13
EDINBURGH WAS A beautiful, if small, city, ‘high-seated, in a fruitful soil and wholesome air’.1 With building restricted by defensive walls built to keep English invaders out, and the population growing, many of its houses were very tall – some eleven to fourteen storeys high. This gave a sense of an enclosed space along the high street where on 17 August 1641 Charles was processed in scarlet and ermine to the Parliament House. Newly built, it was a fine building with a hammer-beam roof, by the Kirk of St Giles. Charles’s crown was carried before him in a display of majesty. Yet he was a defeated king at the mercy of his Scottish subjects. The treaty he signed eight days later gave the Covenanters almost everything they wanted in exchange for the withdrawal of Scottish forces from England.2 Charles planned, nevertheless, to win back what he had lost. He would deal with the Scots once he had regained the upper hand in England. There the Junto’s position was, at last, weakening.
People were becoming increasingly alive to the dangers the Junto now posed both to national stability and to the traditions of the Church of England. Warwick, Saye and Sele, Brooke, Essex, Pym and the rest claimed to be the protectors of the law against the king’s arbitrary rule. Yet they had encouraged violent demonstrations not only in London, but also in the provinces, where Puritan mobs were vandalising local churches. The Church of England also faced a new threat from the radical and formerly clandestine congregations, run by extreme Puritans known as the ‘sectaries’. To many who had sought a conservative reaction to Charles’s political and religious innovations, the Junto were proving even worse: a ‘pack of half-witted lords’ using the sects to ‘stir up sedition’ and get rid of ‘all reverend ministers’.3
In September the Junto attempted to regain control of the iconoclastic attacks on churches by issuing orders through Parliament for an orderly destruction of images and altar rails. This, however, provoked fury in those parishes that did not share their distaste for religious art. At Kidderminster in the west Midlands, ‘the poor journeymen and servants’ ran ‘together with weapons to defend the crucifix and the church images’: a reminder that Charles’s reforms also had their supporters in the Church of England’s congregations.
The Junto’s most potent means of uniting people behind them remained their insistence that there was a popish conspiracy from which only the Junto would protect them. To demonstrate their point they had driven Marie de’ Medici out of England. She had arrived in Dunkirk in June, diminished and seriously ill. The flamboyant former regent would not survive much more than a year, dying in Cologne in a house that had once belonged to Rubens and with her servants burning her furniture to keep her warm. Ordinary Catholics were now in the firing line, facing a persecution even many Protestants later judged to be of ‘preposterous rigour and unreasonable severity’.4 Orders had been issued for all priests to leave England. But at the centre of Catholic religious practice is the Mass, which cannot be performed without a priest: so several had stayed to serve their communities.
The first execution was of an elderly scholar and priest called William Ward. Ward had failed to meet the deadline and was condemned under an Elizabethan law that made it treason simply to be a priest in England. He was hanged at Tyburn and, when almost dead, was cut down from the rope, dragged by his heels to the fire, his belly ripped open, his heart cut out and thrown into the flames. His head was then cut off, his body dismembered, and the parts placed on the gates of the city. He was eighty-one years old.
The death warrants for a further seven priests had been drawn up and were awaiting Charles’s signature, for when he returned to London.
Meanwhile, Charles’s family also remained under attack, with Henrietta Maria facing ‘disgraceful pasquinades’ posted up in London’s streets.5 Until the conclusion of Strafford’s trial she had been a vital intermediary between the king and the Junto, a role facilitated by her long-standing friendship with Holland, who was her high steward. But saving Strafford had been key to hopes of compromise and those hopes were now as dead as he was. The gloves were off in the Junto-led attacks on the queen. It was the traditional resort of the enemies of queens to question their chastity, and Henrietta Maria was accused of adultery with her favourite, Henry Jermyn. She felt, she confessed, ‘almost crazy with the sudden change in my fortunes’.6 She lost weight, and suffered headaches and cold sores, while her doctor dosed her with opium to help her sleep. And in that drug-induced slumber what dreams did come? Of the mobs at the palace gate that May, of the old priests screaming as their guts were torn out, or of a time long ago, when she was carried as a baby at the funeral of her murdered father?
The ailing queen had asked Parliament for permission to escort the Princess Royal to Holland, so she might visit spas for her health. Secretly she also hoped to raise money in Europe for Charles. She had, however, been denied a passport and was instead assured that everything possible would be done to ease her stress. ‘I give many thanks to both Houses of Parliament for their care of my health,’ she replied sarcastically. ‘I hope I shall see the effect of it.’7 Since she could not now help Charles from Europe, she agreed with him to do what she could from home. In the 1630s Henrietta Maria could afford to think ‘little of the future, trusting entirely in the king’.8 Now with his Privy Council packed with members of the Junto, Charles needed someone close to him he could trust and could play a political role.
Charles had told his acting Secretary of State in England, Edward Nicholas, to consult Henrietta Maria while he was in Scotland, explaining that she had been thoroughly briefed and ‘knows my mind fully’.9 He was writing to her from Edinburgh at least three times a week when, on 23 October, just two months after he had signed the peace treaty with the Scots, shattering news arrived of a rising in his third kingdom: Ireland.
From across the sea, Irish Catholics had looked on, appalled, at what was happening to their English co-religionists. It seemed only a matter of time before they faced something still worse – genocide. These fears were justified. The confederal arrangement the Scots sought with the English was designed to support a military agenda against Irish Catholics, and there had already been leading English advocates of genocide as a legitimate tool of colonial conquest there. fn1
The Irish declared theirs a Royalist rebellion: ‘to vindicate the honour of our sovereign, assure the liberty of our consciences, and preserve the freedom of this kingdom under his sacred Majesty’.10 But their ‘liberty of conscience’ and ‘freedom’ represented, on the contrary, a challenge to royal authority. The aim of the rebels was to force Charles to grant them the same degree of religious autonomy, and the same political rights, that he had given the Scots. But Charles would never permit Catholics the free practice of their religion on equal terms with the Church of England. On this one matter Charles and the Junto were agreed: England needed to raise an army to bring Ireland under control.
In Ulster, Protestant settlers were now being stabbed, hanged and burned in their homes by native neighbours they had known for years. Often the Catholic Irish humiliated their victims by stripping off their clothes, and then leaving them exposed to the elements in the unusually bitter weather of that winter. An English sailor described how his own little daughter, naked and freezing, had tried to comfort her shivering parents, insisting ‘she was not cold nor would cry’. She died of hypothermia that night. The parents only saved their four other children by finding shelter in ‘a poor shack’ and lying naked on top of them ‘to keep them in heat and save them alive’.11
The colonial administration’s reaction to the rebellion was equally savage. In Munster 200 Catholics prisoners were hanged without trial ‘for terror’, while in Leinster, Catholics were simply murdered in their beds. Soldiers were actively encouraged to target women, ‘being manifestly very deep in the guilt of this rebellion’.12 ‘Our men burned the house, killed a woman or two, marched on,’ noted the diary of one English officer with indifferent brutality.13
Charles called the Irish rebellion ‘that sea of blood’. For the Junto, however, it represented a powerful propaganda tool: it made the dangers of Catholic conspiracy real. Although the truth was terrible enough, the Junto and their allies exaggerated the stories of atrocities against settlers to help push through Parliament ever more radical means of reducing Charles’s powers. There had been a brief flash of royal teeth on 12 October when a plot was uncovered to arrest (and possibly kill) leading Covenanters in Edinburgh after luring them to Holyrood Palace. Charles denied any foreknowledge of this ‘incident’, as it became known, but he was not believed. It had involved his childhood friend William Murray and was all too reminiscent of the army plots in England earlier that summer. This ‘incident’ and its potentially murderous consequences were a terrifying reminder to the Junto of their likely fate if they failed to coerce the king successfully.
The Junto’s principal concern now was that they control the army that would have to be raised to crush the Irish rebellion. Traditionally armies were raised in the name of the king. That had to be prevented if they were to ensure that Charles could not then turn the army against them.
As the Junto plotted their next moves, they met at Henry Holland’s house in Kensington. Built by Inigo Jones, it was hung with no less than five fabulously expensive Mortlake tapestries, as well as other works of art: an exquisite place for what was often almost a family gathering. Along with Holland’s privateering brother Warwick and their dour soldiering cousin Essex was their mutual cousin, the lovely Lucy Carlisle. It was said that since Strafford’s demise she had taken a new gallant in Pym and become a Puritan ‘she saint’. She was even seen taking notes during sermons.14 Yet she also remained close to the queen.
Lucy was a spy, although for which side was yet to emerge.
Holland, on the other hand, was certainly not the royal favourite he had once been. He had been moving closer to his brother’s position since the dissolution of the Short Parliament, and the offices and grants on which Holland relied for the bulk of his income, and which were in the gift of the king, were now under threat – at least until the Junto deprived Charles of his powers of appointment, as they intended to do. Others were also calculating that Charles could no longer afford to reward great servants: Lucy’s brother, Northumberland, amongst them.15 It would be unfair, though, to suggest that Holland’s decision to move against the king was wholly about money. He was an anti-papist ‘very much by my breeding’, as he himself noted. The Irish rebellion had given him a final push to align with the most ruthless opponents of the rebels – the Junto.
The planned means of attack on the king in Parliament was that form of protest document known as a Remonstrance. This, however, was to be a Grand Remonstrance, listing over 200 individual acts of ‘misgovernment’. It was designed to show that religion, liberties and law were intertwined and, as such, they had to be defended together against a popish plan to destroy Protestantism. The ‘actors and promoters’ of this supposed Jesuitical threat included the Church of England’s own bishops, ‘along with the corrupt part of the clergy who cherish formality and superstition’.16 Once passed by MPs the Grand Remonstrance would be published, so allowing the Junto to go straight to a thoroughly alarmed people with the programme they intended: the removal from the Lords of all bishops and Catholics, a vigorously Calvinist reform of the Church of England, and the employment only of royal councillors approved by Parliament.
Henrietta Maria was under no illusion what the Irish rebellion would mean for her. Already, in November, she was named as a suspect in encouraging the revolt in Ireland and blamed for the deaths of Protestant settlers. She knew too that this would be used against her husband. With the family facing such dangers the best she could do in the short term was to try to smuggle his senior heirs – the Prince of Wales, and James, Duke of York – out of the country. To this end she had the boys brought the eight miles from their residence at Richmond Palace to where she was at Oatlands Palace in Surrey. The Junto promptly dispatched Holland to tell her to return them to their governors.
Holland framed the Junto’s demands politely, in terms of their anxiety that the princes’ education would suffer if they missed their lessons. She did as she was asked, but her punishment for her attempt was swift.17 As the princes left Oatlands her priestly confessor – the man who acted as her spiritual guide and mentor – was taken away for interrogation concerning his ‘involvement’ in the Irish rising and also accused of attempts to convert the Prince of Wales. When the priest later refused to swear his answers on a Protestant Bible, he was placed in the Tower. His loss was a very personal blow to the queen, while the fate of the ordinary Catholics whose protection she saw as her responsibility was becoming ever more concerning. A proclamation had been issued demanding that all Catholics bring their names to Parliament: the assumption was that they would then be expelled from the country as the Jews had been in 1290, or at the very least lose their property.18
Charles, however, had written to assure the queen that he was on his return journey from Scotland to London. He had left Edinburgh on 4 November and was already riding through the towns of northern England, where the streets were lined with cheering crowds and strewn with flowers: a reminder that the Junto only represented part of the nation. Together Charles and Henrietta Maria now plotted a strategy that was tried and tested in England: the king would make a spectacular entrance to London and woo the affections of his people, as the Tudors had done successfully in countering threats that they had faced from disaffected subjects.19 The royal fightback was about to begin.
On 22 November, with Charles still a few days from London, the debate on the Grand Remonstrance opened in the Commons. It was met with ferocious opposition.20 MPs complained that Charles had already answered so many grievances that it was ‘unseasonable’ to now welcome him home from Edinburgh with a ‘volume of reproaches for what others had done and he himself had reformed’.21 The Remonstrance was passed by a mere eleven votes, and at 2 a.m. when most MPs were in bed. Later that morning another row erupted over whether it should be published. This would be a blatant act of troublemaking. ‘I did not dream that we would demonstrate downwards, tell stories to the people and talk of the king as of a third person,’ one MP observed with disgust.22 An interim decision was made for the Remonstrance to be released in manuscript, rather than printed.
On 24 November, Charles reached Theobalds just outside London. Henrietta Maria had gathered a large greeting party that included an impressive array of loyal peers as well as their elder sons. The next day they all accompanied the king towards London. Four miles from the City Charles was met by the lord mayor and his aldermen, along with 600 other leading citizens, all on horse and dressed magnificently. The mayor presented Charles with the keys of the City and Charles delivered a speech. He blamed the riots earlier in the year on the ‘meaner’ sort, and vowed to protect the Protestant religion. He and the princes then mounted horses and rode into the City.
The church bells pealed and fountains ran with wine while Charles ‘was received everywhere with universal acclamations’. He responded with ‘gestures and speech’, causing the crowds to erupt in ‘a renewal of the shouts of welcome’.23 At the Guildhall, the aldermen had laid on a feast and, afterwards, the king and queen were escorted to Whitehall by torchlight, the crowds roaring their approval. In the old tilt yard by the palace hundreds of mounted cavaliers awaited Charles, illuminated by tapers, and when the king entered the gates they cried out, ‘The Lord preserve King Charles.’24
That same day Essex’s command as Lord General of the southern army lapsed, as did Holland’s command of the army north of the Trent. Charles had promoted them to these roles in the hopes of gaining their goodwill. But he was no longer willing to try and buy the Junto’s favours. The king’s next move would be to take control of the army needed for Ireland.
With the peace treaty signed in Edinburgh the English army had been disbanded. It would have been a relatively simple matter to recruit it again to fight the Irish. But the soldiers viewed the Junto as traitors and so the Junto wanted instead to raise an army of pressed men – that is, draftees – to be led by their own hand-picked officers. To achieve this they first needed to pass an impressment bill. Charles was determined to mobilise Royalists in Parliament to stop them.
The king’s party had a majority in the Lords, thanks to the presence of the bishops, while in the Commons the Junto’s majority was reliant on intimidation: moderates had been kept away by the mobs. Charles had to persuade these moderates back. To do so, on 12 December Charles issued a proclamation summoning ‘all members of both Houses of Parliament’ to return to Westminster by royal command on or before 12 January 1642. With moderates obliged to attend under this order, Pym’s claims to represent the people would be exposed as a sham. Already his pretentions to power had earned him the mocking sobriquet ‘King Pym’. It was time to bring his reign to an end.
But 12 January was a month away.
The City radicals were still churning out pamphlets filled with tales from Ireland of babies on pikes and of Protestant families burned in their homes.25 Those who could not read heard similar stories broadcast from Puritan pulpits. The exaggerated numbers of victims quoted by Puritan ministers at times surpassed the entire Protestant population of Ireland.26 When Pym’s Remonstrance, with its depiction of an England in the grip of a Counter-Reformation takeover bid, was now printed and circulated, the scaremongering was spread far beyond London. In York, the future Parliamentarian general Sir Thomas Fairfax wrote to his father at Westminster, describing how he was living in terror of Catholics hiding in homes all over York, poised to take advantage of the Christmas season, when ‘joviality and security chase away fear’, to attack ordinary folk when they least expected it.27
Meanwhile, back in Westminster, pressure was being maintained on MPs by mobs of ‘factious citizens’ who descended on Parliament ‘with their swords by their sides, hundreds in companies’. The atmosphere in London grew still more violent as the capital filled up in turn with cavaliers. One day there were blows at Whitehall between ‘citizens carrying clubs and swords’, shouting abuse outside the gates, and ‘gentlemen of the Court, who went over the rails striking at them with drawn swords’.28 On 27 December the Archbishop of York, John Williams, a moderate Calvinist and former friend to the Junto, got out of his coach at Westminster only to have to fight off thugs with his fists. It had become unsafe for bishops to attend the Lords. This removed the Royalist majority in the Upper House and, as moderate MPs had not yet answered Charles’s summons to attend Parliament, the Junto retained its majority in the Commons. They were free to push through any bills they wanted.
Archbishop Williams urgently petitioned the king for a suspension of parliamentary business, arguing that without the bishops the Lords were not fully constituted. The Junto-packed Commons promptly had ten of the twelve bishop petitioners arrested for treason and incarcerated in the Tower.29 Charles’s last powers could now be dismantled long before 12 January when moderate MPs would return to Parliament. Charles made a last-ditch effort to reach out to his enemies, offering Pym the coveted post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Pym turned him down.
Something drastic now had to be done if Charles was not to risk becoming a puppet king. He decided to use the familiar process of impeachment to charge six of the Junto with treason, such ‘as stirring up the apprentices to tumultuous petitioning’. Five were members of the Commons: John Pym, Sir Arthur Hesilrige, Denzil Holles, John Hampden and a fanatic called William Strode. The one peer, Viscount Mandeville, was Warwick’s son-in-law. Warwick himself and the other great peers were to be left until Charles was in a stronger position. Meanwhile, Charles hoped the impeachment proceedings would clog up parliamentary business until the vital 12 January date.
On Monday 3 January the Attorney General duly presented the House of Lords with the impeachment articles. The Lords would then usually have moved to examine witnesses, as they had with Strafford. Instead, they appointed a committee to decide if the charges were lawful. When the serjeant-at-arms arrived at the Commons to arrest the five members, he was turned away. The Junto then went on the attack, striking as close to the king as they dared.30
That night news reached Charles that Parliament was to deprive the queen of most of her household clergy. Henrietta Maria believed this was the prelude to her own arrest. A whispering campaign had been building, accusing her of seeking ‘to overthrow the laws and religion of the kingdom’. It was said, furthermore, that a ‘queen was only a subject’: as such she could be tried and executed as other queen consorts had been before her.31
At 10 p.m. Charles ordered that the cannon at the Tower be armed and made ready to overawe the capital. London was eerily quiet the next morning. Then, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Charles suddenly emerged from his quarters at Whitehall. He called out to the multitude of armed Royalist gentry who were standing around: ‘Follow me, my most loyal liege men and soldiers.’ As they walked behind him he strode out of the palace and commandeered a carriage off a man in the street. He asked to be taken to Parliament. With him went his nephew, Charles Louis, and the seventy-year-old Earl of Roxburghe. The Scottish peer had been urging Charles to intervene directly. Charles Louis was a more reluctant companion. Charles had kept his nephew, and potential replacement, at his side so that the prince would be associated with his action.
MPs may have ignored the arrest warrant for the five members delivered by Charles’s serjeant-at-arms, but Charles was certain they could not also ignore an order from his own mouth. And that was what he now intended to deliver.
As Charles’s carriage rumbled towards Westminster, Henrietta Maria assured Lucy Carlisle that the king was poised to reclaim his realm, ‘for Pym and his confederates are arrested before now’.32 Henrietta Maria had feared that unless the five members were imprisoned, she would be forced to flee England for her own safety. She had warned Charles the previous night, ‘pull those rogues out by the ears – or never see my face more!’33 What she did not know was that Lucy had then betrayed her, sending a message to an MP friend – possibly Pym – that a plan was being laid against the five members, although she had not known what it was.34
Now, as the king’s carriage continued down the street followed by 400–500 armed men, a soldier who had served in Buckingham’s disastrous French campaign asked what was happening. When he was told, he squeezed past the cavaliers and ran ahead to warn the Commons.
With the soldier’s warning delivered, the five members were asked to leave the Chamber to avoid ‘combustion in the House’. Strode tried to stay, but a friend dragged him out. At that same moment the king entered New Palace Yard, just outside Westminster Hall. Charles’s cavaliers entered the hall first and lined up on either side of the long room in order for the king to pass between them. The MPs sitting in the Commons Chamber then heard the clatter as the king came up the stairs followed by his men. Charles entered the Commons alone, to stunned silence. The five members were by now hiding in the neighbouring Court of the King’s Bench. The MPs who remained seated could see old Roxburghe behind the king, holding open the door to the stairs and a crush of soldiers beyond. One held a pistol in his hand, already cocked. A twitch of a finger and MPs’ blood would spill on the Commons floor.
Charles walked centre stage to the Speaker’s Chair and addressed his MPs. He requested the five members be given up, looking around hoping to spot where they were. ‘I do not see any of them,’ he said, ‘I think I should know them.’35 The birds had flown and there was nothing left to do but leave. The humiliation of his position was evident. As Charles walked out the silence gave way to shouts of ‘Privilege! Privilege!’, the thunderous voices pursuing him down the stairs.36
A petition was delivered to the king from the City Council on 7 January, informing Charles that the fears prompted by the rebellion in Ireland ‘were exceedingly increased by His Majesty’s late going into the House of Commons, attended by a great multitude of armed men’. They saw the potential ‘ruin of the Protestant religion, and the lives and liberties of all his subjects’. The action Charles had taken had proved disastrous. As one Royalist recalled sadly, ‘All that [the Junto] had ever said of plots and conspiracies against Parliament, which had before been laughed at, [was] now thought true and real.’37 Henrietta Maria was blamed for the attempted arrests, and her life was left at even greater risk than before.
Charles, fearing for the safety of his wife and children, informed the Junto that the royal family would leave London. Holland and Essex tried to persuade Charles to stay, while Lucy Carlisle spoke to Henrietta Maria. Lucy was now open in her support for the Junto, to whom she had for some time been communicating ‘all she knew and more of the dispositions of the king and queen’.38 Lucy had always liked winners, and in common with Holland she was dismayed by Charles’s new poverty. England’s purse strings now seemed to be in the hands of the Junto. She may also have felt Strafford had betrayed her. She had learned he had profited personally to the tune of thousands of pounds after persuading her to sell vast tracts of her Irish lands to the king.
In any event, Henrietta Maria was not inclined to listen to the advice of her treacherous lady-in-waiting. Later when the queen helped pick code names for the king’s party, using their enemies’ names to confuse those who intercepted their post, Henrietta Maria chose for herself the code name ‘Carlisle’: a mark of her contempt for her former favourite, now turned foe. Charles too was angered by the ‘ingratitude of those’ who ‘having eaten of our bread and being enriched with our bounty have scornfully lift themselves up against us’.39 Holland’s desertion was particularly painful for the king: he was a fellow Knight of the Garter, a former Captain of the Guard and Groom of the Stool, as well as a long-standing friend of the queen. Yet Holland’s advice was worth listening to. Abandoning London, the ‘seat and centre’ of Charles’s empire, was to prove a major error.
The royal family left Whitehall on Monday 10 January, travelling by barge to Hampton Court, with few courtiers but a large number of officers from the disbanded English army.40 A Royalist saw the King of England arrive in a ‘most disconsolate, perplexed condition, in more need of comfort and counsel than they had ever known him’.41 It was icy cold at Hampton Court and there were few beds made up. Charles, Henrietta Maria and the children slept together. There was surely some comfort in the warmth of their bodies against each other on that January night. Soon they would be separated forever.