The English Civil War: A People’s History

The man who rose to greatness by exploiting those fears also believed in them; indeed, he was their creation. John Pym came from Somerset, from an estate which had been in the family for three hundred years. His father died when he was only a baby, and his mother married again. Later, Pym’s mother believed she was damned, a tragedy which often afflicted Calvinists. Her new husband was a godly gentleman of Cornwall, Anthony Rous, and Pym grew up in the area around Plymouth. In Armada year, he was five years old when Drake set sail, and perhaps he never forgot the fear, the beacons lit from end to end of the land, sending their smoke high up into the sky. Anthony Rous was not the man to let him forget; he was one of Drake’s executors, and was himself a red-hot Puritan, running a kind of house of refuge for godly ministers. However, his brand of austere Calvinism had not yet become a source of disaffection; indeed, it was the glue that kept godly left and Anglican middle together in the years of Pym’s childhood.

Nevertheless, Pym lived a comfortable gentleman’s life – Oxford, and then the Middle Temple. But his time there was disrupted by what might have seemed like a frightening recapitulation of his worst childhood fears; while he was in residence, in 1605, the Gunpowder Plot was discovered, proof that plotting Catholics were here, in England. The gentleman’s life resumed, but there was much evidence that it seemed fragile. He never really made headway in Somerset society; his circle of friends was solid but limited, and when drawn to the attention of the Commons, he was styled ‘one Pym, a receiver’, which meant he was deputed to collect the king’s rents, a process that got him involved in supplying timber for the repair of the coastal forts and thus discovering their parlous state for himself, something that horrified the man who had known the menace of the Armada as a boy. His job also involved disafforestation, an operation which meant that ordinary people lost the right to gather firewood in the forest and to pasture animals in it. This was felt as ruthless and unjust by its victims, whose livelihoods were thus destroyed, and though Pym did his best to defend his tenants on at least one occasion he was also the landlord’s man, not the tenants’ representative. What he wanted was plenty of money in the royal exchequer so that the darkness of popery could be repelled by shot and shell.

As an MP he was serious. He was unresponsive to the House’s mood, unwilling to joke and play, and poor at improvisation. He had his own ideas, and he had no wish to modify them. Yet this carried its own conviction in uncertain times. What helped to give credence to his vehement religious opinions and fears was his mastery of facts and figures in the labyrinthine areas of Crown finances. He was also exceptionally dedicated; he wanted his way more than most of the others, who preferred to adjourn and go off to a good ordinary. But he soon became a brilliant manipulator of the House’s amour-propre. Only the potential power of the Commons offered the frightened little boy that Pym had been safety from the popery he hated and dreaded. So in 1621 he was noticeably anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic, but had also begun to ruminate on Parliament’s role in safeguarding England against popery. ‘The high court of Parliament is the great eye of the kingdom, to find out offences and punish them’, he said. Already he saw the king as an obstacle to this safeguarding: ‘we are not secure enough at home in respect of the enemy at home which grows by the suspen[ding] of the laws at home’. He said papists broke the ‘independency upon others’ which loyal subjects owed, and that the king, by mistaken lenity towards them, was hazarding the state. His position had hardened further by 1624, when he urged a search for recusants who gave away their secret beliefs by their acts; this is anxious, even paranoid, and his subsequent job of hunting down popish schoolmasters increased his anxiety and reinforced his convictions. By 1628 he was in the thick of the campaign for the Petition of Right, and was the chief opponent of Arminianism, which for Pym was a way for the Devil to persuade people that they need not repent.

Like many godly men, Pym was also involved in New World colonization projects, often attempts to build beyond the seas the godly nation which was failing to materialize in the British Isles. Pym was on the Providence Company board, whose very name proclaimed its godliness. This also yielded valuable political contacts. Through it Pym kept in constant touch with his patron the Earl of Bedford, Lord Saye and Sele, and the Earl of Warwick. They met often at Saye’s London house. Pym was treasurer, and helped John Hampden prepare his case against Ship Money in 1638.

It was the opening debate of the Short Parliament that made Pym a national hero. It was not his first attempt to energize the nation by articulating its dread of papists, but the Laudian reforms and the Scottish wars meant that the nation had now moved into step with Pym’s own terrors. He summarized every grievance against the king, but the focus was on religion. Later, Oliver St John said that Pym and his friends had been determined to ensure that the Short Parliament failed.

When the Short Parliament dissolved, Pym began to negotiate with the Scots, bypassing the king, while during the election campaign for the Long Parliament Pym ‘rode about the country to promote the election of the puritanical brethren to serve in Parliament’. Once Parliament met on 3 November 1640, he moved at once to attack Strafford, and called him ‘the greatest enemy to the liberties of his country, and the greatest promoter of tyranny, that any age had produced’. In this he was acting for an alliance of English dissidents and the Scots, who knew Strafford had argued for the Anglicization of Scotland as a province of England, and that he had wanted to go on fighting the war after the Scottish victory at Newburn. The Irish, too, loathed Strafford, and in beginning impeachment proceedings, Pym was acting on behalf of interests in all three kingdoms.

During the next few months, Pym created the laws and institutions that were to govern the early Parliamentarian regime: the Militia Ordinance, the Nineteen Propositions, and above all the Committee of Safety. Its very name points to what had been important to Pym all along. He was not a radical; he believed that the Elizabethan constitution was being undermined by a popish conspiracy. In the Church, too, all he wanted was the Elizabethan black-and-white simplicity of his childhood and youth; he did not want anything truly radical. His own paranoia about papists within was widely shared, but partly because he made it so by voicing his fears eloquently and publicly. It was he more than anyone else who persuaded the men of the House of Commons that a popish conspiracy had entangled the king and his chief ministers, and posed an immediate threat. On 7 November 1640, Pym made a speech two hours long, claiming there was a design of papists to alter law and religion. Sir Francis Seymour voiced the ideas central to Pym: ‘one may see what dangers we are in for religion Jesuits and Priests openly to walk abroad and particularly what encouragement this is to our Papists. No laws in execution. For papists often to go to mass.’ Pym moved that a committee be appointed ‘to see that the papists depart out of town’. The committee was duly created on 9 November 1640, and was empowered to supervise and report on any dispensations granted to recusants. The king was regarded as ineffective because so many papists, it was said, were living round about and were protected by Letters of Grace, royal pardons-in-advance. So the committee began drawing up plans to constrain papists more tightly. Why shouldn’t the anti-recusancy laws apply not just to known recusants, but also to the secret and crypto-papists infesting the Church and the state? Why shouldn’t the laws be extended? Pym even suggested that Catholics should be forced to wear distinctive and recognizable dress, as if they were prisoners. He and the Commons then proposed that the queen should be deprived of all her Catholic servants. ‘We ought to obey God rather than man, and that if we do not prefer God before man, he will refuse us’, said Pym. This statement shows how radical thinking in religion could come to sound like – and to be – political radicalism. What was odd about Pym was shared by a lot of his contemporaries. They could act and talk radically while their reflexes remained conservative, even reactionary. They backed awkwardly into a revolution they did not intend.

The committee on recusants reported to the House on 1 December 1640. Sixty-four priests and Jesuits had been discharged from prison, on Secretary of State Windebank’s authority. Windebank had also written repeatedly to local authorities asking them to halt their proceedings against papists. The House ordered Windebank to appear, to explain himself, and Pym and the future Royalist general Ralph Hopton moved that ‘some course might be taken to suppress the growth of popery’. Then two days later the House ordered all JPs in Westminster, London and Middlesex to tell churchwardens to compile a list of known recusants ‘so that they may be proceeded against with effect, according to law, at the next session, notwithstanding any inhibition or restraint’.

For Pym, the papists were not only a problem in matters of religion; they had become a political menace as well, because they were organizing a conspiracy ‘to alter the kingdom in religion and government’. The country was awash with rumours of papists amassing arms; the House was told of a stabbing carried out by a popish priest because the magistrate in question was about to act against papists in Westminster. They worried that the army commanders were untrustworthy, and agreed to create another committee to look into ‘the state of the king’s army, and what commanders, or other inferior officers, are Papists’. Sir John Clotworthy, the tirelessly godly Ulsterman and Pym’s relation by marriage, reported that eight thousand of Ireland’s ten thousand soldiers were papists, ‘ready to march where I know not. The old Protestant army have not their pay, but the Papists are paid.’

The Commons began to take action to protect the realm. It purged itself of papists by deciding that all members must take communion and that the House should also make a confession of faith renouncing the pope. Meanwhile petitions complained that the government was too lenient towards papists. From the counties came stories of planned Catholic risings. John Clotworthy reported that there was a Catholic Irish invasion at hand. Pym told Parliament that divers persons about the queen were plotting a French invasion. In the Grand Remonstrance, too, plots were prominent, among Jesuits, bishops, prelates and popish courtiers. In reply, some hardy souls pointed out that nothing very much had happened yet, but this did not stop Pym or his followers from disseminating their fears. They may never have become majority beliefs, but they did become very widespread. The Declaration of Fears and Jealousies was especially fearful about Henrietta Maria, ‘a dangerous and ill-affected person who hath been admitted to intermeddle with the great affairs of state, with the disposing of places and preferments, even of highest concernment in the kingdom’.

So widespread was the fear, that ‘popery’ was coming to mean something close to ‘anything in religion or politics that I don’t approve of or like’, that though it extended itself from actual card-carrying Catholics to those in the Church of England suspected of an overfondness for ceremony, it remained firmly grounded in a clear if misinformed apprehension of Romish practices. In particular, popery was foreign, and especially it was Spanish, and hence cruel, or French, and hence silly and nonsensical. Or, to put it another way, the English – and for that matter, the Scots – increasingly developed their ideas of national identity in response to the perceived menace of popery. To be truly, properly English or Scottish was to stand against Rome, an idea that was promulgated by writers from Edmund Spenser to every grubbing pamphleteer. This was to cast a long shadow for Charles Stuart, for it was thus that he could come to seem a traitor to his own people. The flavour of foreignness was to be intensified by the stories from Ireland later in 1641.

In just the first few months of the Long Parliament, no fewer than five popish plots were reported and discussed. A papist army was thought to lurk in South Wales. In early May 1641, every member of the House pledged to ‘maintain and defend the true reformed Protestant religion … against all Popery and Popish innovations’. Pym himself was menaced personally, or so one newsbook thought. It reported on ‘a damnable treason by a contagious plaster of a plague-sore, wrapped up in a letter and sent to Mr. Pym; wherein is discovered a devilish plot against the parliament, Oct. 25 1641’. Two terrifying menaces to security combined: plague and popery.

Or was it the printer who deserves credit for ingenuity? There was a raging bull market for popish plots in 1641. There was A bloody plot, practised by some papists in Darbyshire, and lately discovered by one Jacob Francklin. There was Matters of note made known to all true Protestants: 1st, the plot against the city of London [&c.]. A most damnable and hellish plot exprest in three letters, against all Protestants in Ireland and England, sent out of Rome to the chief actors of the rebellion in Ireland. There was The truest relation of the discoverie of a damnable plot in Scotland. And A discovery to the prayse of God, and joy of all true hearted Protestants of a late intended plot by the papists to subdue the Protestants. And A discovery of the great plot for the … mine of the city of London and the parliament, a pamphlet sometimes attributed to Pym himself. There were dozens of pamphlets like these doing the rounds. One was Gods Late Mercy to England, in discovering of three damnable plots by the treacherous Papists, printed in 1641. It told a compelling story. On 15 November, a poor man named Thomas Beale lodged in a ditch near a post-house, and while thus concealed, he heard two men planning to surprise and take London for the papists, and to murder key MPs. They and their co-conspirators had been promised ten pounds and the chance to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist if they did so. Beale rushed to the Commons with his story, and the malefactors were arrested, but the author decided that ‘we have … as just cause to fear the papists in England as they did in Ireland’. The House agreed, and responded with ever-tougher anti-papist legislation. Another pamphlet, A True Relation of a Plot, told of Catholics in Derbyshire, amassing supplies of gunpowder – itself virtually a logo for Catholics after 1605 – and also old iron; they had planned to blow up the local church with the worshippers inside.

So readers could learn some simple lessons. For the pamphleteers, Catholics were people with gunpowder, people who plotted; traitors too. They had tortuous, devious minds. They were animated by hatred of the good and godly. And they were at this very moment menacing the country from within: why, any stranger at an alehouse might be a Jesuit in disguise. And from without, too: the Jesuit in the alehouse might be in touch with a vast army ready to sweep into England.

Into this dynamite came a spark. On 1 November 1641, news reached London of a major rebellion in Ulster. Many years later, one of the many Protestants terrorized by it recalled the fear. Alice Thornton was the daughter of Sir Christopher Wandesford, who succeeded his cousin Strafford as Lord Deputy of Ireland:

That horrid rebellion and massacre of the poor English protestants began to break out in the country, which was by the all-seeing providence of God prevented in the city of Dublin, where we were. We were forced upon the alarum to leave our house and fly into the castle that night with all my mother’s family and what goods she could. From thence, we were forced into the city, continuing for fourteen days and nights in great fears, frights, and hideous distractions from the alarums and outcries given in Dublin each night by the rebels. These frights, fastings, and pains about packing the goods, and wanting sleep, times of eating, or refreshment, wrought so much upon my young body, that I fell into a desperate flux, called the Irish disease, being nigh unto death, while I stayed in Dublin.

Stories of terrible atrocities committed by the insurrectionists circulated in London as well as in Dublin. This may have been the kind of thing Alice feared:

they [Irish rebels] being blood-thirsty savages … not deserving the title of humanity without any more words beat out his brains, then they laid hold on his wife being big with child, & ravished her, then ripped open her womb, and like so many Neros undauntedly viewed nature’s bed of conception, afterward took her and her Infant and sacrificed in fire their wounded bodies to appease their Immaculate Souls, which being done, they pillaged the house, taking what they thought good, and when they had done, they set the house on fire.

This horrible story may or may not be true: as in the Indian Mutiny in the 1850s, stories like this had propaganda value far in excess of any simple truth. But to a young English girl, fifteen-year-old Alice Thornton, crouching in Dublin, stories like this might seem a direct threat to her in particular. Immediately the news press went into overdrive, and tales of atrocities began to pour forth. There were descriptions of gruesome tortures, especially stories of unborn babies ripped from their mothers’ wombs, wives raped in front of their husbands, and girls in front of their parents. The rebels allegedly hanged a woman by her hair from a door; in Tyrone, it was said, a fat Scot was killed and rendered into tallow candles, in a grisly prefiguration of the Holocaust’s soap industry. Humble people lost relatives and friends too. Among the dead was Zachariah, the brother-in-law of London woodturner Nehemiah Wallington, though the news did not reach Nehemiah himself until almost two years later, in 1643. The story was horrible: Zachariah had been cut down while his children begged, ‘Oh, do not kill my father. Oh, do not kill my father.’ Two of those children also died that winter, of cold and exposure, and Zachariah’s widow, the sister of Nehemiah’s wife, had to scramble along in a desperate plight, so desperate that she eventually took an Irish Catholic as her lover and protector. This horrified Nehemiah, but it was a move born of dire necessity. She sent one of her surviving sons to her sister and to Nehemiah, where he was trained as a woodturner. At least she had managed to get him away.

Nehemiah knew by then just how to interpret Zachariah’s last words, which he carefully transcribed into his diary: ‘as for the rebels, God will raise an army in His time to root them out, that although for a time they may prevail, yet at last God will find out men enough to destroy them. And as for the king, if it be true, as these rebels say, that they have his commission … to kill … all the Protestants … then surely the Lord will not suffer the king nor his posterity to reign, but the Lord at last will requite our blood at his hands.’ They were to be the instruments of God’s vengeance. This idea, piled on top of months of anxiety and panic, created a mentality which led people to think that the king needed to be restrained. After the war, clergyman and chronicler Richard Baxter said the rising was one of the main causes of the Civil War: ‘the terrible massacre in Ireland, and the threatenings of the rebels to invade England’; Royalist historian Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon also thought it a key factor. John Dod told the Commons Committee that ‘he saw a great number of Irish rebels whom he knew had a hand in the most barbarous actions of the rebellion, as the dashing of small infants and the ripping up of women and children and the like’. Joseph Lister, a boy of twelve at the time, never forgot his terror that he and other Protestants were about to be set upon as the Protestant Irish had been: ‘O what fears and tears, cries and prayers night and day!’ he recalled, ‘was there then in many places, and in my dear mother’s house in particular!’

London still retained some sense about nonsense. In January 1642, a tract entitled No pamphlet, but a detestation against all such pamphlets as are printed, concerning the Irish rebellion, denounced the ‘many fabulous pamphlets that are set out concerning the rebels in Ireland’ as forgeries. But similar accounts of the Thirty Years War made them seem likely. John Erwyn led a party of Scots soldiers to Edward Mullan’s house in Ireland on Sunday 2 February 1642. He drew his sword ‘and wounded the said Mary Mullan in her head, and forehead, and cut her fingers, at which time she cried out, “Dear John, do not kill me, for I never offended you”, repeating this to him two or three times, whereupon he thrust her under the right breast and she gave up the ghost … And after a time the said Erwyn took a mighty lump of fire and put it on the said Mary Mullan’s breast, expecting she was still living.’

Mary’s words sound like the desperate self-defences of women accused of witchcraft by violent neighbours. Particularly telling is the test to see if Mary is really dead; it sounds as if Erwyn expects Mary to be impervious to weapons. A pamphlet called Treason in Ireland told typical stories, and invited its readers to see the sponsors as traitors of the worst and cruellest kind:

Henry Orell, when they slew his wife an ancient woman, and ravished her daughter in the most barbarous manner that ever was known; and when they had done pulled her limbs asunder, and mangled her body in pieces without pity or Christianity … The woman and her maid a brewing, for it was an alehouse, where they brewed their own drink. The maid they took and ravished, and when they had abused her body at their pleasure, they threw her into the boiling cauldron.

The terror in England was almost a panic. On one public fast day at Pudsey the congregation was thrown into turmoil because of reports that the Irish rebels had invaded the West Riding and had reached Halifax and Bradford. ‘Upon which the congregation was all in confusion, some ran out, others wept, others fell to talking to friends, and the Irish massacre being but lately acted, and all circumstances put together, the people’s hearts fainted with fear.’ Fears were not allayed till it was discovered that the supposed rebels were actually refugees. Elizabeth Harding testified that her lodger had remarked, on hearing of the Irish rebellion, that ‘the worst of the plot was not yet discovered there, and that the Protestants heels would go up apace’. Devonshire petitioners were terrified when refugees told them of ‘their wolvish enemies, that the bounds of that kingdom shall not limit their malicious tyranny’. Many Londoners, like Nehemiah, believed that ‘he that will England win/ Must first with Ireland begin’. Wallington added, ‘now, all these plots in Ireland are but one plot against England, for it is England that is that fine, sweet bit which they so long for, and their cruel teeth so much water at. And therefore these blood-thirsty papists do here among us in England plot what may be for our overthrow, to bring in their damnable superstition and idolatry among us.’ Parliament thought that the English Catholics were to have risen at the same time. The counties that felt especially exposed – North Wales, Cheshire and Lancashire – began asking London for help.

People felt they were already at war, and believed that the rebels would find a fifth column of supporters poised to help them. In Parliament ‘new jealousy and sharpness was expressed against the papists’, said Clarendon, ‘as if they were privy to the insurrection in Ireland, and to perform the same exploit in this kingdom’. Considerable numbers of English Catholics were said to have gone over to Ireland to help the rebels. Jesuits were (as usual) thought to be behind it all. Pym was quickfooted as ever, and managed to make political capital from it all: ‘the papists here are acted by the same principle as those in Ireland; many of the most active of them have lately been there; which argues an intercourse and communication of counsels’. One pamphlet revealed a plan to blow up and burn the chief English cities and to land an army. When another plot was revealed in London, ‘the poor people, all the countries over, were ready either to run to arms, or hide themselves thinking that the Papists were ready to rise and cut their throats’, wrote Richard Baxter. Some counties asked for help in rounding up the local Catholics who were believed to be on the brink of helping to launch an invasion.

There is no evidence that English Catholics had any such intentions, and most of them probably shared their countrymen’s dislike and fear of the Irish; one, John Carill, of Harting in Sussex, actually sold lands to raise money for an army to suppress the rebellion, a tactful move to appease his neighbours. But it made little difference. Ardent Protestants saw events in both Ireland and England as signs of a general European Catholic conspiracy to eradicate Protestantism. The worst-case scenario envisaged the Irish landing in England, backed by Spain and France; then they could turn against the Dutch too. It was believed that the pope was behind this, for he had given plenary indulgences to all those who made war on his behalf. As fears of a Catholic invasion spread, England was seen as a tiny, gallant Protestant nation, encircled by conniving Catholic superpowers keen to blot it from the earth.

As with more recent conspiracy theories, the immediate result was loss of civil liberties. Trunks and possessions of suspected persons heading for Ireland were ordered to be searched. Letters were intercepted and read. Even foreign ambassadors’ reports came under scrutiny. Irish soldiers returning home from fighting for the kings of France or Spain were detained at the ports and questioned. A register of Irish residents in Middlesex and Westminster was drawn up, and all over England and Wales Irish Catholics and priests were arrested. English and Welsh Catholics found themselves secured and disarmed too. Catholic peers and bishops in the House of Lords came under renewed political attack. And yet another army began to be raised to put down the rebellion.

The question was, could the king be trusted with such an army? What if it were used against the king’s critics at home? After all, the rebels themselves unhelpfully claimed to be fighting for the maintenance of the royal prerogative against the Puritans in Parliament. They also claimed they held the king’s commission under the great seal. In London the queen and other advisers were openly attacked as the authors of the rebellion; at the beginning of 1642 Pym claimed that the king had granted passes to the rebels. Clarendon claimed in his History of the Rebellion, written after his exile from court in 1667, that some chose the Parliamentarian side because they saw the king as the ally of the Irish rebels; he also thought that the idea of the king as a secret supporter of Catholicism was a key factor in dividing the nation. It was not only the godly who were terrified by the Ulster Rising. Royalists were also revolted; Wales, for example, suffered more Irish invasion panics than most areas, but eventually became staunchly Royalist. It seems as if the rebellion in Ireland only galvanized anti-monarchical spirits when added to a premix of godliness, dislike of Laud and anxiety about the Catholics at court. Parliamentarian propaganda sought to link Laud with popery, tyranny and barbarity, while Parliament fashioned itself as the upholder of traditional liberties. For the rest of the war, Parliament would harp on this note, constantly pointing to papists within Royalist circles or forces, asserting that some Irish rebels had been recruited into the king’s armies, while Royalist forces were compared with the rebels at the taking of Marlborough, at which the prisoners ‘were used after the manner that the Irish rebels used the Protestants in Ireland’.

Late in 1641 and for the first months of 1642, Protestant Irish refugees flooded into England and Wales, seeking aid from relatives, poor relief, or Parliament. Edmund Ludlow noted that everywhere they went they told stories of the brutalities they had endured, sometimes in a bid to gain relief. Many arrived at Chester and Milford Haven, and more in Lancashire and the Isle of Wight in March 1642 and February 1643 respectively. The earlier refugees were mostly women and children. They told their stories to eager, frightened audiences.

One account given by Richard Baxter summed up the intense propaganda appeal of the Ulster Rising:

This putteth me in mind of that worthy servant of Christ, Dr Teat, who being put to fly suddenly with his wife and children from the fury of the Irish Rebels, in the night without provision, wandered in the snow out of all ways upon the mountain till Mrs Teat, having no suck for the child in her arms, and he being ready to die with Hunger, she went to the brow of a rock to lay him down, and leave him that she might not see him die, and there in the snow out of all ways where no footsteps appeared she found a suck-bottle full of new, sweet milk, which preserved the child’s life.

The helpless women and children, at the mercy of their enemies but cared for by God, were truly iconic for all Protestants in all three kingdoms. If anyone who could read was not afraid of Catholic plots in 1640, a diet of this kind of print ensured that they were terrified by 1642.

Part of the Commons’ efforts to save the kingdom from being engulfed by popery was the prosecution of Strafford, who had come to seem symbolic of the worst aspects of the personal rule. Loathing Strafford was a way of complaining about Charles. Traditionally, grievances about monarchs expressed themselves as dislike of the monarch’s councillors. More importantly, Strafford was the direct enemy of Pym and his supporters. He had tried to get the Commons to impeach them for their correspondence with the Scots Covenanters; now they turned the tables on him.

Pym had thought of Strafford’s trial as an obvious case of treason. But treason had to be a crime against the king. It was widely known that Charles had trusted Strafford completely and was still refusing to get rid of him or to back away from his policies. So Pym said that Strafford was guilty of treason not against the king, but against the constitution. Here again, Pym seems to have reversed accidentally into radicalism because of expediency. Strafford sensibly pointed out what a dangerous idea this was, but by then he was so hated that the London crowd simply wanted him dead, and was not over-particular about the means. The case began with Pym’s sizzling attack on Strafford’s activities in Ireland, another Pym theme. But things didn’t quite go to plan. At his trial, Strafford remained brave and calm, and even those who loathed him were moved to grudging admiration. His worst crime, which was to have said that an Irish army might be brought over to reduce Scotland and then England, was poorly evidenced – only Henry Vane the Elder could be got to say that he had heard Strafford actually say it, and the law required two witnesses. Nonetheless, Strafford’s indictment allowed the Commons to practise talking as if they and not the king embodied English sovereignty. It was to become an acceptable rather than an unthinkable idea.

Now it was another MP, godly Arthur Haselrig, who had a clever new notion, though not one congenial to Pym, who was hoping for a show-trial. Why not drop the cumbersome impeachment, which actually required tiresome amounts of proof? Why not simply introduce a Bill of Attainder? All this required was a Commons vote. At first Pym was against it, but came around to the idea once he saw that it was the only sure-fire way to bring Strafford to the scaffold. Strafford’s final speech in his own defence, made on 13 April, was a gallant attempt to rebut the charges in the name of the very traditions the king had violated: ‘I have ever admired the wisdom of our ancestry, who have so fixed the pillars of this monarchy that each of them keeps their measure and proportion with each other … the happiness of a Kingdom consists in this just poise of the king’s prerogative and the subject’s liberty and that things should never be well till these went hand in hand together.’

It was Pym who stood up to refute Strafford, and he said that ‘if the prerogative of the king overwhelm the liberty of the people, it will be turned into tyranny; if liberty undermine the prerogative, it will grow into anarchy’. This scarcely answered Strafford’s charge that laws could not be set aside. Prophetically, he argued that ‘You, your estates, your posterities lie all at the stake if such learned gentlemen as these, whose lungs are well acquainted with such proceedings, shall be started out against you: if your friends, your counsel were denied access to you, if your professed enemies admitted to witness against you, if every word, intention, circumstance of yours be alleged as treasonable, not because of a statute, but a consequence, a construction of law heaved up in a high rhetorical strain, and a number of supposed probabilities’.

Thanks to this powerful appeal, fifty-nine people voted against the Bill of Attainder at its third reading, and found their names on a list posted outside the Commons, headed, ‘These are the Straffordians, the betrayers of their country.’ Things were turning nasty.

The same mood prevailed in the streets, and newer and more radical voices emerged from the hubbub. Rude Henry Marten, certainly no Puritan, was among those who produced the Protestation, which was an imitation of the Kirk’s Covenant, and toughly vowed to crush all who threatened true religion, especially priests and Jesuits, ‘and other adherents of the See of Rome [that] have of late more boldly and frequently put in practice than formerly’. It did offer allegiance to the king as well, but like Pym, Marten had come to think the king was the problem in guaranteeing true religion. As early as 1641 Marten confessed to his friend Sir Edward Hyde that he did not believe that one man was wise enough to rule a whole nation. By 1642 he was identified as a key figure among those Sir Simonds D’Ewes referred to as the ‘fiery spirits’ who used language disparaging towards the royal dignity. Having proclaimed kingship to be forfeitable he was excluded from pardon for life or estate by Charles I in the same year. Later he was to go further. In support of the Puritan divine John Saltmarsh, the author of a pamphlet proposing the deposition of the king, Marten stated in the Commons on 16 August 1643 that ‘it were better one family be destroyed than many’. He was asked who he meant, and at once said he meant the royal family. For this the Commons sent him to the Tower; they were not yet ready to hear what he had to say.

In the meantime, a group of writers had vowed to free Strafford; borrowing a none-too-plausible plot from the stage, they planned to seize the Tower and help Strafford to make his getaway, while bringing the army south. The group included William Davenant, who had long claimed to be Shakespeare’s illegitimate son, and the elegant and intelligent Sir John Suckling. Also involved was George Goring, later a Royalist general of notoriously undisciplined troops and himself a wild card. Charles, who always loved a play, was privy to their counsels, but may also have urged Goring to leak it to the Parliamentarian leadership. He was attempting to convince them not to pursue Strafford to death, trying to frighten them off. It didn’t work. The Lords passed the attainder by a slim margin, with many bishops and all the Catholic peers missing. An armed mob accompanied those taking it to the king for signature.

And the next day, on Sunday 9 May 1641, after hesitating all evening, Charles signed his chief counsellor’s death warrant. He did it to save his wife, who would certainly have been next, and his frightened children. But he never forgave himself. Strafford was to face the executioner’s axe on 12 May 1641, before a huge and joyous crowd. ‘I do freely forgive all the world,’ he said on the scaffold, ‘I wish that every man would lay his hand on his heart and consider seriously whether the beginnings of the people’s happiness should be written in letters of blood.’ But London was glad to have it so, and as Strafford’s bloody head was lifted, bonfires flamed across the country, and at dusk candles were lit in windows to celebrate his fall.

It was in this atmosphere of tension and violence that on 7 November 1641 Pym began formally to connect ‘the corrupt part of our clergy that make things for their own ends and with a union between us and Rome’. This is close to what Milton wrote in a sudden outburst of passionately anti-Laudian fervour in Lycidas: the spineless clergy do not feed their hungry sheep, and so Rome, ‘the grim wolf with privy paw’ carries off more of them every day. But Pym meant more. For him, increasingly influenced by the Scots, bishops themselves were coming to seem central to the problem. And Parliament was the centre of the solution: ‘the parliament is as the soul of the commonwealth, that only is able to apprehend and understand the symptoms of all such diseases that threaten the body politic’. He spoke for two hours. He connected the religious menaces of popery with menaces to Parliament, to property. That afternoon, although this was not obvious to him or to anyone else, Pym created the Parliamentarian cause that was to be disputed so bloodily over the next nine years.

The Grand Remonstrance was Pym’s powerful statement of a political credo that demanded reform on a grand scale indeed. The elections to the Common Council a month later, in December, provided a very comfortable majority of Pym’s supporters, and from January 1642, the older and more conservative councillors were systematically replaced by those who served Pym. The Grand Remonstrance was not a Declaration of Independence, or a Declaration of the Rights of Man, much less a Marseillaise. It was still couched in the conservative rhetoric of days of yore, asking the king in fulsome terms of grovelling humility to redress grievances. But even that rhetoric had begun to fall away, and some at least of it was addressed to the people, not the king. It was first read on 8 November 1641, and finally passed in the middle of the night on the 22nd. In it Pym’s exceptionally vehement anti-popery and his concerns about the state came to seem one and the same issue. It contained long low moans about the Jesuited papists: ‘the multiplicity, sharpness and malignity of those evils under which we have now many years suffered … and which were fomented and cherished by … those malignant parties whose proceedings evidently appear to be mainly for their advantage and increase of popery’. They, it seemed, and not Strafford, were responsible for everything that had gone wrong in the past fifteen years. Like Hitler’s anti-Semitism, Pym’s anti-popery was both a genuine moral passion and also a card he played to try to bring the public into sympathy with his plans.

The phrase Grand Remonstrance is still used for any rebuke, though few today have much idea of what was in the original. The Remonstrance was a multipurpose affair. It was a discontented history of the personal rule of Charles I, minute and even fussy. Every grievance of the personal rule found a place. But its main concerns were large. Its announced goal was to restore ‘the ancient honour, greatness and security of this crown and nation’. It was to expose the ‘mischevious designs’ that had tried to drive a wedge between the king and his people, forcing them to argue about liberty and prerogative. It was also supposed to expose those who intended to drive Puritans out ‘with force’ or root them out by violence. It demanded that the king employ only ministers ‘as the Parliament may have cause to confide in, without which we cannot give his Majesty supplies for the support of his own estate’. It demanded that bishops be deprived of votes in the Lords, ‘who cherish formality and superstition’ in what came to seem an ‘ecclesiastical tyranny’. It complained of illicit revenue-raising through Ship Money and the Forced Loan. It objected to the imprisonment of members of the Commons. It protested very strenuously at the destruction of the king’s forests, a matter near Pym’s heart, and to the selling of Forest of Dean timber to ‘papists’, ‘which was the best storehouse of this kingdom for the maintenance of our shipping’. It also tried to reassure everyone that it was not a blueprint for religious radicalism. There would be, if anything, more discipline than before. Similarly, it closed with a ringing avowal, explaining that all its creators wanted was ‘that His Majesty may have cause to be in love with good counsel, and good men’.

The debate was the most passionate the House had ever seen. The final exchange, on 22 November 1641, was especially fierce, and here the shadowy outlines of Royalist and Parliamentarian became briefly visible. Many spoke against the Remonstrance. They disliked its peremptory procedure, the refusal of its creators to consult the Lords. Pym and his chums were becoming starkly visible as a powerful clique, and some members of the Commons were not eager to expel one clique in order to have another in its place. Those who disliked the Remonstrance complained that it dragged old skeletons from their graves. Pym retorted that the country’s plight was desperate. Popery was about to destroy everything. But some were beginning to wonder if there really were evil Jesuits lurking behind every tree. A moderate group containing future historian and Earl of Clarendon Edward Hyde and the brilliant young humanist Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, were among the doubters. They worried, too, that Pym and his faction were encouraging sectarians and godly fanatics. One dissenter was Sir Edward Dering, and his concerns show what was truly radical about the Grand Remonstrance, though not everyone noticed at the time. There was something big at stake here: ‘When I first heard of a remonstrance, I presently imagined that like faithful counsellors we should hold up a glass unto his majesty; I thought to represent unto the king the wicked counsels of pernicious councillors; the restless turbulency of practical papists … I did not dream that we should remonstrate downward, tell stories to the people, and talk of the King as a third person.’

For Dering, the Remonstrance was radical and entirely unacceptable not for what it said, but to whom it was said. Parliament was no longer addressing its grievances to the king, but to the people. Sovereignty and the definition of who guaranteed the people’s rights had shifted. Pym responded, though, with the glorious plainness which kept him in his place as leader: ‘It’s time to speak plain English,’ he said, ‘lest posterity shall say that England was lost and no man dared speak truth.’ The debate went on until after midnight, when there was – at long last – a division. Over three hundred MPs were still present. The Remonstrance was carried, on a majority of just eleven votes. This tiny margin helped convince the king that strong action against a little faction would settle things. He was wrong, as the Remonstrance itself showed. But it also showed that the nation’s representatives were beginning to divide. So too would the nation.

VI Stand Up, Shout Mars (#ulink_c301025b-0c68-5db9-ae71-a510bc966d6d)

Already, as the Commons debated, the city of London was reflecting the turbulence of its governors. Two years of disorder and riots – outbreaks in which those ordinary people who could not speak in Parliament or even in church demanded a voice. Hostile crowds attacked Lambeth Palace in May 1640, demonstrated in large numbers during Strafford’s trial in the following spring, and took to the streets in the winter of 1641–2. Conservatives were alarmed by the coincidence of these demonstrations with Pym’s assaults in the House of Commons, thinking that the radicals in Parliament were orchestrating the mobs. But Pym and the crowds were engaged in a kind of dance in which neither led, but each responded to a music of discords in Church and state. Huge numbers signed petitions – 15,000 signed the Root and Branch Petition, which urged the abolition of bishops, deans and chapters, tendered in December 1640; 20,000 Londoners signed a petition against Strafford, and 15,000 ‘poor labouring men’ signed a petition complaining about the faltering economy on 31 January 1642. Thirty thousand apprentices – nearly all of those in London – signed a petition presented in the violent demonstrations of Christmas 1641. However, this must be seen in context. London’s apprentices had always been inclined to riot. Fisticuffs and shouting were good entertainment for boys.

London was wild with rumour and story. The undercurrent of dread, that sometimes threatened to rise and swamp the city, was the fear of popery. ‘Prentices and clubs’ became the call. The London apprentices in May 1640 threatened to rise against the Queen Mother Marie de Medici and Archbishop Laud. They marched, with a drummer at their head. Placards materialized everywhere, calling the apprentices to rid the city of the curse of bishops. Everyone was on holiday for May Day, so when the crowd of apprentices reached St George’s Fields, Southwark, it was augmented by sailors and dockhands, idle through lack of trade. They decided to hunt for ‘Laud, the fox’, and 500 of them marched on Lambeth Palace. The apprentices, balked because Laud had escaped, went instead to break open prisons, and to attack the house of the Earl of Arundel. A rumour swept London that 50,000 Frenchmen were already hidden away in the city’s suburbs, ready to spring out and support the king, and overthrow true religion. On 21 May, the judges declared the disturbances were high treason, and John Archer, a glover of Southwark, was brutally tortured before his execution. The justices were hoping to make him an example, but the effect was the reverse of what they had in mind. This did not give the crowds much reassurance about the government’s intentions. Finally, the following year, the crowd’s hunger for a scapegoat had been rewarded by the spectacle of Strafford’s severed head, but this had not so much placated as excited them further.

Since the fall of Strafford, events stood on a knife edge, and were served by rumour, gossip, personal contacts. It is said to have been Henrietta herself who, Lady Macbeth-like, urged her husband to aggression. She is supposed to have told him, ‘Go, you coward, and pull those rogues out by the ears, or never see my face more.’ And Henrietta may have had reason to fear that Parliament was preparing to move against her, personally. It had removed Strafford; it had attacked Laud. Of its great enemies, only she was left. And Charles may have seen himself in nightmares reluctantly signing her death warrant too.

Charles became convinced that strong action against a tiny band was all that was needed to give him back his life, his court, his rule. He was a knight-errant. He was, it turned out, Don Quixote, living in a world that did not exist. Like other mildly stupid people, he gave no thought to what would happen if his plans went awry and the bold action failed. He only saw the dazzling sun of success.