The English Civil War: A People’s History

For better-off children, the country could be a delicious place of play. In 1639, some who would rise to prominence in the war were still close to a childhood of wild unsupervised games. The eleven-year-old John Bunyan might have been holed up somewhere with his favourite book, no Bible, but the racy – and sexy – adventures of a superhero called Bevis of Hampden. And thirteen-year-old Richard Cromwell, Oliver’s son, was still slogging his unenthusiastic way through grammar school, unaware that he was to be – briefly – ruler of England. The young Matthew Hopkins shows what terrible pressures could be created inside the good seventeenth-century child. As a boy, Matthew is said to have ‘took affright at an apparition of the Devil, which he saw in the night’. As the son of a godly vicar, whose will insists firmly on salvation through faith alone, Hopkins was like most godly children; he was terrified of the powers of hell, which he believed might claim him. And yet in maturity Hopkins liked to invent different childhoods for himself. He told William Lilly that he came from a line of schoolmasters in Suffolk, ‘who had composed for the psalms of King David’; there was indeed a John Hopkins, an English hymn-writer, but he didn’t have a son called Matthew. Hopkins told Lady Jane Whorwood that he was really named Hopequins and was the grandson of an English Catholic diplomat, Richard Hopequins, a much grander background than he could really claim. These alternative identities suggest a profound wish to hide from something or someone, perhaps from the Devil.

Among all those relishing peace were the two men who were to be the chief protagonists in the coming wars. The man who was to be the only king ever executed by the English people was born a privileged little boy, but one whom nobody particularly wanted. Charles Stuart spent a childhood ill and in pain, bullied by those he loved, and he grew into a disabled and often unhappy adult. In the same calendar year, another boy was born, a boy who was to become the only man not of royal blood ever to head the English state. Oliver Cromwell was welcomed into a family of struggling East Anglian gentry, the adored and long-awaited only boy in a family of girls. The boost to his self-esteem was lifelong.

When Charles was born on 19 November 1600, he was his parents’ third child, and they had a fine son already, destined to rule in Edinburgh one day. Charles was nobody’s favourite, nobody’s problem. He was first assigned a noblewoman to be his foster-mother, in the manner usual for those of his class; her name was Lady Margaret Ochiltree. Charles cared enough about Lady Margaret to be angry when her pension fell into arrears in 1634. But of course she didn’t do the childcare herself; Charles also had a wetnurse, and a rocker who was supposed to rock the cradle, but was also a general nurserymaid, and other nursery nurses. Like other upper-class children, his closest bonds were therefore with servants, and hence precarious because servants could come and go. A child was supposed to be attached to his natural parents, but when he was only two, Charles lost his parents to England; James left Scotland in April to take the throne of England after Elizabeth I died in March 1603, and was followed a month later by Anne, with her eldest children, Henry and Elizabeth. With astonishing insensitivity, or perhaps with a desire to begin Charles’s princely training, the royal couple also moved him to a new household, that of Alexander Seton, Lord Fyvie, who had nine surviving daughters and a son.

Installed in this overflowing family, Charles does not seem to have flourished. Reports sent on him spoke of his longing to be with his parents. There was another problem, too, one that would overshadow Charles’s relations with his parents still further. Fyvie sent bullish reports on Charles to the court, but read carefully they contained alarming news. In April 1604 – when Charles was three – Fyvie said that Charles was ‘in good health, courage and lofty mind’ but added that he was ‘weak in body’. Most ominously of all, he confided that Charles was ‘beginning to speak some words’. If Charles was really only beginning to speak at the age of three, it points to severe disability. Fyvie added ‘he is far better of his mind and tongue than of his body and feet’. This report alarmed Charles’s parents, for James sent Dr Henry Atkins to examine the prince. Arriving on the night of 12 May 1604, he reported to the king that he had found the young duke ‘walking with an ancient gentlewoman his nurse in the great chamber … although he walked not alone but sustained and led by that gentlewoman’s hand’. Atkins said that Charles evaded an examination by ‘calling for music to one of his servants … desiring several kinds of measures … and would imitate the instrument with the sound of the true tune with his high tender voice’. But the next day he was duly examined, and Atkins reported that he was in reasonable condition but for the joint problems, ‘the weakness of his legs’, diarrhoea said to be caused by teething, and a desire to drink often. Tellingly, Atkins couldn’t examine Charles’s teeth because ‘his Highness would not permit any to feel his gums’. Despite his fairly reassuring report to the king and queen, Atkins wrote more frankly to Secretary of State Robert Cecil that ‘at my coming the duke was far out of order’. To the king he announced that the duke would begin a journey south under his supervision. Charles had difficulty standing and walking because ‘he was so weak in his joints and especially ankles, insomuch as many feared they were out of joint’ and of the ‘joints of his knees, hips and ankles being great and loose are not yet closed and knit together as happeneth to many in their tender years which afterwards when years hath confirmed them proves very strong and able persons’.

The lonely little boy had rickets. This childhood illness was a dominant factor in the development of his personality. The victims of rickets suffer low height and weight, and painful decayed teeth. The spine and breastbone are affected, long bones are shortened and deformed, the ligaments are loose, and fractures are common. Rickets gives bow legs and a pigeon chest, visible deformities. Rickets may also have caused lowered resistance to other diseases, including measles, diarrhoea and whooping cough. But perhaps most significantly, modern studies of rickets suggest that it affects the personality, making for apathy and irritability, and this was noted in Charles’s case. His guardian wrote to James, saying that ‘the great weakness of his body, after so long and heavy sickness, is much supplied by the might and strength of his spirit and mind’ – which might be a diplomatic way of calling the small duke a headstrong child. A toddler in pain is a difficult toddler.

Unfortunately, Charles was not especially lucky in his parents’ response to his illness. If we compare it with that of Buckinghamshire gentleman Ralph Verney, we can see that the royal family were not only careless but callous. Mary Verney wrote of her son: ‘for Jack his legs are most miserable, crooked as ever I saw any child’s, and yet thank God he goes very strongly, and is very straight in his body as any child can bee; and is a very fine child in all but his legs’ … And she too blamed diet. ‘Truly I think it would be much finer if we had him in ordering, for they let him eat anything he has a mind to, and he keeps a very ill diet.’ Ralph Verney’s response was anxious and sympathetic: ‘truly the crookedness of his legs grieves my very heart, ask some advice about it at London, but do not tamper with him’. What he meant by this is dismally clear. When Charles arrived in London on the heels of Atkins’s report, fresh stories of his illness flew about, and those eager to act as guardians to him melted away. ‘There were many great ladies suitors for the keeping of the duke; but when they did see how weak a child he was, and not likely to live, their hearts were down, and none of them was desirous to take charge of him.’ Kind Richard Carey took Charles on, though he reported that ‘he was not able to go, nor scant stand alone, he was so weak in his joints, and especially his ankles, insomuch as many feared they were out of joint’. Carey’s first move was to surround Charles with his own servants; another change of personnel for the little boy. Even more disturbing is his account of his wife’s struggles with James I’s plans, as Richard reported:

Many a battle my wife had with the King, but she still prevailed. The King was desirous that the string under his tongue should be cut, for he was so long beginning to speak as he [the king] thought he would never have spoke. Then he [the king] would have him put in iron boots, to strengthen his sinews and joints, but my wife protested so much against them both, as she got the victory, and the King was fain to yield.

These cruel treatments, contested by Charles’s new foster-mother, may have had their origins in James’s own separation from his mother and his own lack of security. Mary Queen of Scots fled to England without James before his first birthday, leaving him with foster-parents. James himself did not walk until he was about five, and like his son he too had childhood rickets. Also like his son, he compensated for his difficulty in walking by taking up riding and then hunting with especial vigour. When James was around four, he was moved from the woman’s world of the nursery to the schoolroom; this was three years earlier than normal, and it reflected his status as king, but it was hard on him. He loved books, but his tutor George Buchanan was a hard man who hated Catholics, and Mary Queen of Scots most of all. James grew up with his ears ringing with stories of his mother’s wickedness. Buchanan thought she was a witch, a whore and a murderer. On one occasion, he beat the king severely. James may also have been alarmed at seeing his own disabilities reflected in his son. James had very noticeable physical problems: his tongue was too large for his mouth, which made him dribble, and he had only imperfect control over bodily functions and a profound dislike of bathing. When thwarted, he would fling himself furiously about, sobbing or screaming, as his son did.

Historians have tended to portray Charles’s rickets as shortlived, but this may betray the influence of Stuart propaganda. Richard Carey was afterwards keen to tell the world that he had performed a miracle cure. ‘Beyond all men’s expectations so blessed the duke with health and strength under my wife’s charge, as he grew better and better every day.’ Royal astrologer William Lilly said Charles overcame his physical weakness by running and riding and hunting, and that his success made him stubborn in endeavour. Similarly, Philip Warwick reported that ‘though born weakly yet came [he] through temperance and exercise to have as firm and strong a body as that of most persons I ever knew’. And all his life he walked breathlessly fast. But on 6 January 1605, when Charles was created Duke of York, all his robes and other vestments had to be carried by an attendant gentleman, and Charles himself was held in the arms of the Lord High Admiral, the Earl of Nottingham. On 15 September 1608 he was too weak to go to a christening, and it was said that he was ‘exceedingly feeble in his lower parts, his legs growing not erect but repandous [crooked] and embowed, whereas he was unapt for exercises of activity’. As late as 1610 his movements were clumsy, and his part in a masque had to be specially contrived to hide his legs – a circle of children surrounded him as he danced. Finally, Charles’s father and his son, the future Charles II, were both tall, but Charles remained small, further evidence of the severity of his rickets. His brittle bones impeded his growth severely, so that he only reached 5’ 4”, or in other accounts 4’ 11”. (5’ 4” is based on a surviving suit of armour.) The Court portrait painter, Van Dyck, used devices such as a flight of steps, the presence of a dwarf, and a raised throne to make Charles look bigger. In the case of the mounted figure of Charles created by Hubert le Sueur the sculptor was explicitly told to make the figure six feet in height. By contrast, both his older siblings Henry and Elizabeth were relatively tall – Henry was 5’ 8” at the age of seventeen – and also healthy.

The disparity led to rivalry, and James made matters worse by telling Henry that he would leave the crown to Charles if Henry did not work harder. This sort of cruelty, together with the characteristically violent and competitive early modern boys’ culture, led Henry to bully his smaller, weaker, less capable brother, and to taunt him, explicitly, about his disability. One day, as the two were waiting with a group of bishops and courtiers for the king to appear, Henry snatched the Archbishop of Canterbury’s hat and put it on Charles, saying that when he was king he would make Charles primate, since he was swot and toady enough for the job and the long robes would hide his ugly legs. Charles had to be dragged away, screaming with rage. Like many a victim of bullying, Charles tried to win his brother over by extreme submissiveness: ‘Sweet, sweet brother,’ he wrote, desperately, when he was nine, ‘I will give everything I have to you, both horses, and my books, and my pieces [guns], and my crossbow, or anything you would have. Good brother love me … ’ The pathos of this letter can scarcely be exaggerated. In late 1612, however, Henry was dead, aged eighteen. He died of typhoid fever after a hard game of tennis. His last request was for his sister Elizabeth to visit his bedside; there was no mention of his brother. Diarist and MP Simonds D’Ewes recorded that ‘Charles duke of York was so young and sickly as the thought of their enjoying him [as king] did nothing at all to alienate or mollify the people’s mourning’.

King James wrote textbooks to edify his children, but was less enthusiastic about spending time with them. He preferred his male companions, especially his lover and favourite George Villiers Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham, beautiful as a hunting leopard, supernaturally brilliant at divining the psychic needs of the powerful and supplying them, became after Henry’s death the elder brother Charles had always wanted, one who loved and accepted him. Like all brothers, Charles and Buckingham fought for mastery, and Charles usually lost. Charles bet Buckingham a banquet on a game of tennis – he lost – and another on which of two footmen could run fastest – he lost again. The disastrous Spanish marriage negotiations of 1623 were a similar game, designed to show the boys in a romantic, daredevil light. Fancying himself in love with the Spanish Infanta, whom he had never seen, Charles impetuously decided to sweep her off her feet. Adopting a disguise was part of the fun; all his life he loved theatricality. In this case he donned a false beard and a false name, John Smith, and set out, accompanied by a similarly attired Buckingham, who was travelling as ‘Tom Smith’. The disguises were so poor that they were arrested as suspicious characters in Canterbury. The boys bought better beards over the Channel, and visited the court of Louis XIII; they rustled some mountain goats in the Pyrenees, and in March they walked into the British embassy in Madrid and declared that they were taking control of the marriage negotiations. To show his love, Charles climbed over the wall of the garden where the Infanta liked to walk. As he leapt down, the Infanta fled, screaming for her chaperone, and Charles had to be let out by a side door. Charles also made many concessions to the Spanish in the negotiations. But when Philip began to insist that Elizabeth’s eldest son would need to marry a Hapsburg before Spain would help the Palatinate, Charles balked. This gave Philip the excuse to pack off his guests by pretending that Charles’s threat to return home to his ageing father was a farewell. The boys slunk home. Charles may have been miserable and humiliated, but London was overjoyed – the people had not warmed to the idea of a queen from Spain.

And yet Charles’s lifelong quest for the love he lost as a child did evoke a response in some of those closest to him, most of all in his future wife, who had herself been a lonely little princess. When Buckingham was removed by an assassin in late August 1628, Charles and his till-then neglected bride fell abruptly but permanently in love, and what had been a miserable forced marriage became blissful domesticity. Gradually, encircled by his wife’s warm regard, Charles built up a retinue of trusted retainers who could help him to feel safe, conceal his deformities, and support him. He made an idyll and then resisted anything that came to disturb it. The loyalty Charles commanded was personal and protective. All his life, Charles would be loved by those who saw him every day, hated only by those who saw him from a distance. James Harrington, one of those appointed by Parliament to attend on the king during his captivity, ‘passionately loved his Majesty, and I have oftentimes heard him speak of King Charles I with the greatest zeal and passion imaginable, and that his death gave him so great a grief that he contracted a disease by it; that never anything did go so neer to him’. Sir Philip Warwick wrote that when he thought of dying what cheered him up was the thought that he would meet King Charles again. Warwick also praised the dignity of his deportment, a contrast with his father’s uncontrolled excitability: ‘he would not let fall his dignity, no not to the Greatest Foreigners that came to visit him and his court’. Clarendon was personally devoted to the king whose decisions he criticized. The Duke of Ormonde, passed over for promotion by Charles, lost his son in 1680, but wrote to a wellwisher that ‘my loss, indeed, sits heavily on me, and nothing else in the world could affect me so much, but since I could bear the death of my great and good master King Charles the First I can bear anything else’.

Historians have long agreed that ‘the man Charles Stuart’ was one of the principal causes of the war. The king’s small and painful body was a picture in miniature of the divisions that were also to rive his people. Charles’s love of codes and disguises and his longing to make the monarchy independent of any hurtful criticism proceeded from the bullied child he was. He wanted to put the past behind him, but that longing itself chained him to it. His odd and fatal mixture of indecision and stubbornness is typical of a victim of bullying. All his life, Charles needed love. He set his people test after test, and they could not love him enough to heal the wounds inflicted in the past. By 1639, Charles was keeping the peace by deafening himself to any signs of conflict. His need for tranquillity had become one cause of the coming war.

Oliver Cromwell was born on 25 April 1599, in the High Street of Huntingdon. He was the last of a long family; he had six sisters, and three siblings who died in infancy. Like Charles I, he had an older brother named Henry, four years older than Oliver, who died before 1617; another boy, named Robert, died in 1609, shortly after his birth. Cromwell had an unusually close, tender and long-term relationship with his mother for whom he soon became the main patriarch and protector. For most male children in Tudor and Stuart England, the early years were split in two by the onset of formal schooling or training around the age of seven. Before that, they were at home under the care of mothers and servants. Schooling represented a violent repudiation of infancy, and with it the world of the mother; it also symbolized a tussle with the father’s authority. It was a chance for boys to be different from their fathers, to do something their fathers had never done, to climb an inch or two further up the social ladder than their fathers had. And their fathers were not always overjoyed about it.

The grammars were a wide crack in the invincible hierarchy of the class system in more respects than this. The master was compared to an ‘absolute monarch’, ‘a little despotic emperor’. It may be that many grammar schools bred suspicion of such absolutism. What reinforced these feelings of misgiving and dislike were the beatings; it is hard for us to imagine what these were like, or to understand the fear and horror they generated. Both John Aubrey and Samuel Hartlib still dreamed of school beatings twenty years after leaving. Bulstrode Whitelocke, who hated them, understood them as ‘a severe discipline’, that would lead boys to ‘a greater courage and constancy’. The experience of this schooling was shared by all the men who became Charles’s principal foes, though it was also common enough among Royalists. Oliver Cromwell attended the free school just down the road from his home, which offered a grammar-style education, preparing him for entry to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Many not very reliable and Royalist accounts of Cromwell’s childhood describe him as distinctly rowdy in late boyhood and early adolescence; taking hearty exercise, behaving with noticeable boisterousness, scrumping apples and stealing pigeons, getting into fights … All this may well be untrue, but the stories convey the perception that Cromwell was energetic and dynamic, a force of nature difficult to control.

Cromwell described himself as ‘by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity’. Actually, even this simple statement was defensive rather than descriptive. He was the eldest surviving son of the younger son of a knight. Cromwell’s grandfather lived the life of a gentleman in a brand-new manor house, built on the site of a former nunnery, and with a second hunting house in the fen, on the site of a former abbey. Oliver’s father Robert could manage only a town house in Huntingdon, and a modest income of £300 a year, nothing like the £2000 a year that his father enjoyed. His grander relatives had a mansion at Hinchinbrooke, built from the ruins of three abbeys, a nunnery and two priories. The manor was splendid enough to entertain James I. Oliver could only be a poor relation of all this substance. Oliver was so badly off that he paid tax in bonis, on the value of his moveable goods, and even that was only four pounds a year, suggesting an income of a hundred pounds a year or less. When he moved to St Ives in 1631, essentially he was there as a yeoman, not a gentleman; he had slipped from the gentry to the rank of the middling sort. His circumstances improved somewhat in 1636, but he nevertheless continued to lead a life more like that of those just below the gentry. He lived in a town, not a manor, he worked for his living. He had only a few household servants, no tenants or dependants. When he declared his enthusiasm for the ‘russet-coated captain that knows what he is fighting for’, he was not condescending; he was describing the men among whom he had spent his life as an equal, the men of his own class – he was describing himself. And when as Protector he likened himself to a good constable rather than to a justice, he was expressing the same class allegiance.

Eight of Cromwell’s children survived infancy, but his eldest son Robert suffered an accident at school in Felsted in May 1639 and was buried there, at seventeen. Recalling this twenty years later, Cromwell recalled that ‘when my eldest son died, [it] went as a dagger to my heart’. It was this sympathy with parents who had lost a child which led Cromwell to write so warmly to the bereaved during the war. And yet Cromwell’s son’s death draws our attention to the troubled aspects of his childhood and youth. Because early modern men were supposed to see themselves as their fathers over again, for a son to be truly adult, he had to somehow push his father aside in order to take his place. The death of a father or of a son could induce an identity crisis. This sounds abstruse, but it is exactly the kind of question encouraged by the work of Thomas Beard, Cromwell’s schoolmaster, whose book The Theater of Gods Judgements proposed that reprobates are punished for their sins in this life as well as the next. Struck down by bolts of lightning on their way home from church, the sinful begin their sojourn in hell and act as an example to the living.

Cromwell’s mother Elizabeth Steward was thirty-four when Oliver was born. Before she married Cromwell’s father, she had been the wife of John Lynne of Bassingbourn, and had a daughter called Katherine who died as a baby. From the Lynnes she inherited the brewing-house whose association with Cromwell later writers found so rib-ticklingly funny. Her father was a solid gentleman-farmer who farmed the cathedral lands of Ely. Clarendon called her ‘a decent woman’ and an ambassador praised her as ‘a woman of ripe wisdom and great prudence’. Cromwell, as the only surviving son, was forced to abandon his Cambridge college and return to the household on his father’s death. But he returned not as a child, to be under his mother’s governance, but as head of that household, effectively usurping his father’s place. Elizabeth Steward Cromwell formally combined her household with her son’s in the late 1630s, along with his youngest sister Robina. She never left him again, and remained such a key part of his circle that everyone who knew him knew her too. During the war, when Cromwell was desperate for money and reinforcements, his mother wrote, crossly, to a cousin: ‘I wish there might be care to spare some monies for my son, who I fear hath been too long and much neglected.’ When he moved from his London lodgings to Whitehall as Protector, she went with him. Elizabeth Cromwell Senior did not enjoy the palace; its splendours did not impress her. She was more concerned about her son; musket fire made her tremble for him, lest it be an assassin’s bullet. She did not die until she had seen her son become Lord Protector. Elizabeth Cromwell was eighty-nine at her death late in 1654. Her health had been failing for some time, and Cromwell put off a visit to Richard Mayor: ‘truly’, he wrote, ‘my mother is in such a condition of illness that I could not leave her’. Thurloe recorded her last blessing to her son: ‘The Lord cause his face to shine upon you and comfort you in all your adversities, and enable you to do great things for the glory of your most high God.’ She was given a funeral at Westminster Abbey, illuminated by hundreds of flickering torches.

A mix of frustrated social ambition and a longing for absolution, together with the strain of being thrust early into the role of family carer and provider, may explain the spiritual crisis which overtook Cromwell towards the end of the 1620s. Although such crises were commonplace, this was because stories of reprobation and salvation were among those most available to people trying to negotiate complex feelings. Cromwell’s emerged out of a period of black depression. Sir Theodore Mayerne, the prominent London physician, treated Cromwell for valde melancholicus at the time of the 1628/9 Parliament. Melancholy and mopishness were common accompaniments to a religious conversion. Cromwell’s doctor Dr Simcotts of Huntingdon said that he had often been called out to Cromwell because he believed himself to be dying. Simcotts also said that he was ‘a most splenetic man and hypochondriacal’. This may be what contemporaries classed as spoiling, too. Of his conversion, Cromwell himself wrote: ‘You know what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated the light. I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true: I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me. Oh the riches of his mercy! Praise Him for me, pray for me, that he who hath begun a good work would perfect it to the day of Christ.’

When Royalists talk about Cromwell’s wildness ‘which afterwards he seemed sensible of and sorrowful for’, and the Puritan Richard Baxter says he was ‘prodigal’, this implies that Cromwell may have been fond of telling his life story as the story of the Lord’s prodigal, a sinner in youth, converted in a sudden crisis to godliness and a repudiation of his former life. All godly people thought of themselves as repentant sinners. Being godly did not mean being gloomy and sad; Cromwell liked food, music and dancing, but not as forms of religious practice. His oft-repeated conversion should not lead us to imagine that Cromwell’s sins were especially great, but it does suggest that he saw himself as distinct from the godly prior to his conversion. Bishop Burnet said Cromwell led a very strict life for about eight years before the war; being a Scot, he probably meant the Bishops’ Wars, which would put Cromwell’s conversion in 1631 or thereabouts. What godly people like Cromwell wanted was to complete the work of Reformation, which meant both reforming the liturgy and Church calendar and reforming behaviour.

It was Charles, who had had the more difficult and painful childhood, who was the first to think differently about the state. He wanted a new kind of kingdom. But this wasn’t a long-held dream; it was an angry response to what he felt as intolerable bullying. When the 1628/9 Parliament tried to assert its own sovereignty over his, when it began making demands on him rather than acting according to his direction, when it failed him – as he saw it – in a manner that compromised his honour in his dealings with his enemies abroad, then – and only then – Charles recalled that the Bourbons were phasing out their ancient assembly, that the Spanish had never needed one. Why go on summoning Parliament, that dated institution? The events that were ultimately to lead to the Civil War were set in motion by a royal tantrum.

The idea of ‘personal rule’ did not occur to Charles all at once. Indeed, in his proclamation dissolving what turned out to be his last Parliament, he affirmed his enthusiasm for the institution. But he resolved to do without it, and do without it he did, in an ad hoc and improvisational manner. The process was scarcely trouble-free, and the biggest problem was supply. From the king’s point of view, Parliament existed to generate revenue. Without it, the king could only use his prerogative, as it was called. It meant he could raise money through reviving some archaic taxes – more of this in a moment – and enforce policy mainly through the courts – the Star Chamber, and the High Court. The Star Chamber was a kind of distillation of the Privy Council, which met in the room so named at the Palace of Westminster; it became a court that focused its gaze on political and public order cases, which made it a natural political instrument of repression.

Even before Charles began trying to rule without Parliament, he faced a mountain of debt generated by successive and entirely unsuccessful wars with France. But the astounding thing was that he cleared it without coming anywhere near alienating the vast majority of his subjects. By 1635, after six years of peace, royal finances were in reasonable shape. The economy had improved, and so the king was able to earn extra money from customs. Charles also dug deeply into his nobles’ purses, finding tiny revenue-raisers like fining gentlemen who could have become knights for failing to do so at his coronation. These were petty, but no one much minded about them.

Historians have tended to see Charles’s other big moneyspinner as significantly more controversial. This was the so-called Ship Money. Ship Money was a hangover from the days when the English navy was a dignified name for a bunch of privateers. The king would conscript ships that were owned by nobles or gentlemen for the duration of a particular campaign, and then give them back, along with any plunder or any valuable prisoners, at the end of the campaign in question. Because of revolutions in ship design, such privately-owned ships no longer made for a powerful navy by the 1630s, so Charles began to fear that the French and Dutch would gain control of the English Channel and the North Sea. He could have done the orthodox thing, called Parliament to pass legislation authorizing a tax to finance the navy. Instead, he twisted the medieval system into a means of financing a standing, professional fleet.

Popular notions of the Civil War give this tax much prominence, as the tyrannical extraction of monies without ‘representation’, as the American revolutionaries were to put it nearly one hundred and fifty years later. When the payments were first demanded, the nation grumbled a bit – taxes are never popular – but it paid up. Much of the discontent was about the unevenness of methods of assessment; in some areas, quite different standards were used to assess near neighbours, and this was just as popular as one might expect. But until 1638 returns hovered around the 90% mark. As time went on the mutterings did increase in volume, as it dawned on people that this occasional levy had somehow become a permanent seasonal item, coming round as regularly as Christmas. But for most of the 1630s, the nation grumbled but it paid the tax.

A Buckinghamshire gentleman called John Hampden sought to change this state of discontent into something more substantial. He was the son of an outstandingly godly man, whose will had roundly announced, ‘I know my soul to be sanctified.’ This holy, inspirational figure died when John was only a toddler, and his mother harboured political ambitions for him. The family was not a great one, but was solidly prosperous. John Hampden was soon drawn into a political circle that became immensely powerful in its criticism of Charles’s policies. He had been very active in the 1628 Parliament, collaborating with John Pym, and in the key debate of 5 June 1628, he made a speech that a contemporary summarized as follows:

Here is [firstly], an innovation of religion suspected; is it not high time to take it to heart and acquaint his Majesty? Secondly, alteration of government; can you forbear when it goes no less than the subversion of the whole state? Thirdly, hemmed in with enemies; is it now a time to be silent, and not to show to his Majesty that a man that has so much power uses none of it to help us? If he be no papist, papists are friends and kindred to him.

This speech may have been the reason that the king chose to try Hampden of all the Ship Money refusers, rather than the godly peer Lord Saye and Sele, who had also been noisily refusing to pay in the hope of bringing matters to a head. Hampden was determined to secure a ruling that called the king’s taxation into question. He deliberately failed to pay just one pound of what he owed, meekly anteing up otherwise. The judges treated Hampden’s case with a procedure reserved for the most significant disputes. Instead of being heard in the Court of Exchequer, normally responsible for collecting revenues, it was referred to the Court of Exchequer Chamber, a special body dating from 1585, in which all twelve judges in England took part, and the Court of Exchequer was to follow the advice it received from a simple majority of the twelve. The trial began in November 1637. On Hampden’s side the case was argued by a member of the group critical of the king, the Earl of Bedford’s client Oliver St John. St John was an obscure young lawyer who was to make his name out of the case, just as Hampden did. He argued not that the king had no power to command his subjects to provide a ship, but that he could only exercise this power in an emergency, such as the invasion of the realm. Because no such emergency existed at the time the king called for the money, he was required to call Parliament to levy it as a tax; hence Ship Money was an unparliamentary tax. The king’s solicitor and representative Sir Edward Littleton replied for the Crown, arguing that the circumstances had not permitted the time-consuming summoning of Parliament. Hampden’s second lawyer, Robert Holborne, replied, and in his submission the fundamental issue was carefully stated: ‘by the fundamental laws of England, the king cannot, out of parliament, charge the subject – no, not for the common good unless in special cases’, even if he thought the danger was imminent. The subject’s right to his property occluded the king’s right to decide that danger was immediate. (Unfortunately, Holborne’s delivery was marred by some kind of speech impediment.) The fat was in the fire, and the king’s representative Anthony Bankes began talking of principles instead of narrow micromanaging. He made a ringing and poetic defence of the king as ‘the first mover among these orbs of ours … the soul of this body, whose proper act is to command’. No one could criticize the king’s exercise of his powers because there was no valid place or position from which to do it.

When the judges finally considered their verdict, they had a complex body of issues to address. Four of them made strong claims for the prerogative, following the lead given by Bankes. Two took a firm stand against any such claims, and one of them – Croke – argued flatly that only Parliament could allow the king to charge a subject. But the others stuck doggedly to the legal technicalities and tried to close their eyes to the wider issues, debating whether the king could act alone if he merely apprehended national danger, and whether he had used due means. This last point was really about whether Ship Money was a tax or a form of military service; none of the judges was very sure what to decide, but eventually two key judges said that since Hampden was being tried for unpaid debt then he could not be seen as required to provide a service, and they ruled against the king. This led them to decide for Hampden. The eventual result was that the king won, but with a narrow majority; because of divisions among the judges, bystanders could not even agree on what, exactly, the majority was, but many thought it just seven over five. The nation had been following the case so passionately that curious bystanders couldn’t get into the court even by rising at dawn. The case turned Hampden into a hero; it might have been better for Charles if he had lost, since winning made him seem more of a tyrant. From then on, more people began to refuse to pay Ship Money.

But the hearing did nothing directly to unseat Charles. It gave a brief voice to resentment, but resentment is not revolution. The main result was that for the sheriffs and constables forced to collect trifling sums such as a penny from the poorest men, life became nearly unbearable. Administrative nuisances, however, did not threaten the regime in and of themselves. There was no chance of personal rule being truly disturbed by tax protests. The sense of grievance was confined to a small minority; but it was an articulate minority with good connections, increasingly an organized minority, drawn from exactly the class the House of Commons existed to represent. It was becoming obvious that if Charles ever did call Parliament, he could expect trouble from it.

Personal rule was not, however, sunk solely by finance and taxes, but by the fact that the king made another, larger group of enemies. Or rather, this second group of enemies were made for him by his Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud and his queen, Henrietta Maria. Again, these enemies probably never amounted to a majority of the nation. But they were exceptionally motivated, as religious minorities are apt to be, articulate, superb at using the printing press to spread their ideas, and they increasingly overlapped with the first group, the erstwhile MPs. They were godly Protestants who feared popery; they ranged from sectarians who wanted complete reform to Presbyterians who would have no bishops, to conservatives who supported the Anglican Church of Elizabethan England.

If there was simmering discontent in the 1630s, it was not so much with Ship Money as with Archbishop Laud, eagerly bringing ceremonial back to the Church of England in the form of altar-rails and reverence for the Eucharist, and as eagerly denouncing and suppressing ‘Puritans’, or the godly, as they called themselves. Worst of all, Laud was dismantling the central doctrine of Calvinism, predestination. In Calvinist predestination, every person is already bound for heaven or hell. Human beings are so sinful that they can only understand God’s message and achieve faith if he gives them grace to do so. This happens suddenly if it happens at all. God chooses who will be saved and who damned, regardless of merit or desert. God emerges as not unlike a capricious monarch, electing some to bliss, dropping others into woe. But Laud and his followers were Arminians (though Laud tried to stay neutral in public), and this meant they believed that faith grew slowly together with a person’s chosen and willed virtue.

So from a godly point of view, the Church of England was being run by an emissary of hell, and the king was doing nothing to stop him. People began to wonder if Charles’s personal rule risked running the kingdom into the arms of Rome. In the Stuart era, religion led, and political questions followed. The result was to stir up constant questions about what might previously be taken for granted.

Whatever the godly thought, Laud saw himself as a stout Protestant, doughtily fighting the encroachments of Rome and the godly alike. For him, the Church of England was a shambles. He was especially upset by Old St Paul’s in London, the nave of which had become a place to see and be seen, to sleep rough, or to do a little business. There were adverts plastered on the walls and pillars. The noise was intense and irreverent: ‘like that of bees, a strange humming or buzz mixed’, thought the horrified prelate. For Laud, the church should be hallowed, special. It wasn’t that he believed in the Real Presence; he just thought, not too eccentrically, that churches ought to be different from markets, and that it wouldn’t hurt to bring beauty and order to them.

But it did hurt. The Church of England, then as now, was an awkward coalition of quite diverse groups. With much bickering, its members had come to tolerate the white walls and bare wood of the Elizabethan church settlement, the spareness of its services. Some wanted still more reform – was not a church itself a kind of icon? – but were willing for it to take place gradually, through local effort. Some still enjoyed church ales – a kind of beery parish sale-of-work – and maypoles, and defended them robustly. But in most places everyone felt that though far from perfect the church did offer something to them.

Laud’s reforms destroyed everyone’s optimism. The moderate middle were comfortable with a reduced number of icons, but not happy to see them going up instead of coming down. As for the very godly, they viewed Laud’s alterations with utter horror. William Prynne wrote furiously of those ‘who now erect crucifixes and images in our churches, contrary to our articles, injunctions, homilies’. And these fears and horrors were not baseless. Bristol alone spent almost £200 on its high cross, which now included statues of James I and Charles I. The link between images of the Stuart kings and icons was ultimately to prove very unfortunate, but also indissoluble. New stained-glass windows were put in, especially in Oxford and Cambridge colleges and at Durham and Lambeth. And there was a new service order. Ministers had to wear full clerical robes; they had to bow at the name of Jesus, use the cross to baptize and recite the full Book of Common Prayer service with no omissions and additions.

And while personal rule might be forgotten for months on end, Laud’s innovations were on constant display in every church. Laud had said, for example, that the altar ‘is the greatest place of God’s residence on earth’: ‘yea, ‘tis greater than the pulpit, for there ‘tis hoc est corpus meum, this is my body. But in the pulpit ‘tis at most but Hoc est verbum meum, This is my word.’ For a godly churchwarden, this was a direct attack – on his authority, and on that of God Himself. To keep the altar sacred, the churchwarden was supposed to erect railings, which were to mark the space around the altar as sacred, and hence keep out of it everyone from the churchwarden keen to use it as a table for his account books to schoolboys using it as a place to store hats and satchels. Boys were apparently especially inclined to take a quiet nap under it at sermon time, and dogs sometimes nipped in and took the consecrated bread, to Laud’s very particular horror; a woman in Cheshire was unpopular because she held her dancing baby over the table and afterwards someone spotted a lot of water on the table itself. Laud concluded sensibly that it might have been worse. But the new arrangement also kept the congregation away from the sacred, implying that it was not for the likes of them. In Suffolk people complained that the new rails and table meant that ‘not half of the people can see or hear the ministration’.

This is one of the moments where the interlacing of politics and religion becomes obvious: the rails and table, harmless though they sound, were experienced as creating an entirely artificial hierarchy, reserving the priest as sacred and the altar as a sacred space where he presided (not unlike the inner rooms at court). Because that new church hierarchy seemed so specious, other hierarchies began to seem equally open to question.

Laud and his altar-rails were in part an attempt to prevent an upper-class drift to Rome. Fear of this had begun when Charles married Henrietta Maria, and was realized when the queen’s Jesuit chaplains and courtiers managed a spectacular wave of conversions among the aristocracy. To grasp this dread and its power, we might begin on a day in July 1626, when the then-new queen made an unusual pilgrimage, as one of those who disliked her reported in horror:

Some say the queen and a group of her followers were strolling through the royal parks around St James’s palace, and happened to stop for prayer for the Catholics who had died on Tyburn Tree.

Others say the queen made it an almost official pilgrimage: barefoot, she walked while her confessor rode, as if to imitate the martyrs’ routes to the scaffold. At the gallows, she fell to her knees with a rosary in her hand.

Nay their [the priests’] insolences towards the queen were not to be endured; for, besides that these bawdy knaves would, by way of confession, interrogate her how often in a night the king had kissed her; and no longer ago than upon St James’s Day last those hypocritical dogs made the poor queen walk afoot (some say barefoot) from her house at St James’s to the gallows at Tyburn, thereby to honour the saint of the day in visiting that holy place where so many martyrs forsooth hath shed their blood in defence of the Catholic cause. Had they not also made her to dabble in the dirt, in a foul morning, from Somerset House to St James’s her Luciferian confessor riding alongside her in his coach? Yea, they have made her to go barefoot, to spin, to cut her meat out of dishes, to wait at the table, to serve her servants, with many other ridiculous and absurd penances; and if they dare thus insult over the daughter, sister, and wife of so great kings, what slavery would they not make us, the people, to undergo?

For this reporter, not only was Henrietta’s pilgrimage an outrage to Christendom, it was also an affront to royal dignity. What was the background to this extraordinary event, unprecedented – and for that matter, unrepeated – in the annals of English monarchy? For Henrietta, what was being visited was a sacred site, a wailing wall, a place holy to her people because sanctified by their blood. Tyburn, with its Triple Tree, was not any old gallows; it was the place where men and women had died bravely for the Catholic faith.

Henrietta held to a belief for which material objects – people, places – were important. Catholicism was not something that happened in the head; it involved the vital and willing body in strenuous acts of faith to other bodies, beginning with Christ’s own bleeding body, and ending with those of the martyrs. Visiting Tyburn, she would have felt something of what we might feel visiting the site of Auschwitz – awe, pity, fear, and passionate indignation – and a little of the fear might still have felt pressing and personal, for the laws of England allowed people to be hanged for being Catholic, for doing no more and sometimes rather less than Henrietta’s marriage treaty allowed her to do. Only two years after the treaty was signed, two Catholics were hanged at Lancaster. Henrietta’s family were Catholic, as were her friends, and she was personally devout. Events like the hangings were utterly baffling for her, and hardly added to an already imperilled sense of security.

Catholics had been feared since the 1570 papal edict against Elizabeth I, but what aroused a new kind of anxiety was the perceived influence of Catholics at court. The powerful Duke of Buckingham’s wife and his mother had both converted to Catholicism in 1622. Catholic icons were still being imported into the country. One member of the 1621 Parliament reported that rosaries, crucifixes, relics, and ‘papistical pictures’ were flooding in, and that in Lancashire they were made and sold openly in the streets. In The Popish Royal Favourite, William Prynne claimed that Buckingham’s ‘Jesuited mother and sister’ influenced him and through him the kingdom. Henrietta’s marriage treaty guaranteed her the right to practise her own religion, and her household servants to do the same. This was by itself enough to terrify. But her behaviour made matters worse. Henrietta was strongly, passionately, vehemently Catholic. The English were inclined to read this as rather tactless. They hadn’t been unduly pleased by the previous queen Anne of Denmark’s Catholicism, but at least she had shown the good taste to keep it decently under wraps. Henrietta was a woman of real conviction, which meant she didn’t and couldn’t. She was also a girl in her late teens, not very experienced in politics or used to compromise. Half Bourbon, half Medici, she had not learnt much about giving way from her mother. She stoutly refused to attend her husband’s coronation, because it was a Church of England ceremony.

Henrietta’s fervour had much to do with fashion. To a godly critic of the queen, Catholicism was part of a deadly and poisoned past, but to the queen herself it seemed the future. Catholicism fitted with court fashions; the court loved ritual and drama, colour and the baroque. The Laudian idea of ‘the beauty of holiness’ was one that Catholicism could accept, even if Laud himself was eager to maintain boundaries. When the aestheticization of faith became the goal, England could only lope awkwardly behind Rubens’s Antwerp or Bellini’s Rome. Both Charles and Henrietta did not want to trail in last in the aesthetic revolutionary army; they wanted to march in the front ranks. Precisely because the godly were not keen on images, pagan or Christian, those vanguards were dominated by Catholics.

As well, Henrietta wanted to be Esther, freeing her people through her influence. She was called to save English Catholics from the savage prejudices of their fellow-countrymen. Henrietta had been asked by the pope himself to promote Catholicism in her new kingdom. She went about it with characteristic verve and taste.

The centrepiece of her campaign was the building of her hated chapel. She wanted to create a new kind of place of worship, employing the most avant-garde and brilliant architect, Inigo Jones. The foundation stone was laid on 14 September 1632, and the chapel opened 8 December 1635, the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. One French envoy claimed that it had taken a long time because Inigo Jones was a Puritan and did not want it done. However, like many a godly soul, Jones was not averse to commerce, and after he had been given some additional monies, the work was completed.

The old chapel, which had existed since Anne of Denmark’s day, had been unpopular enough. Apprentices talked of pulling it down in 1634. The new one became a symbol of all the terrors the queen’s very existence came to evoke. It was plain outside; inside it was exuberant, rich, fanciful. There were the gold and silver reliquaries. There were ciberia, chalices, embroidered stoles. There were paintings, statues, even a chapel garden, a tribute to the queen’s interest in all things that grew green. It was, observers thought, ‘quite masculine and unaffected’ on the outside. But inside it was splendid, with an elaborate altarpiece made up of a series of seven oval frames containing angels sitting on clouds. A delicate carved screen on fluted and gilded Doric columns marked the entrance to the queen’s closet. And the opening celebrations were more splendid still.

As George Garrard observed tartly, ‘the ceremonies lasted three days, massing, preaching and singing of litanies, and such a glorious scene built over their altar, the Glory of Heaven, Inigo Jones never presented a more curious piece in any of the masques at Whitehall; with this our English ignorant papists are mightily taken’. The king visited it three days after the opening, and told Father Gamache that he had never seen anything more beautiful or more ingeniously contrived. It had one feature which would strike some modern Catholics as surprising, and which horrified Protestant contemporaries. An eminent sculptor named François Dieussart ‘made a machine, which was admired even by the most ingenious persons, to exhibit the Holy Sacrament, and to give it a more majestic appearance’. The resulting spectacle deserves a full description, even though it is tiring; the ceremony itself must have been even slower: