10
IT WAS DUSK when Charles approached London from York on 31 October 1640. A humiliating armistice had been signed with the Scots. Under its terms the Covenanters had been promised £850 a day to maintain their armies on English soil. Newcastle, and the northern counties of Northumberland and County Durham, remained in enemy hands, along with the Tyneside collieries. This meant the Scots controlled the coal Londoners needed to heat their homes, and winter was now upon them.
Charles’s Privy Council had fortified Whitehall Palace and artillery pieces covered the landward approaches. Behind the palace gates, meanwhile, in the Great Court, caballeros or ‘Cavaliers’, as they were coming to be known, awaited the king, dressed in wide-brimmed hats and tall leather boots.fn1 Some of his bodyguard were on horse, others on foot, ready to protect the king from his own subjects.1
The opposition’s latest political weapon was the mass petition. Charles had been brought a document in York which expanded on the ‘heap of complaints’ offered by the twelve-peers petition and bore the signatures of 10,000 London citizens. Not all the signatures represented the genuinely aggrieved. Bully-boy tactics also got names on paper. It would become commonplace to be called to the houses of powerful neighbours late at night, and those who would not sign the latest petition told that they were ‘neither good Christians nor honest men’, and could be ostracised – or worse.2
Charles, too, knew what it was like to have his hand forced.
Although the king had announced in York, ‘I have of myself resolved to call a parliament,’ the truth was he had had little choice. What would become known as the Long Parliament was due to open on Tuesday 3 November 1640. Warwick gave friends the news, crowing that ‘the Game was well begun!’3 The opposition’s next move in their power play was to provoke fears of an internal Catholic threat. This would encourage MPs to help them take power from the king. Spreading fear and slander was not difficult – the opposition could speak to thousands through print and pulpit – but sometimes actions spoke even louder than words.
On the night of 2 November Catholic homes in London were searched for arms. The message this sent was that Catholics were about to rise up and turn hidden weapons on sleeping Protestants. A story spread like wildfire that Marie de’ Medici had ‘secretly given the king advice against the liberty and religion of the realm’: that the king himself could not be trusted.4 Charles did not therefore dare risk the usual grand procession through the streets to Parliament for its opening. Instead, he arrived at Westminster on 3 November by barge, unseen by his people: a small victory for his enemies.
But Charles had friends here, as well as foes. One nobleman had written in advance to a fellow peer instructing him to come to Parliament armed ‘with zeal and with the sword of eloquence’ so they might ‘cut in two the Puritans and chop off the heads of the anti-Monarchists’.5 Another called the petitioner peers ‘traitors and Covenanters’ who ‘deserved to be hanged’.6 Such men awaited Charles’s lead.
The Lords Chamber was filled with MPs and peers, while Lucy Carlisle stood with other courtiers who had come to watch the proceedings. The king sat on the throne dressed in ermine robes with his ten-year-old heir at his right hand. He had a sensitive face. In several portraits, a favourite baroque pearl earring hangs by his cheek like a falling tear. But his melancholic eyes could also reveal determination: ‘if fair means will not [achieve my aims], power must redress it,’ he had once said.7
Addressing the gathered MPs Charles asked that they consider their fellow countrymen living under the heel of the Scottish enemy. A third campaign against the Scots was necessary to free the north. Charles did not go on to allude to those who had betrayed the English army to the Scots, but he planned to act against them. Strafford had been summoned from York to discuss how to use the royal armies in the north and in Ireland also, to crush both the Scots and their English allies.
Strafford reached London on 10 November. The next morning he proposed to Charles that those who had invited the Scots into England now be accused publicly of high treason. Just a short walk from Whitehall, in Parliament, Strafford’s impeachment had, however, been launched and John Pym was already summarising the accusations in the Commons Chamber. Strafford and the king had taken their decision too late.
Pym had a ‘grave and very comely way of expressing himself, with great volubility of words, natural and proper’.8 MPs listened intently as he exposed Strafford as a secret papal agent provocateur. Strafford’s plan was ‘to provoke the king to make a war between us and the Scots that thereby we might consume one another’. With England at war with Scotland, Strafford would then bring over the Irish army and, with the help of English Catholics and foreign powers, he would subdue England entirely and ‘bring in the papist party’.9
To counter this threat a parliamentary committee had already begun to draw up plans to constrain Catholics more tightly. Pym would go so far as to suggest Catholics be forced to wear distinctive clothes, an idea inspired by the badge of shame worn by Jews in medieval Europe.10
The truth was that Strafford was an orthodox Protestant whose wife came from a Puritan family. The accusation that he sought a Catholic takeover was absurd, but in the fevered atmosphere Pym’s alternative truth was believed.
That evening, still innocent of the proceedings against him, Strafford arrived in the Lords. Holland was amongst those present.11 It was said that if Warwick was the visible head of the Puritans, Holland was now the ‘invisible’ head ‘not because he means to do either hurt or good’ but because he thought it ‘gallantry’ to act as the opposition’s future go-between with the king.12 The debates on the impeachment charges were still in progress and Strafford was greeted as he entered by shouts of ‘Withdraw! Withdraw!’ He duly left, shocked, only returning when the debates had concluded. He was then informed he was to be placed in custody while the charges were further investigated.
Henrietta Maria later recalled that Strafford had the most beautiful hands she had ever seen. Did they tremble as he gave up his sword? He was escorted from the Chamber under guard, ‘all gazing’, their hats on in a mark of contempt, ‘to him whom before that morning the greatest in England would have stood’.13
Strafford had recovered his composure by the time Lucy Carlisle visited him in the Tower. She told everyone he was ‘very confident of his overcoming all these accusations’ and ‘I never saw him for one minute discomposed.’14 But those who had conspired with the Scots knew they had to destroy Strafford if their lives were ever to be safe. They could not trust Charles to grant them amnesty for their treason unless they had control over him. That meant not only stripping Charles of power, but also taking the roles of his senior councillors for themselves, and making sure any royal servant capable of fighting back on the king’s behalf was incapacitated by ruin, imprisonment or death.
Charles’s Secretary of State, Sir Francis Windebank, fled to France, rather than risk his own arrest. The Lord Chancellor, John Finch, would also do so. Laud stayed. His radical vision of an empowered Church of England would have changed the face of English society. He understood better than Charles that for the landowning classes, who had benefited from the land released by the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, it looked like a potential reversal of their fortunes, as well as a threat to the Reformation itself. He had long expected their revenge.
On 18 December Laud was impeached in the Commons for high treason. The charges laid against him were of endeavouring to bring in arbitrary government, alienating the king from his English subjects, hindering justice, bringing about the war with Scotland, altering the true religion, persecuting godly preachers and working secretly to reconcile with Rome.
Laud was not yet locked in the Tower. He was instead placed in the custody of the Gentleman Usher to be sent for trial in due course. The diminutive and grey-haired archbishop was not a man to raise or lead armies. He did not pose the same sort of threat to the opposition as did Strafford – the leading advocate of force.
The queen was, however, now also at risk. The opposition’s narrative of popish threat had a part for her too. A verbal assault against that ‘popish brat of France’ was unleashed in Puritan pulpits and violence then followed. A Puritan mob came to ‘my own house’, she wrote to a friend, attacking people emerging from Mass in her chapel, ‘furiously with stones and weapons’.15 There was no respite for Henrietta Maria even when the death of the three-year-old Princess Anne was announced on 16 December 1640. The heartbroken king and queen had known the deaths of infants, but never of a child whose growth they had measured, and with whom they had played. It had been but ‘a brief sickness’ and the Venetian ambassador described their ‘intense grief’.16
Just at the time they had lost one child, however, they had to plan to send another away: nine-year-old Mary, the little girl who had refused to stand still for Van Dyck’s portraits. Charles needed money and allies. Marie de’ Medici had suggested a marriage for Mary that would gain both, while also pleasing his kingdoms: a Protestant marriage to the fourteen-year-old William of Orange, heir to the ruling house of Holland. He was Calvinist – so there could be no accusations of popery – and he was rich. Indeed, Marie argued, he could help provide Charles with an army of 20,000 men.17
Already power in England was slipping from Charles’s grasp. The majority of Parliament’s electorate had been troubled by his authoritarianism. They wanted Parliament to reassert its place in the ‘ancient constitution’ and MPs to ensure that the ‘liberties of the subject’ were secured. Similarly many wished to see the Calvinist character of the Elizabethan church renewed, and its growing political power stripped back. These aims were conservative, but to achieve them, the majority of MPs were prepared to back those who were leading the way in imposing new ways of constraining the king.
A new law was passed that Parliament must be called every three years. There could be no further eleven years of personal rule. Charles was also denied his right to raise customs revenues under the royal prerogative. There would be no further taxation without representation, and Charles was left fiscally dependent on Parliament. No longer would Puritan gentlemen have their ears cropped, or Puritan ministers be punished for opposing the anti-Calvinist changes in the Church of England. Parliamentary committees were appointed to abolish any court that did not adhere to common law. These included the Star Chamber (used in trials for sedition) and the ecclesiastic Court of High Commission (used against dissident clergy), as well as the regional judiciaries of the Council of the North and the Council of the Marches of Wales.
Yet there remained a dark undercurrent to this return to a functioning ‘mixed monarchy’ and Puritan liberation. Despite tougher penal laws being introduced against Catholics and Charles ordering the expulsion from England of Catholic priests, attacks on innocent Catholics in general, and on Henrietta Maria in particular, continued. In one of the lost royal letters preserved in the archives of Belvoir Castle’s secret rooms, Henrietta Maria feared she faced her ‘utter ruin’. Written to the French Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the Comte de Chavigny, this letter prepared the ground for her possible flight to Paris.18
Charles’s leading opponents and their allies were now so powerful they were being called the ‘Junto’. And this too was troubling for many. The Junto had the appearance of an emerging oligarchy with its own radical agenda. Warwick’s London house was serving as the kingdom’s new exchequer, and channelling money to the Scottish occupiers. His Scottish friends now intended to use their victory to impose their religious views throughout Britain and Ireland. Like their allies in England, the Covenanters needed to secure themselves against any future trial for treason. If episcopacy was not acknowledged to be intrinsically wrong then they too would never be secure from Charles’s future revenge. They therefore had demanded that episcopacy be abolished across the three kingdoms. But in doing so they had asked something of Charles that he would never give them.
In his coronation oath, Charles had sworn to defend the rights granted to the clergy by Edward the Confessor, ‘according to the laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel established in this kingdom’.19 He was not a man to break such an oath, nor to deny his sacral kingship, as God’s lieutenant on earth. When he learned the latest price of peace with the Scots, his anger was such it was said ‘the king he runs stark mad’. But the demands of the Scots were also the shock that brought the moribund Royalist party in England back to life.
Like the king, the majority of MPs saw episcopacy and Henry VIII’s royal supremacy in religion as an integral part of England’s constitutional arrangements. Upending them could undermine the rule of law and the entire social order.20 The legislation Parliament had put through limited the king’s freedom to act without the direct co-operation of the landed classes. This was what they had wanted to achieve. What they did not want was to introduce to England a Scottish-style Presbyterian system of church government. There was also widespread dislike for another Scottish demand: the Scots wanted a new confederal constitutional arrangement between the two kingdoms that would support a military agenda aimed against the native Catholic population of Ireland. Few English MPs wished to see any kind of political union with Scotland.
Within the Junto itself there was also a division between hard-line and more moderate elements.21 But they were all at least partially dependent on the support of London radicals who wanted revolutionary change.22 Most striking was a radical petition to Parliament, bearing 20,000 signatures, that demanded episcopacy be abolished ‘root and branch’. As with other such petitions it was backed by the threat of mass violence. Moderate MPs fought against having the petition even considered, ‘because tumultuously brought’.23
When Charles’s sister, Elizabeth, in The Hague, received a letter from a friend with the ‘news of Parliament’, it was a tale of cold civil war: ‘We are full of distempers, all is like a broken glass,’ her correspondent wrote, ‘our world of happiness is near an end.’24