The English Civil War: A People’s History

From England, it all looked very different; so much so that you could be forgiven for thinking you were reading about different events. From London, the conflict did not appear to be a war about who the Scots were, but a war about the Laudian Church. To Charles, the Scots’ opposition seemed like a threat, a deliberate and mean attempt to undermine him. It was victory or death. His feelings blinded him to politics. For Charles, the Scots were out to destroy monarchy and impose a republic. ‘So long as the covenant is in force,’ he declared, ‘I am no more in Scotland than a Duke in Venice, which I will rather die than suffer.’ He spoke of ‘those traitors, the Covenanters’. He murmured defensively that ‘the blame for the consequences is theirs’. In August he ordered one of their propaganda sheets burned by the public hangman, and a few weeks later proclaimed all Scots invaders traitors whose lives were forfeit.

Charles saw the Covenanters as incomprehensible aliens, not as his familiar subjects even though he had spent his early childhood in Scotland, and may even have retained a very slight Scottish accent. Charles’s warm embrace of Europe in the person of his wife, his liking for European fashion and formality in matters of court life and religion, meant that Scottish plainness struck him as boorish and threatening.

Whitehall tried to organize an army under the Earl of Essex to go to Scotland. The godly Essex’s appointment was designed to reassure those who feared that the war was a campaign against the godly, since he had fought for the Dutch; however, Henrietta insisted that her ally the Earl of Holland be general of the horse. Holland was never an especially credible military leader, and his appointment convinced some that sinister forces were at work (meaning the queen). In fact Holland was part of a warmly Presbyterian faction at her court, which included Lucy Hay, but the anxiety about popery in high places refused to abate.

A slow-paced mobilization continued. Finally, at the end of March 1639, the king left, at the head of some 20,000 men, many of them notably unwilling. ‘We must needs go against the Scots for not being idolatrous and will have no mass amongst them’, declared an anonymous news-sheet. There was a shortage of incentives. Scotland was cold and plunder-free. The loyal, brave Sir Edmund Verney wrote to his son Ralph that ‘our army is but weak. Our purse is weaker, and if we fight with these forces and early in the year we shall have our throats cut, and to delay fighting long we cannot for want of money to keep our army together.’ He also commented that ‘I dare say there was never so raw, so unskilful and so unwilling an army brought to fight … Truly here are many brave gentlemen that for point of honour must run such a hazard as truly would grieve any heart but his that does it purposely to ruin them. For mine own part I have lived till pain and trouble has made me weary of to do so, and the worst that can come shall not be unwelcome to me, but it is a pity to see what men are like to be slaughtered here, unless it shall please God to put it in the king’s heart to increase his army, or stay till these know what they do, for as yet they are as like to kill their fellows as the enemy.’

Verney thought he knew who the mysterious agents behind the war were: ‘The Catholics make a large contribution, as they pretend, and indeed use all the ways and means they can to set us by the ears, and I think they will not fail of their plot.’ He thought that in part because Henrietta Maria was diligently trying to persuade the English Catholics to prove their loyalty to Charles with lavish donations to the war chest. She wrote individually to Catholic gentry families and especially to women. Some ladies did give up their jewellery, and peers like the Marquess of Winchester contributed four-figure sums. But a mysterious letter purporting to be from the pope urged them not to give. This may have been good advice, whoever it came from, because the main result was to make good, not especially godly men like Verney suspect that a papist plot lay behind the Scottish war. Madame de Motteville, Henrietta’s friend and confidante after the war, said Henrietta had told her that Charles was indeed trying to transform Scottish religion in order eventually to restore popery. It wasn’t likely, but she may have hoped it was true.

For the raggle-taggle army, it was hot and miserable on the way from Newcastle to Alnwick, thirsty and slow, and Alnwick was in a state of ruin, having been all but abandoned by the Percys for the urbanities of Syon House. The king tried to behave like a good commander. He lived under canvas with his men, he rode up and down to cheer his army, wearing out two mounts. At Berwick the rain set in.

People were, to say the least, sceptical – about the war itself, its causes, the army’s chances of success. George Puryer was hauled before the Yorkshire Justices for opining ‘that the soldiers were all rogues that came against the Scots, and if it had not been for the Scots thirty thousand Irish had risen all in arms, and cut all our throats, and that the king and queen was at mass together, and that he would prove it upon record, and that he is fitter to be hanged than to be a king, and that he hoped ere long that Lashlaye [David Leslie] would be a king, for he was a better man than any was in England’. This outburst aptly summarized the grievances of those unenthusiastic about the entire campaign, but there was another factor too; in fighting for the wrong side in matters of religion, the people of Stuart England feared not only that they were unjust, but that it might be a sign that they were damned, even a sign that God was deserting the nation.

The First Bishops’ War amply fulfilled the worst apprehension of Verney and the nation. The king’s army camped outside Berwick in May 1639, and on 3 June the Earl of Holland, too, managed to find in himself an even worse performance than the country had expected. He and his cavalry sprinted ahead of the disordered infantry. Late in a long afternoon, Holland suddenly saw his folly in leaving them behind. Eight thousand Scottish footsoldiers were closing in on him, in a wide sickle, as if his men were grass ripe for cutting. Holland halted, sensing disaster. He and the Scots gazed at each other in a deadly game of chicken. Blustering, Holland sent a trumpeter to ask for the Scots to withdraw. Leslie, the Scottish commander, sent the messenger back, with a cool request that Holland withdraw instead. Holland had his only flash of good sense for the day. He obeyed, and fled, pursued by the Scots’ cries of derision. They were in fine fettle after weeks of sleeping rough and singing psalms. The English were miserable; when it wasn’t raining, it was hot, and when it was hot there were midges, and what on earth were they doing here anyway?

The commanders were busy. They were not, however, busy safeguarding the army or doing the king’s bidding. Holland and Newcastle were expending their energies fighting a duel over an incident connected with the colours; colourful indeed, and full of musty rites of honour, but quite beside the point.

The king and the Scots managed a kind of peace in June 1639, signing a truce. But even while they were doing so, amicably enough, the first battle of the Civil Wars had begun, between Scot and Scot, between the Gordons, ardent supporters of the king, and the Covenanters under Montrose, at the Bridge of Dee.

The man in charge of the defence of Aberdeen had every reason to dislike Montrose, since Montrose had earlier been responsible for his captivity. Montrose had occupied the town before, on 25 May, but by then the Royalists had melted away. Montrose had marched north to besiege some local lairds, and in his absence the king’s ships, captained by Aboyne, had reoccupied Aberdeen on 6 June. By then Montrose had gone south to make sure his foe was not leading another, larger force. Finding this fear to be groundless, he marched north again.

The Dee was brimful of rain, swollen and impassable. The bridge was barricaded with earth and stones. Montrose’s guns pounded the bridge from the southern bank, but made no impact; the shot passed over the heads of the defenders. Some women came out with suppers for their men, a cosy domestic event which was to be repeated many times in the wars that followed. The day wore on till nightfall, with nothing done. Montrose knew delay would defeat him. He moved his guns, and next morning the bridge took a real pounding; nonetheless the defenders clung on to the north bank. So Montrose decided on a feint. He led his horse westwards, as if he meant to cross higher up. He set a trap with himself as the bait. The cannons kept up their pounding; one volley of shot took Seton of Pitmedden in the belly, cutting off his torso from his legs. Once enough defenders had been distracted into pursuing Montrose himself, the rest of the Covenanters charged the bridge, and the defenders retreated. Montrose marched into Aberdeen, refused to burn it, but allowed his troops to feast on its salmon and corn. But it was not subdued. As Montrose stood in the town centre, the man standing next to him was shot dead. The bullet was probably meant for Montrose.

For London it was calming and consoling when Charles finally returned from the Scottish wars, on 3 August 1639, but enthusiasm was damped by the fact that he arrived in his mother-in-law’s carriage; symbolically this seemed to signify that he was under her thumb. The arrival of a Spanish fleet was rumoured to be an instrument for invasion of Scotland, England, or both. Ballads and newsbooks stressed the Spaniards’ amazing wealth; they were said to have fired gold and silver from their cannons when they ran out of ammunition.

So in an atmosphere of fear, the stories and rumours circulated faster and faster in London and its environs. The rumpus over the prayer book was beginning to look to some ardent Protestants like the beginning of a war of Good against Evil. In June 1640, rumour tore through Woolwich and Plumstead that the high constable had searched the house of one Mrs Ratcliff, and found ten beds, still warm from their hastily-departed papist sleepers. The rumour reached the blacksmith, Timothy Scudder, in his shop at Plumstead; he passed it on to his customers, adding that he had heard that forty or fifty men had landed at Woolwich, heading for Mrs Ratcliff’s home, called Burridge House. A man named Allen Churchmen was loading his cart with bricks when he saw the men too. Meanwhile the maid at Burridge House had told the wife of the victualler that there was a vault being made at the house; could the missing men from the beds be hidden in it? At the local tavern, too, workmen from the house were questioned by townspeople eager for the latest news. The story flew from person to person, lighting up the social network as it went. As more and more stories of this kind were told, panic and terror spread. Fear is a solvent of social glues.

With the Scottish question unresolved, Charles sent for someone used to pacifying unruly Celts. He summoned Thomas Wentworth.

In the late summer of 1639, Wentworth was still in Ireland, where he had done his best to galvanize the tottering Church of Ireland as an advance unit in the onward march of civilization. Wentworth had managed to impose his own ideas on Ireland, but at the cost of alienating moderate Irish opinion, a policy whose drawbacks would become self-evident very shortly indeed. He had also become very rich through the normal joys of Stuart government: selling offices, taking over customs farms. He was distinctly reluctant to answer Charles’s command.

Perhaps Charles was a little afraid of this Yorkshire tough. ‘Come when you will,’ he wrote, with a mixture of autocracy and timidity, rather as he had once written to his elder brother, ‘ye shall be welcome to your assured friend, Charles Stuart.’ But Charles knew his man, perhaps informed about him by Henrietta, who in turn was briefed by Wentworth’s lover and court patron Lucy Hay. Charles at once granted him the earldom Wentworth badly wanted, so that he became Earl of Strafford; he also gave him command of the army. Wentworth’s plan was to use an Irish army to put down the Scots. But the situation was irretrievable. The Scots were all over Northumberland and Durham, and the English forces were the same poorly organized rabble; there was no chance of rounding them up. Wentworth kept hoping that English loathing of the Scots would galvanize them, but he underestimated the extent to which many Englishmen now felt that the Scots were their allies against enemies nearer at hand. So he was sent back to Ireland to raise money and soldiers. All this achieved was to create a panic in the already unruly troops about Catholics in their midst. Mutinies against ‘popish’ officers became common, and one officer was even set upon and beaten to death. Young Edmund Verney said he had to go to church three times a day to show his men that he was not Irish nor a papist.

In Ireland, there had been forty years of peace after Elizabeth I’s forces had finally defeated the Gaelic leaders in 1603. James could and did claim descent from the ancient royal houses of Ireland, which further strengthened London’s authority. The population expanded to around two million, and the economy grew too; there was now a small woollen industry, and some ironworks, but still to English eyes the majority of the people lived directly off the land, off bogs and forests. English-style landownership was slowly imported. Yet there were deep tensions. The largest group, three-quarters of the population, was the ethnic Irish, the Old Irish. Little has survived written by them, so it is hard to know how they saw themselves, but we do know that they were Catholic. Then there were the Old English, descendants of medieval settlers, also mainly Catholic but with a few Protestants like James Butler, Marquess of Ormond, mainly settled in the Dublin Pale, Munster and Connaught. Pushed out of high office by the Elizabethan regime to be replaced with Protestants despite their long loyalty to the Crown, they had begun to intermarry with and ally themselves to the Old Irish. The Old Irish were being pushed out, too – evicted from land their families had held for centuries by the Plantation Scheme, which took land from Irish Catholics and handed it over to Protestant settlers. Protestants knew how to farm properly – that is, in an English manner. There were 25,000 or so Scots among the settlers, because the government hoped that by encouraging this it would drive a wedge between the MacDonnells of Ulster and the McDonalds of Clan Ian Mor, both Catholic, both keen to form a single unit. Many Catholic Irish had begun to leave; some had left for foreign military service, and they were soon recruited by Spain to fight the Dutch, where they met the likes of London soldier Philip Skippon over the battlements, while Skippon in turn formed impressions of them, that they were part of a vast Catholic conspiracy to rule the world. Those who had fought against Spain in the Low Countries never forgot this.

When Wentworth had become Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1632, his job was to strengthen royal authority as much as possible. He wanted to civilize Ireland, but without spending any English money on it. He thought Ireland had had far too much English gold poured into it already; look at the fat cats among the Protestant landowners! Thus he alienated his natural allies. He planned a vast, money-raising plantation for Connaught. He also intended to put down the activities of the Presbyterian Scots in Ulster, a bunch of fanatics who stood in the way of Laudian reforms he hoped to spread. He also hated Catholics, and was determined to stop them appealing to the king for mercy over his head. There was a savage series of bad harvests and outbreaks of cattle disease in the 1630s, especially in Ulster. Soon, the only thing that everyone in Ireland could agree on was their loathing of Strafford. The Three Kingdoms were coming apart along the seams.

In the Bishops’ Wars, an estimated five hundred men died. Also lost was Charles’s personal rule. He had run out of money. He called Parliament on 13 April 1640, at Wentworth’s urging; Wentworth needed funds to pay his troops and to equip them. He promised that he could control an English Parliament just as he had Irish Parliaments. This was empty nonsense. Moreover, Wentworth was sick with gout and eye trouble; he had to be carried about in a litter.

Charles had a plan that he believed would help control Parliament. The Scots had written a letter – with Montrose among its signatories – sometime in February 1640 which was addressed to Louis XIII, King of France. It denounced Charles’s oppressive rule as the result of Spanish influence and Hapsburg power, and urged France to ally with the Scots against England. Charles was certain that Parliament would be so horrified by the letter that it would at once vote him the monies he needed to bring the renegade Scots to heel. But Parliament was not especially horrified, perhaps because better-informed members of the Commons knew that Louis’s adviser Cardinal Richelieu was unlikely to want to support the Covenanters. Stolidly, the Commons insisted on bringing a long list of English grievances to Charles before it would agree to vote him the money for the Scottish wars.

To grasp the transient drama of the Short Parliament it is necessary to understand what Parliament was in the seventeenth century. Although called by the same name and occupying the same site, it was very different from the body we know today. In the first place, a seventeenth-century House of Commons was not democratically elected. MPs were almost always from a particular stratum of society, the gentry or merchant class – the number of the latter among MPs was growing, but not at any breakneck speed – and most elections were not contested; rather, the MP stood before the assembled franchise-holders and was acclaimed. Even this very feeble democratic gesture was confined to men with property, characteristically landed property. Very occasionally a woman property-holder did try to exercise the franchise, but she was usually turned away by outraged males, and generally suffrage and being an MP were entirely landed male affairs. Women, servants and labourers were no more part of it than they were part of the monarchy – less, if anything, for a female ruler was more conceivable than a female MP. Like everything else in the seventeenth-century state, the vote was unevenly distributed, so that in some urban areas maybe as many as one-third of adult men could vote, but this was an atypical peak; in rural areas suffrage could fall below 5%. Then there was the problem of the Celtic kingdoms. Although the Welsh sent representatives, the Scots and Irish did not. Finally, the Commons’ powers were always bracketed by the power of the House of Lords, which represented the aristocracy and also the government of the Church of England.

Together with the monarch, the two houses were supposed to form a kind of snapshot of the nation’s various social classes, but in fact the result was a portrait-bust, showing the nation only from the chest up.

Secondly, Parliament could only be summoned by the monarch, and each time this happened a different body resulted, which then sat until the monarch chose to dismiss it. Finally, monarchs tended to see Parliaments solely as a way of raising money, while legal experts such as Edward Coke saw Parliaments as much more – vehicles of complaint, guarantees of justice if the courts failed, and – most controversially – sites of ultimate sovereignty, on behalf of the whole people. In fact most Parliamentary time was spent on local issues, often of soporific triviality to everyone outside the locale in question – deepening the River Ouse, for example. Men might become MPs because of an interest in some such local issue, or more simply and far more commonly to prove their status. Because becoming an MP was such a popular way to show yourself a proper gentleman, the number of seats kept increasing. Once elected, MPs tended to race up to London for as short a time as possible, since life in the capital was expensive and they had things to do at home. Divisions (actual votes) were fairly uncommon; mostly the goal was unity, ‘the sense of the house’, rather as in the elections themselves, where the goal was unanimity, participation, and not choice. Nor was there a great deal of talk or debate. Most country gentlemen were unused to speechmaking; only those who had been at university or the Inns of Court had the right rhetorical training. These were the same men who were charged with maintaining law and order when they got home to their counties – JPs, deputy lieutenants, tax commissioners, commissioners of array. So there were always plenty of other things to occupy time.

Parliament was supposed to act in an ad hoc manner, to fix things that had gone wrong, like a physician. So permanent alliances were rare and parties nonexistent. Parliament was also seen as ancient, part of an older way where the Commons spoke to the king: ‘We are the last monarchy in Christendom that yet retains our original rights and constitutions’, thought Sir Robert Phelips proudly in 1625. The antiquity of Parliament was reflected in the site where the House of Commons met. The Royal Chapel of St Stephen was secularized at the Reformation; before that, it had been part of Westminster Abbey, and by 1550 it had become the meeting-place of the Commons, which had previously been forced to cram itself into any old vacant committee room. The symbolism was obvious. The Commons was a true, redeemed fount of the virtue which the Catholic Church and its denizens had failed to acquire, and hence failed to infuse into the national fabric. Secular authority elbowed out spiritual authority while borrowing its prestige. The overlap between religion and politics was clear.

The chapel was tall, two-storeyed, and had long, stained-glass windows. The members sat in the choir stalls, on the north and south walls. As the number of MPs increased inexorably, these expanded to a horseshoe shape, four rows deep, and then an additional gallery was built in 1621 to house still more seats. It was like a theatre, thought John Hooker. The Speaker’s Chair replaced the altar, and his mace rested on a table which replaced the lectern. The antechapel acted as a lobby for the rare divisions; members who wished to vote aye could move out into it, while noes stayed inside. St Stephen’s Chapel was the seat of the House of Commons from 1550 until it was destroyed by fire in 1834. Parliament’s authority was enhanced by this spectacular setting, and from it the English developed the habit of housing important secular institutions in buildings of medieval Gothic design.

But the temple of democracy was surrounded by a den of thieves. Ben Jonson commented on how disreputable the little city of Westminster was. The Palace was surrounded by shops and taverns; it did not help the area’s reputation that the three best-known taverns were called Hell, Heaven and Purgatory. Hell had several exits, to allow MPs to make a quick getaway. The area around the Palace was crowded and crammed with hawkers’ stalls. Hoping to catch the eye of MPs and peers, were lobbyists; barristers, clerks, servants, messengers and other employees scurried down the many shortcuts that led from the street to the Thames, from the Commons chambers to the Lords. Printers congregated around the Palace, many specializing in printing petitions to the Commons, others documenting its activities, publicizing the Commons’ just discovery of the wickedness of this man, its fairness in helping that struggling local industry. When Parliament was sitting, its 450-odd Commons members, 50–70 peers and handful of bishops created an economic powerhouse for the entire area.

Parliament also had practical functions. It was supposed to make taxes honest. Chronically short of money, the monarchy got its income from rents, court fines, and a mass of funny, quaint revenue-raisers, including customs and excise (tonnage and poundage). What made for shortage was the Europe-wide economic crisis generated by inflation; taxes didn’t keep pace with the dropping value of money, and any attempt to make good the deficit by levying more of them led to political trouble. In theory, this grim scenario gave Parliament more power; any group of MPs could withhold money in exchange for concessions on whatever grievances they wanted to air. There were some Jacobean attempts at a settlement involving a fixed royal income, swapping taxes for redressed grievances, but they had always collapsed in the face of James’s apparently genetic difficulty in sticking to a budget for his own spending. Charles, sensibly enough, was trying to find a way around the entire creaky machine, a way that would allow him to make the English state modern, like France and Spain, its rivals. But some of the men who felt their local authority depended on Parliament knew they could use the House of Commons to stop him, and they did so without further ado.

They were helped by the fact that the House of Commons was not static. It was changing, evolving. Increasingly, local electors had begun to expect that MPs would deliver local projects; in exchange, they would agree to taxes without too much fuss. Conversely, if pet projects evaporated, they might grow restive. And it is easy to overstate the consensuality of Jacobean Parliaments. There was the particular case of the Petition of Right, produced by the 1628 Parliament, which announced roundly that there should be no taxation without representation, no taxes without the consent of the Commons. It also decried arbitrary imprisonment. As often, these were presented as traditional rights; actually, from the king’s point of view they extended Parliament’s powers, clarifying what had been gratifyingly murky, and he agreed to the petition only in order to ensure supply (a term which means the provision of money). The same 1628 Parliament, gratified, grew more and more determined to ensure the safety of Protestantism; indeed, its MPs felt they had been chosen for this very purpose. Amidst scenes of unprecedented passion, in which the Speaker was physically prevented from rising by Denzil Holles, who pinned him in his chair, the House condemned Arminians and the collectors and payers of tonnage and poundage as enemies of England, and deserving of death. What followed was dissolution, but the tantrum had its effect. Charles felt sure Parliament was a kind of rabble. It was its behaviour that made him grimly determined never to call one again. And when he did, having avoided doing so for twelve years, it turned out that its ideas had not changed.

Parliament met on 13 April 1640. At once it became apparent that little had changed since 1629; if anything the members were more anxious, more discontented, and more determined to be heard by the king. The personnel were different – one of the reasons for John Pym’s prominence was that virtually all his seniors had died in the long interval of personal rule – but their concerns remained the same. The stories of two MPs illustrate how Parliament came to be so intransigent. A member of the old guard from 1628, William Strode was well-known already for his radical activities in that year. Strode had played a major part in resisting the Speaker’s efforts to adjourn the House. He explained that ‘I desire the same, that we may not be turned off like scattered sheep, as we were at the end of the last session, and have a scorn put on us in print; but that we may leave something behind us’.

Summoned next day to be examined by the Privy Council, Strode refused to appear, and was arrested in the country, spending some time in the Tower after he had doggedly refused bail linked to a good-behaviour bond. He was still in gaol in January 1640, when he was finally released. This was supposed to be a reconciling, peacemaking move. In fact, he was a kind of living martyr for the Good Old Cause before it was properly formed. He was not a maker of policy, but he was exceedingly bitter against Charles. Clarendon calls him ‘one of the fiercest men of the party’, and MP Simonds D’Ewes describes him as a ‘firebrand’, a ‘notable profaner of the scriptures’, and one with ‘too hot a tongue’. Strode was also animated by the same sense of godly mission that was motivating the Covenanters themselves. Like their wilder spirits, he was fervently anti-episcopal. It was these godly views that led him to assert Parliamentary authority over prerogatives, the guarantee of religious rectitude and a bulwark against the crafts of popery.

One of the new MPs was Henry Marten, who was joining his father as an MP for a Berkshire seat dominated by the county town of Abingdon, later to become a godly stronghold during the war. He had already refused to contribute to a new Forced Loan to fund the Scottish wars. Marten was not, however, an obvious or orthodox member of the godly faction led by John Pym and his allies. Indeed, Marten was widely known as a rake and a rascal. Seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey called him ‘a great lover of pretty girls’, and he had been rebuked for it by the king himself, who called him ‘ugly rascal’ and ‘whore-master’. Aubrey claims Marten never forgot the insult, and it may have been this which made him different from his much more moderate father and brother-in-law. Marten emerged quickly as a radical voice and was to develop a career as a key man on committees later, but during the Short Parliament he was not an obvious leader. He was, however, one of many MPs who were determined to assert the Commons’ ‘ancient rights’ and restrain the king’s attempts to diminish them. He played no role; he made no speeches. But he was there, and his later career shows that he was convinced. The calling of the Short Parliament created an opportunity for men like Strode to win those like Marten to their view of events, and to make them allies. Led by Pym, those concerned about religion were able to do so very effectively.

Hence when the Commons met, and Secretary Windebank read the Scottish Covenanters’ letter to Louis XIII, he was met by an MP called Harbottle Grimston, who explained courteously that there were dangers at home that were even greater than those to which the letter referred. The liberty of the subject had been infringed, contrary to the Petition of Right. The king’s bad ministers were not giving him the right advice. All this was reinforced when John Pym rose for a two-hour speech in which he explained that ‘religion was the greatest grievance to be looked into’, and here he focused on what he described as a campaign to return England to popery. ‘The parliament is the soul of the commonwealth’, the intellectual part which governs all the rest. As well, he said, the right to property had been infringed. It was embarrassingly clear that he meant Ship Money, and when the Commons sent for the records of the Ship Money trials, it became even clearer. Finally, the Commons said firmly that it could give the king nothing until he clarified his own position.

After only a few days, it was evident to most that there was little hope of compromise. Charles offered a last-ditch deal; he agreed to abandon Ship Money in exchange for twelve subsidies for the war. This was less than he needed, but to Parliament it seemed like an enormous amount. MPs wondered about their constituents’ reactions. Charles could see there was no prospect that MPs would agree. Pym had been in touch with the Scots, and some whispered that he might bring their grievances before the House. Thus it was that by 5 May 1640 Charles had – equally hastily – decided to dissolve Parliament again. The Short Parliament was a sign of Charles’s short fuse, and a tactical disaster. The whole grisly mess to come might have been averted if Charles had only managed to endure people shouting critically at him for more than a month. But the insecure boy still alive and well in Charles Stuart simply couldn’t do it. He wanted to believe that Parliament would go away if he told it to, as it had in 1629. He wanted to believe that the problem was the rebellious Scots and their co-conspirators in London, and that defeating the former would put an end to the latter. He didn’t want to believe that John Pym, MP, had managed to talk others into sharing his own world-view. And so he couldn’t get together the money he needed to prosecute the Scottish war again.

But he was determined to try. On 20 August 1640 Charles left London to join his northern army, while the Scots crossed the Tweed and advanced towards Newcastle. The king had managed to scrape up around 25,000 men, but they were untrained, raw. And they were hungry; the army brought no bakeries, no brewhouses. And they were cold; no one except the senior officers had tents. Their pistols were often broken across the butt, making them more likely to explode.

They were explosive in other ways, too. They fired guns through tents, including the king’s tent. They were mutinous. They were beggarly. They were more fit for Bedlam (London’s asylum) or Bridewell Prison than the king’s service. They murdered a pregnant woman in Essex and beat up Oxford undergraduates. And some were vehement iconoclasts, which illustrated the incongruity of the war itself. In Rickmansworth, a quiet Sunday morning service was disrupted when Captain Edmund Ayle and his troop smashed the altar and rails. It was a taste of things to come; so too were the complaints from families whose larders were eaten bare by the hordes of soldiers, families who found themselves playing host to drunken soldiers.

When the hungry, ill-disciplined English clashed with the Scots at Newburn, on 28 August 1640, the Scots easily drove them back, securing their first victory over the English since Bannockburn. To the Scots, it was proof of their divine election. Bishops, thought one Covenanter, were ‘the panders of the Whore of Babylon, and the instruments of the devil’.

So when Charles had to call Parliament again, on 3 November 1640, John Pym had his chance, and he also had experience, allies, and knowledge of the system.

V Pym against the Papists (#ulink_58690aa2-f819-557a-83ad-c51859a635f9)

One of the first things done by the Parliament that opened on 3 November 1640 was to release William Prynne and Henry Burton from prison (John Bastwick came home to London a week later, to similar acclaim). All three had been imprisoned – Prynne first in Caernarvon, which the government hoped would be remote enough to allow the whole matter to be forgotten, then in Jersey when this hope proved vain – because of their vigorous objections to the Laudian Church and their agitation for godly reform. Prynne had first been gaoled for attacking the wickedness of stage plays, with a sly hostile glance at the queen, and from prison had written an angry denunciation of bishops; loathing of the episcopate was Bastwick’s and Burton’s crime too. All of them had become symbols of the sufferings of true Protestants under the regime of Charles and Laud.

Their release was therefore the beginning of a campaign against the personal rule of Charles, launched with a graphic political message. The release of the three was a sign that England was once more a nation fit for the godly, and that the Commons would keep it so. Prynne, Burton and Bastwick had all been sentenced during Charles’s personal rule to be mutilated by having their ears cropped, and then fined, and imprisoned for life for their writings in 1637. Each man, free but forever disfigured, was a walking advertisement for Parliament’s clemency and the king’s tyrannical cruelty.

They arrived in London on 28 November 1640, after a momentous journey. Their way was strewn with rosemary and bay, and they were greeted by bonfires and bells. It was an unusually warm day for November, tempting immense crowds out into its golden light. They stopped for dinner in the little town of Brentford, which was to be the scene of fierce fighting later in the war.

So thick was the throng that their progress slowed to one mile an hour. It was, thought some observers, almost like a royal procession. The living martyrs were home at last. In London itself, some three thousand coaches, and four thousand horsemen, and ‘a world of foot’ awaited them, everyone carrying a rosemary branch. Everyone noticed that the bishops were far from overjoyed. They had every reason for apprehension. Prynne’s warning to Laud that his own career was not immune from ruin was about to be as spectacularly fulfilled as the crudest tragedy.

And Prynne, like many a prophet, was himself one of the main causes of what he had cleverly foretold. On 18 December 1640, Laud was charged with high treason, and when he was removed to the Tower in the spring of 1641, Prynne gained access to his private papers, which he promptly published, carefully providing glosses. For Prynne – as for the young, clever John Milton – the bishops were nothing more nor less than ‘ravenous wolves’. It is fair to say that in bringing Laud to book, Prynne too was an iconoclast, and Laud an icon whose smash would prove his falsity. Just as early reformers had eagerly exposed Christ’s ‘blood’ of Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire to be a fake, so Prynne sought to open Laud to public inspection, to provoke healing ridicule and laughter. But there was always the risk that Prynne and Pym would come to resemble the men who, they felt, had persecuted them.

One of the new pamphlet plays, entitled Canterbury His Change of Diet, was composed to mark the occasion of the condign punishment meted out to the three. ‘Privately acted near the Palace-yard at West-minster’, said the title page. ‘The Bishop of Canterbury having variety of dainties, is not satisfied till he be fed with the tippets of men’s ears.’ Laud’s love of luxury, his links with the court, are turned into a kind of monstrous cannibalism.

The charges against Laud had to do with profound, deepening, widening dread of popery. It was this fear that animated the man who led the Commons, sometimes from the wings but increasingly from centre-stage. The man was John Pym, and his hour had found him. It was Pym’s task not only to reflect but also to whip up anti-popery, to turn headshaking dismay at the queen’s antics into shouting alarm. Only by generating a sense of national crisis – England was in danger, about to be swept away – could Pym hope to overcome the English political system’s tendency to right itself, to seek consensus and shun division.

The ground for his campaign had already been prepared. John Pym’s anti-popery was not unique to him, nor was his use of it in Parliament historically unprecedented. The Parliament of 1621 had been preoccupied with the idea that a Jesuit conspiracy was behind the fall of the Palatinate to the forces of Rome. The Parliament of 1628/9 was anxious that Arminianism was spreading. Arminianism was the belief that men and women could be saved by their own works, and by their own goodness and repentance; the way to heaven was a slow and steady walk, lined with kindness to others. This harmless-sounding idea flew in the face of Calvinism, which held that every person was destined by God to be either saved or damned and could moreover be saved by his grace alone. As Pym’s stepbrother Francis Rous put it: ‘an Arminian is the spawn of a Papist; and if there come the warmth of favour upon him, you shall see him turn into one of those frogs that rise out of the bottomless pit. And if you mark it well, you shall see an Arminian reaching out his hand to a Papist, a Papist to a Jesuit, a Jesuit gives one hand to the Pope and the other to the King of Spain; these men having kindled a fire in our neighbour country, now they have brought over some of it hither, to set on flame this kingdom also.’ Arminianism was seen as a menace because it was believed to prevent the kind of real, passionate soul-searching, with real self-loathing and much anguish, that was needed for true repentance. As a result of heightened anxieties of this kind, becoming an MP came to involve a declaration of religious allegiance. When Richard Grosvenor made a speech in support of candidates in Cheshire in 1624, he roundly announced that they were staunch Protestants, ‘untainted in their religion’. The 1624 elections were especially dominated by anxieties about popery in the wake of the Spanish Match and its failure.

This dread of sneaking popery centred on the court, because it was the queen’s influence that was feared most. Sir William Bulstrode was horrified by the spectacle of people trooping off to Mass with the queen: ‘so that it grows ordinary with the out-facing Jesuits, and common in discourse, Will you go to Mass, or have you been at Mass at Somerset-house? There coming five hundred a time from mass.’ In this atmosphere, Pym scarcely had to work hard to rouse fears that were ever-present.

The fear was renewed by Protestant England’s consciousness of its own history. John Foxe’s book Acts and Monuments, known as the Book of Martyrs, which graphically described the burning of Protestants during the reign of Mary Tudor eighty years earlier, was widely read and highly influential. The godly iconoclast William Dowsing owned three copies of it for his own personal use. So eager was Ipswich for the book that a satirist invented a maiden who shaped her sweetmeats into figures from Foxe. More recent events also haunted the Protestant imagination. Dread was fanned every year in the fires of the fifth of November. The Gunpowder Plot made papists and Jesuits seem especially the enemies of the Houses of Parliament. The godly Samuel Ward always warned his congregations on 5 November of the terrible danger in which they stood. Every year the celebration of Bonfire Night, in which often the pope and not Guy Fawkes was burned in effigy, reminded everyone that Catholic conspirators might be in their midst, but that God had delivered them. In the 1630s, only Puritans celebrated, but by 1644 the whole nation adopted the festival; even Royalists tried to invoke it by claiming that it was Parliament that resembled the gunpowder plotters. November was, besides, a Royalist month; it embraced Princess Mary’s birthday on the fourth, and Henrietta Maria’s on the sixteenth, and the king’s on the nineteenth. Despite all this, spectacular fireworks displays marked the day in November 1647, celebrating Parliament’s victories. The celebrations were themselves a kind of elaborate allegory of popery, and included ‘fire-balls burning in the water, and rising out of the water burning, showing the papists’ conjuration and consultation with infernal spirits, for the destruction of England’s king and Parliament’. They also rang the church bells all over England every 5 November. They grew louder and louder as the 1630s went on, and somehow, in some places, the bells rung for the king’s coronation day become softer, less sustained. Catholic courtiers, Catholic nobles, and above all the queen: men and women began to wonder if they were poised to act, to use the king as their tool.

Everyone had noticed how many Catholics eagerly joined the king’s army against the Scots. All through the 1630s there were stories of plotting papists: a mole-catcher called Henry Sawyer was examined by the council for saying that when the king went to Scotland to be crowned, the Catholics would rise up and attack the Protestants. It was widely whispered that such campaigns would be led by Catholic gentry, but some suspected involvement at higher levels. The Earl of Bridgewater, the young John Milton’s patron, reported worriedly to Secretary Coke that there had been a violent incident; an elderly woman had begged alms of a young gallant on horseback, who had responded by offering her a shilling if she would kneel to the cross on the shilling itself. She refused, and the young man killed her. Terror was increased when the winter of 1638/9 saw freak storms, which contemporaries read as signs. Dennis Bond of Dorset reported in his diary that ‘this year the 15 December was seen throughout the whole kingdom the opening of the sky for half a quarter of an hour’. Henry Hastings reported that a vision of men with pikes and muskets had been seen in the sky. Brilliana Harley thought that in 1639 the anti-christ must begin to fall, while the armies themselves quailed at the spectacle of lightning and thunder. ‘Many fears we have of dangerous plots by French and papists’, recorded Robert Woodforde, while the alarm was such in Northamptonshire that some town marshals in Kettering set up a round-the-clock guard. On further rumours that papists were making ready to set fire to the town, the watch was strengthened. It was becoming clear that Charles couldn’t altogether control the situation. People began to wonder if he could guarantee the safety of the English Church and its members from the dreadful dangers besetting them within and without the kingdom. And Charles himself might be a danger.