the King and Queen closer together. The reconciliation had become surer and firmer when the Duke of Buckingham’s military campaigns had deprived Charles of his friend’s companionship for a longer period than he had ever had to bear. In his loneliness he had been driven to seek the consolation of his now less cantankerous wife. And, after Buckingham’s murder, in the agony of his grief was conceived a new love. Formerly the Queen had displayed a physical aversion to a husband without either the imagination or the humour, the experience or the sensuality to overcome the nervousness and shrinking reluctance of an unawakened and underdeveloped girl; now they had reached ‘such a degree of kindness’, the court jester, Archie Armstrong, told the Earl of Carlisle, that the king was ‘a wooer again’. He gazed at his wife with soulful desire, repeatedly gave her presents, evidently felt restless and unfulfilled when they were apart, and when they were together, so an ambassador reported to his government, kissed her ‘a hundred times’ in an hour.

Her first baby died within an hour of its christening; but the mother soon recovered and her husband was so kind and considerate that she felt not only ‘the happiest princess’, but ‘the happiest woman in the world’. A few months later she was pregnant again, with a pre-natal craving for shellfish. The baby, born on 29 May 1630,. another boy, was big and healthy. He was christened Charles. Other children followed him with the most satisfying regularity, a princess, Mary, the next year; another son, Prince James, in 1633; a second daughter, Princess Elizabeth in 1635; then a third daughter in 1636; and a third son in 1640. They were all healthy children, and their mother, her years of unhappiness now far behind her, settled down to a life of full contentment. Year by year the King’s affection for her deepened; and her influence over him was to have the most fateful consequences in the future. He made no public protest when various people at court were converted to Roman Catholicism under her influence, nor when she took her two elder sons to mass. Edward Hyde, later first Earl of Clarendon, then a successful young lawyer who was to know them both well, observed, ‘the King’s affection to the Queen was of a very extraordinary alloy; a composition of conscience and love and generosity and gratitude…insomuch as he saw with her eyes and determined by her judgement.’

The country being at peace, the King was able to pay his way without the necessity of calling Parliament, resorting to all manner of devices for raising money – some of doubtful legality, all of them unpopular – for the ordinary costs of government. Customs duties were collected as of right; obsolete laws were resurrected to extract money from those who had breached their provisions; Crown lands were managed with the utmost severity, and royal forests extended; monopolies were sold to companies and corporations since the law forbade their sale to individuals; fines were imposed upon all owners of freehold land worth £40 a year or more who had not applied for knighthood at the King’s coronation; and Ship Money, a tax which had been levied by ancient right upon maritime towns and counties to meet naval expenses, was extended to inland areas also.

As in the past when advised by Buckingham, the King was not so widely blamed for these impositions as were his ministers and advisers, in particular Thomas Wentworth, the future Earl of Strafford, and William Laud, who was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, the one a hard, intelligent, impatient and energetic man, the son of an ancient family and owner of huge estates in Yorkshire, whose great wealth had been increased by none too scrupulous methods, the other the son of a Reading clothier, a ‘little low red-faced man of mean parentage’, in Sir Simonds D’Ewes’ description. Overworked, fussy, unimaginative and outspoken, sometimes irritable and often rude, William Laud had made many enemies. He was scholarly and devout, withdrawing seven times a day, however pressing his business, to kneel in prayer; yet those who had seen the eyes in his alert, flushed face flash with sudden and alarming anger, who had been shouted down by him in argument, who had suffered at his hands in the Star Chamber or in the Court of High Commission, had good cause to fear and dislike him.

To him Puritans were like wolves ‘to be held by the ears’; and, while introducing measures which effectively reduced the number of those who propounded what he took to be their heretical doctrines, he appointed to vacant sees bishops who were prepared to endorse his own and the King’s views on conformity, the use of the Prayer Book, surplices and organs, the proper position of the communion table as an altar at the east end of the church rather than as a mere slab of wood in the middle, the need to make services more reverent and churches more beautiful. ‘It is called superstition nowadays’, he once indignantly complained, ‘for any man to come with more reverence into a church than a tinker and a dog into an ale-house.’

Very insular in his outlook, he set great store by the Englishness of the established Church which was beginning to be called Anglican, the Church which had kept itself free from the deviations of the medieval popes, which remained the true Church of Christendom, which must be steered in that ‘middle way’, as the King described it, ‘between the pomp of superstitious tyranny and the meanness of fantastick anarchy’.

This view of the meaning and importance of the English Church offended both Catholic and Puritan, yet it could not be said that the jointly held views of the King and Archbishop were imposed upon a wholly antagonistic people: there was much in ‘Laudism’, and not only its nationalistic overtones, which appealed strongly to all classes. While enemies of the established Church ranted against bishops, many parishes presented petitions in support of them and later organized demonstrations in favour of altar rails and organs. Indeed, during these eleven years when the King ruled the country without reference to Parliament, there were numerous people to be found who believed the country in general, as well as the Church in particular, was set upon a fair and encouraging course. New roads were being built and old ones improved, canals dug and swamps drained; a postal service was started; attempts were made to improve local government and to find work for the unemployed. The country was prosperous and remained at peace. Edward Hyde went so far as to suggest that in 1639 ‘England enjoyed the greatest measure of felicity it had ever known. But then,’ Hyde continued, ‘in the midst of this scene of happiness and plenty, a small, scarce discernible cloud arose in the North, which was shortly after attended with such a storm, that even rooted up the greatest and tallest cedars of [the country]; blasted all its beauty and fruitfulness; brought its strength to decay, and its glory to reproach.’

PART ONE

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