Chapter 13
In This Chapter
● Coming south: The Stuarts and James I’s reign
● Introducing Charles I: Bad beginnings that culminated in civil war
● Becoming a republic: Cromwell’s England
● Returning of the king: Charles II and his uneasy alliance with Parliament
The seventeenth century is the century that made Britain different. And because this was also the century when the British began to settle in America in large numbers, it made America different, too. At the start of the century, England was like any other kingdom, with an all-powerful king, but by the end of it the English had toppled two kings and put one of them on trial. Even more importantly, they had overturned the monarchy itself and turned England into a republic under Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell’s republic didn’t last, but it certainly changed things. England was going to be a Parliamentary monarchy quite unlike other European states, and Scotland and Ireland were going to have to live with it (and in it) whether they liked it or not.
The Stewarts Come South
James VI was only a baby when Mary, Queen of Scots had to abdicate and flee to England (see Chapter 11 to find out why) leaving him behind to become King of Scotland. Everyone wanted to be Regent, of course, so initially some fine old to-ing and fro-ing occurred between the Earl of Lennox, the Earl of Mar, and the Earl of Morton. All this quarrelling wasn’t just about who was going to run the country, it was also about religion (no surprise there; if you are surprised, refer to Chapter 12 to find out why you shouldn’t be).
James was brought up by strict Presbyterians who were always worrying that he was going to rebel and become a Catholic like his mother. And these Presbyterians didn’t like James getting friendly with the French Duke of Lennox, Esme Stuart, one bit. In 1582 a group of Protestant lords kidnapped James and held him prisoner until he condemned Esme to death. James, pluckily, refused. He wasn’t a Catholic, and he wasn’t going to become a Catholic, but he wasn’t going to be told what to do either.
James became Head of the Church of Scotland and reintroduced bishops, which he really enjoyed because it annoyed the Presbyterians so much. But above all, he was keeping a close eye on England. Elizabeth had made England a major European power, much richer and stronger than Scotland, and soon England would be his, all his! James couldn’t wait for Elizabeth to die. He wrote to her regularly and was regularly disappointed when she wrote back. Finally, in January 1603, the news arrived: Elizabeth was dead. King James VI of Scotland was now King James I of England. The Scots didn’t see James for dust.
England had conquered Wales and Ireland in the Middle Ages (see Chapters 8 and 9 to find out how) but the Kings of England had never quite managed to become Kings of Scotland, so when James became King of England, it was the first time the whole of the islands - England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland - had ever had the same ruler. James even called himself King of Great Britain, but the name didn’t catch on, mainly because his kingdoms were still very different. He also dropped ‘Stewart’ for the more English ‘Stuart’.
James assumed the English Parliament would work much the same way as the Scottish Parliament (which was essentially there to pass any laws the king happened to want it). Boy, was he wrong!
James believed in a new theory called the Divine Right of Kings, which held that kings could do what they liked and were answerable only to God. He even said that ‘Kings are justly called gods’, which was news to the English. James certainly didn’t look like a god. He had long spindly legs, and his tongue always hung out, which made him stammer even when he was telling dirty jokes (which he did often). He seemed almost paranoid about being assassinated and wore extra padding in case anyone tried to knife him.
Know your Puritans
Elizabeth had cracked down on Catholics and Puritans (see Chapter 12 to find out why), so both sides were looking to James to give them a break. The Puritans even hoped James would go a bit further and introduce a few changes into the Church of England. Some hope. James loathed Scottish Presbyterians, and he thought Puritans were just Presbyterians with posh voices.
Although similar in many ways (they both followed John Calvin’s teachings, for example, and they both hated bishops), English Puritans weren’t quite the same as the Scottish Presbyterians. An important difference between the two groups was that Scottish Presbyterians didn’t believe that a king or queen could be head of the Church; English Puritans, on the other hand, accepted the monarch as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England.
The Mayflower
A fine, stirring tale is this: The small band of God-fearing Puritans who took ship in the Mayflower and sailed from Plymouth to Cape Cod (actually they'd been aiming for Virginia but they took a wrong turn) and founded a settlement they called Plymouth Plantation. However, they only survived their first winter in the New World thanks to the help and hospitality of the native tribes. At this point millions of Americans go dewy-eyed and feel a lump in the throat while the rest of the world wonders what all the fuss is about.
Okay, let's get real here. Firstly, less than a third of the settlers were Puritans. Secondly, although New England had an elected governor, it was one of the most intolerant societies of its day. Puritans certainly believed in their own freedom of worship, but they didn't believe in anyone else's. Many people in England were only too pleased to see them go.
James called a big meeting of Puritans and bishops to Hampton Court in 1604 to try to sort out all these religious problems. The bishops were pretty cross about this meeting. They couldn’t see why they should have to sit down with the Puritans at all. They soon cheered up, however, when the Puritans said they wanted to get rid of bishops, and James told them simply, ‘No bishop, no king’ - and sent them packing. His Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Bancroft, promptly started hunting down Puritans and forcing them out of the Church. No wonder some of them thought they’d be better off on the other side of the Atlantic and hired a ship, the Mayflower, to take them there.
Boom, shake the room: The Gunpowder Plot
If James thought the Puritans were a problem (see the preceding section), he hadn’t yet met the Catholics. James was as good a friend as the Catholics were likely to get. He made peace with Spain and even tried to marry his son Charles to a Spanish princess. He certainly preferred Catholics to Puritans, but he couldn’t risk appearing soft on popery by removing all Elizabeth’s anti-Catholic fines and penalties (the English had executed his Catholic mother, don’t forget: James never did). So he allowed his chief minister, Lord Robert Cecil, to re-impose heavy fines on Catholics and banish Catholic priests. Most Catholics simply went and put new sheets on the camp bed in the priest-hole (see Chapter 12), but a hot-headed fool called Robert Catesby decided to get more pro-active. He planned one of the most famous terrorist attacks in history: The Gunpowder Plot.
Catesby, and a group of conspirators, planned to blow the king and the whole of Parliament sky-high. Had they succeeded, the explosion would have destroyed everybody with any claim to sovereignty throughout the islands, and what would have followed hardly bears thinking of: Almost certainly civil war, quite possibly foreign invasion, and very likely sectarian massacre.
The government got wind of the plot (the plotters were filling the cellars under the House of Lords with large barrels and lots of firewood - it would’ve been hard not to get wind of it) when someone, presumably one of the plotters, sent a note to a Lord Monteagle warning him not to go to Parliament on the 5th of November. Lord Monteagle promptly showed the note to Lord Robert Cecil, who sent guards down to the cellar. They found Guy Fawkes, another conspirator, surrounded by barrels of gunpowder, with a fuse in one hand and a match in the other, trying to convince them he’d just come to check the plumbing. They took him away and tortured him, while the rest of the plotters gave themselves up after a gun battle with government troops. The nation breathed an almighty sigh of relief.
The English have got quite fond of the Gunpowder Plot and don’t take it too seriously nowadays. The Plot’s a good excuse for a big fireworks display each 5th of November and a line of jokes about Guy Fawkes being the only honest man to go into Parliament. Of course, there was nothing funny about it at the time.
James I fought the law and . . . who won?
Ironically, James was probably a better King of Scotland while he was in London than he had ever been while he was at Holyrood in Edinburgh. He set up a system of nobles, bishops, lawyers, and Scottish MPs to keep Scotland on an even keel while he was away, and by and large his system worked. It was in England that he hit trouble.
The English soon came to despise James, especially when he started relying on favourites - never a good idea. First it was Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and then it was George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. The English didn’t like his peace with Spain or his attempt to get England entangled in Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (if you want to know what the Thirty Years’ War was all about, and I know you do, see European History For Dummies (Wiley)). But above all, they couldn’t take his Divine Right of Kings idea. Lord Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke said James was going against English Common Law. James tried to tell Parliament to stop banging on about human rights, but Parliament said that if James wanted any money out of them, he would have to put up with it. So James decided to do without Parliament and get money by other ways instead.
Witch crazed
James I was obsessed with witches. He wrote a book called Daemonologie about how to spot if your neighbour was a witch and what to do about it if she was (which was, essentially, to hang her). Most people believed in witches, and Elizabeth even had her own personal magus, Dr John Dee, who knew all about the occult. But James's level of interest was something new. While he was still in Scotland he accused the Earl of Bothwell of trying to kill him by using witchcraft to raise up a storm at sea - imagine trying to defend yourself in court against a charge like that! - and Bothwell virtually had to stage a coup to get the charges dropped.
The English soon cottoned on to their new king's interests. Shakespeare wrote witches into Macbeth, and a zealous magistrate in Lancashire looked into a suspiciously large number of cases of deliberate healing by old women at the town of Pendle - and hanged them.
To fund his projects, James borrowed; he forced people to lend him money; he sold trading monopolies; and he even invented a new hereditary title, baronet, which he sold to hundreds of eager buyers - social climbing’s not a new idea. But all his efforts weren’t enough. James had inherited a rich court, and he wanted to make the most of it, commissioning new buildings and paintings in the latest baroque or Jacobean (from Jacobus, Latin for James) style. By the time he died in 1625, he had no credit at the bank and not much in Parliament either.
Charles I
If ever a man asked for every bad thing that came to him, that man has got to be King Charles I, James I’s son. He was arrogant, untrustworthy, and, above all, utterly blind to the reality of what he was up against. (He became king only because his elder brother Henry died unexpectedly.) James I had left a very tricky political and religious situation to his successor. Charles made it a whole lot worse.
Buckingham's palace ?
We’ll start with George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. He was James I’s great favourite, possibly even his lover. But Buckingham very sensibly took care to make friends with James’s heir, too. He took Charles on a madcap jaunt to turn up unannounced in the chamber of the Infanta, the King of Spain’s eldest daughter, and demand her hand. Presumably Villiers and Charles thought this act was a lark, but the Spanish were incensed. When the two got back to England, Charles married a French princess, Henrietta Maria, instead.
Out of sour grapes, Buckingham persuaded James to declare war on Spain. Now was the time for Buckingham to demonstrate his capacity for military genius - or rather his genius for military incapacity:
● Netherlands, 1625: Plan: English troops land on Dutch coast and liberate the Protestant Netherlands from hated Spanish rule. What actually happened: Buckingham forgot to pack any food for them, so the men died from hunger and disease.
● Cadiz, 1625: Plan: Buckingham leads a Drake-style attack on Cadiz to capture the Spanish treasure fleet. What actually happened: Buckingham’s men got so drunk they couldn’t fight; the fleet mutinied; and the Spanish treasure fleet sailed safely home, no doubt baring their buttocks at the English as they went. Parliament discussed impeaching Buckingham. Instead, Buckingham stirred up trouble with France.
● La Rochelle, 1627: Plan: Brave Buckingham liberates the French Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle. What actually happened: The Protestants (Huguenots) wisely refused to let him in, so he landed on the Ile de Re instead. But he forgot to bring reinforcements, so the French simply crossed over and massacred his men.
● Portsmouth, 1628: Plan: Buckingham descends on La Rochelle, kicks Catholic butt, saves the world for the Protestant religion, and throws Cardinal Richelieu into the Seine. What actually happened: Buckingham got stabbed at Portsmouth by an officer called John Felton, who’d walked all the way from London specially to do it. So much for Buckingham.
Dissolving Parliament
Parliament spent the first part of Charles’s reign complaining about Buckingham, and from the preceding section you can see why. They were also unhappy at the way Charles was using forced loans and ancient legal technicalities to pay for the war. In 1628 the House of Commons managed to get Charles to accept the Petition of Right, promising to respect his people’s ancient rights and liberties and not to imprison people without trial, billet troops in people’s homes, or raise taxes without Parliament’s consent. So far so good, but Parliament’s actions didn’t stop there.
The leading figure in Parliament at the time was a hot head called Sir John Eliot. He got Parliament to agree only to let Charles I raise the traditional customs duties known as tunnage and poundage for one year. (Elizabeth and James I had had them for life, and Charles expected the same.) Eliot also bitterly attacked the changes Charles was making to the Church. Charles sent his messenger, Black Rod, down to the House of Commons to dissolve (dismiss) it, but Eliot and his supporters shut the door and held the Speaker of the Commons down in his chair by force while Eliot got the House to pass Three Resolutions saying, in effect, that what Charles was doing was treason. Only after the Three Resolutions were passed did the MPs agree to the dissolution. Charles had had enough. He decided to show that he could rule perfectly well without Parliament, and for the next eleven years he did just that.
Looking at all these events as the House of Commons standing up for the rights of the English people is easy, but in fact, a lot of people thought Eliot and the Commons had gone too far. Some MPs and Lords were so shaken by what happened that they switched sides and became loyal supporters of the king. The most important of these was ‘Black Tom’ Wentworth, who had actually helped draw up the Petition of Right, but now reckoned that Parliament was a greater threat to law and order than the king was. Charles made Wentworth Earl of Strafford, in effect his royal strong-arm man. He sent him to sort out the frontier - Ireland.
Ireland, under Strafford's thumb
The Tudors never really controlled Ireland except for the Pale, a fenced-in area around Dublin where the ‘Old English’ settlers had been living for centuries (see Chapter 8 to find out how many centuries). ‘Beyond the Pale’ still means ‘wild, outside the law’. When Tudor England turned Protestant, the Gaelic Irish stayed fiercely loyal to the Catholic Church, and in the Nine Years’ War (1594-1603), the Gaelic chieftains Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, fought to drive the Protestant English out of Ireland. They failed, and in 1607, they fled to France in what’s known as the Flight of the Earls. (You can find out more about this crucial period in Ireland’s history in Irish History For Dummies (Wiley).)
Elizabeth I and James I brought in Scottish Presbyterians to drive the Catholics off the best land and settle it themselves, but the Protestants stayed mainly in Ulster. Most of Ireland was still controlled by the Gaelic tribal chiefs.
Two groups already lived in Ireland: The native Gaelic tribes, who lived under tribal chiefs and had remained Catholic, and the Anglo-Irish, who were descended from the old Anglo-Norman knights who’d come over in the twelfth century. The Anglo-Irish belonged to the Church of Ireland, the Irish branch of the Church of England. These new Scottish Protestants who had settled in Ulster therefore made a third group.
In 1632 the Earl of Strafford arrived in Ireland. Strafford managed to turn everyone - Gaelic, Old English, and Scots - against him, and he couldn’t care less. He reckoned Ireland had a lot more money than the king was getting, and he created and enforced a tough policy, called Thorough, to find it. He forced the Old English to pay more taxes; he said the Crown would confiscate lands unless landowners, Old English or Irish, paid protection money; and when King Charles went to war with Scotland, he made the Ulster Scots swear loyalty to the king. These actions didn’t win Strafford any friends, but they worked: Ireland gave Charles no trouble while Strafford was there. But when Strafford came home to England, all hell broke loose. See the section ‘Civil War: Battle Hymns and a Republic’ for details.
Getting tough with Puritans - again
Charles had got very busy with the Church of England. Like his father,
Charles had no time for Puritans, and he found just the bishop to get rid of them. William Laud was an up-and-coming clergyman who wanted to remind the Church of England of its medieval (that is, Catholic) heritage by bringing back things like crosses and candlesticks and having altars at the east end of churches. Any Puritans who objected soon found themselves out of a job or even hauled up before the dreaded - well, all right, resented - Court of High Commission. Most books tell you that the English hated what Laud was doing, but in fact, he had quite a lot of support. Only when he tried to do the same thing in Scotland did he hit serious trouble.
Say it with stools!
Charles was head of the Scottish Kirk and in 1635 he gave Laud free rein to do what he liked with it. Laud reintroduced bishops, turned St Giles’s Church in Edinburgh into a cathedral, and insisted that the Scots use the same Prayer Book as the English - candlesticks, altar rails, and all. The Scots, er, didn’t like these changes. When the minister tried to use the English Prayer Book at St Giles’s, one of his parishioners, Jenny Geddes, sprang up and threw her stool at him. The situation got so bad that one bishop kept a pair of pistols with him in the pulpit (presumably in case Jenny turned up with a sofa).
The Bishops' War
In 1638 the Scots drew up a National Covenant telling Charles and Laud to keep their hands off the Scottish Kirk or there’d be trouble. This declaration was mutiny on a grand scale, but Charles didn’t have the money for an army to deal with these Covenanters (he was ruling without Parliament, remember). He had to make do with a couple of men with nothing better to do and a very half-hearted dog. This event was called the Bishops’ War, but there wasn’t even a battle.
Charles’s army got fed up and went home, and the Scots nearly ruptured themselves laughing. At this point, Charles decided he could do with some help and sent for ‘Black Tom’ Strafford. Strafford told him to call Parliament.
Parliament: It's back and shows who's boss
Calling up Parliament after having dissolved it eleven years earlier wasn’t as crazy an idea as it may sound. You can’t fight a war without money, and Charles simply didn’t have enough. He’d been living off forced loans and illegal taxes for the past eleven years (with a special Court of Star Chamber dealing with anyone who complained), but it was a very chancy business. Take Ship Money. This tax was supposed to pay for a fleet to protect the coast.
Very sensible when Algerian pirates could sail up and down the Bristol Channel kidnapping people in Devon villages and carrying them off as slaves.
And it raised a lot of money. But then folk discovered that Charles was using the money to support the Catholic Spanish against the Protestant Dutch, so the English stopped paying it. Landowner John Hampden became a national hero when he went to the pillory for non-payment. So getting Parliament’s consent for any new taxes was only sensible.
But when Parliament met in 1640 it was just as bolshie as it had been before Charles had dissolved it. This time, John Pym led the troublemakers. Charles dissolved the recalled Parliament after only three weeks (which is why this period’s called the Short Parliament) and Strafford had to make do with press-ganging an army to fight the second Bishops’ War. Result? The English soldiers mutinied and the Scots occupied a great swathe of northern England, including Newcastle, and then presented Charles with a bill for expenses at £850 a day. At 1640 prices. Charles was going to have to call Parliament again.
This next session became known as the Long Parliament, and it lasted a lot longer than three weeks.
This new Parliament told Charles to:
● Arrest Laud
● Arrest Strafford
● Abolish Ship Money
● Abolish the courts of High Commission and Star Chamber
Some MPs even wanted Charles to abolish bishops, but the Commons couldn’t agree on that one, so Pym advised them to drop it.
Arresting Strafford, Charles’s most loyal supporter, was the one thing everyone - Parliament, Scots, and Irish - agreed on. Turns out Charles agreed to this demand as well. Pym and Co. tried impeaching Strafford (basically, trying him in Parliament) but they didn’t have enough evidence, so the Commons passed a law instead. The law, called an Act of Attainder, said that Strafford was guilty of treason. And Charles signed it. Poor old Strafford was executed. ‘Put not your trust in Princes,’ he said bitterly. Well, not in this one at any rate. And Archbishop Laud? They put him in the Tower to rot. Charles agreed to that, too. With friends like Charles I. . . .
Civil War: Battle Hymns and a Republic
The trouble leading to civil war started in Ireland. In 1641 the Catholics rose up against all those Protestant plantations in Ulster (see the earlier section ‘Ireland under Strafford’s thumb’) and started massacring everyone they could find. At Portadown, for example, a hundred Protestants were thrown off the bridge and then shot down in the water. Charles needed troops to restore order, and he needed them fast, but Parliament wasn’t sure it could trust him. What if he then used these troops against Parliament?
Pym and Hampden drew up the Grand Remonstrance which said, in effect, that Charles couldn’t govern for toffee and would have to let Parliament take over, but the bill only passed by eleven votes: Several MPs thought Pym was pushing things too far, especially when he started talking about impeaching the queen. Then, just as things looked as though they may swing Charles’s way, Charles went and ruined it. He marched into the House of Commons with a troop of soldiers to arrest Pym, Hampden, and three others. The five men had been tipped off and weren’t there. When the king asked where Pym, Hampden, and the others were, the Speaker replied, ‘If it please your Majesty, I have neither eye to see, nor tongue to speak here, but as the House is pleased to direct me.’ Which was a very polite way of telling Charles to get lost. Charles left London that same day. He was going to re-take London by force; Parliament prepared to resist him. The result was Civil War.
War stories
Initially, the war was a shambles. No professional army existed, so both sides told landowners and towns to raise volunteers. Parliament put two noblemen, the Earl of Essex and the Duke of Manchester, in charge of its army; Charles had his German nephew, Prince Rupert of the Rhine - one of the best cavalry commanders of the day. Rupert ran rings round Essex and Manchester’s men at Edgehill, the first battle of the war.
Nothing existed to stop Charles taking London - so he didn’t. He got cold feet and set up camp at Oxford instead, while his army wasted time besieging Parliamentary strongholds like Bristol and Gloucester. Figure 13-1 shows the major comings and goings through the war. One Parliamentary officer, a certain Oliver Cromwell, was deeply impressed with Prince Rupert’s cavalry and set about training professional cavalry to fight for Parliament. His ‘Ironsides’ made their debut when they crushed Prince Rupert’s men at the Battle of Marston Moor. Parliament completely reorganised its army along the same lines, and it was this New Model Army under Cromwell and Sir Thomas Fairfax that finally defeated Charles at the Battle of Naseby. The unthinkable had happened: The King had lost the war.
Some very uncivil battles
The trouble with English Civil War (or, more accurately, the British Civil Wars) is all those costumes. Grim-faced Roundheads and swashbuckling Cavaliers galloping around: The vision's a day out for the tourists. In fact, the war was appallingly traumatic, with wholesale killing and murder, and communities and families split down the middle. At Colchester Castle, the Parliamentary army took the two royalist commanders, put them against a wall, and shot them. Basing House, now a Berkshire stately home, became a deadly killing ground. Each side believed they were doing God's work. Cromwell's soldiers even went into battle singing hymns. And of course even as they did all this killing, each side blamed the other for causing it. Things don't change much!
Figure 13-1: The Civil War
Can We join in? Enter the Irish and the Scots
The Irish quickly realised (quite rightly) that Parliament and the Puritans were much more of a threat than the king, and so they decided to fight on Charles’s side. They did very well helping to drive the Covenanters (the
Scottish MPs whose National Covenant was telling Charles and Laud to leave the Scottish Kirk alone; see the section ‘Getting tough with Puritans - again’ for details) out of the Scottish Highlands. Charles always hoped that the Irish would save him from the English. Dream on, Charles.
The Scots were a very different matter. They had an alliance with the English Parliament - they didn’t want Charles’s Prayer Book, remember (see the earlier section ‘Say it with stools!’) - but not all the Scots were happy about the alliance. Charles reckoned that if he played his cards carefully he could use this fact to his advantage. So after the Battle of Naseby, when Charles lost to Cromwell’s army, he deliberately surrendered to the Scots, not the English; then he sat back to watch the fun. Only events didn’t quite work out the way Charles was expecting.
The Scots said they’d be happy to put Charles back on his throne if he agreed to close down the Church of England and make England a Presbyterian country like Scotland. Charles didn’t say no, but he sure didn’t say yes either. This was his own church they were talking about. The Scots lost patience with him. ‘Have it your own way,’ they said, and handed him over to the English. ‘Hello Charlie,’ said Parliament. ‘Welcome home.’
The only good Stuart is a dead Stuart
More than enough killing had taken place in the Civil War and no one wanted any more: All anyone wanted was to work out some sort of settlement that would leave Charles on the throne but stop him messing everything up. But finding a solution was never going to be that simple:
● Parliament was split. Only Puritans were left: The majority were Presbyterians who wanted to make England a Presbyterian country like Scotland, and the minority were Independents, who didn’t.
● Parliament and the army were split. The Presbyterians in Parliament tried to disband the army because it was full of Independents, so the soldiers, who were already fed up because Parliament hadn’t paid them for months, marched on London, seized the Tower, and virtually took Parliament prisoner.
● The army was split. Cromwell and Fairfax were in favour of negotiating with the king, but their soldiers were against it. Many of them had joined a radical group called the Levellers who believed that everyone should be equal and that England should be a republic. The army held a series of discussions about this issue at Putney church. These discussions were known as the Putney Debates, and they turned Cromwell and Fairfax firmly against the Levellers.
Negotiations galore and a second Civil War
How did all this wrangling affect the king? Simple: Each side tried to use him against the other. Parliament was trying to cut a deal whereby they’d put Charles back on the throne if he promised to turn the Church of England Presbyterian. Cromwell and Fairfax promised Charles could stay on the throne if he promised to allow complete religious freedom (except for Catholics, of course) and also promised not to have any more of Archbishop Laud’s silly ideas.
But you couldn’t trust Charles. He was constantly writing to the Scots to get them to rescue him, and then he did a bunk and turned up on the Isle of Wight. Which was a silly move really, because the Governor of the Isle of Wight turned out to be a staunch Parliamentarian and just locked him up in Carisbrooke Castle.
But Charles’s imprisonment on the Isle of Wight brought the Scots charging down to the rescue, and that started a second Civil War, which had only one big battle, at Preston. Cromwell cut the Scots to pieces. Cromwell decided the time had come to deal finally with Charles Stuart, ‘that man of blood’. He was to stand trial for treason.
Heads you lose
Parliament put the king on trial. The Presbyterians in Parliament had wanted to keep Charles on the throne, but Cromwell had the lot of them arrested, leaving only a non-Presbyterian group called Independents, who reckoned a good Stuart was a dead Stuart. Cromwell believed in many things but respect for the sovereignty of Parliament wasn’t one of them.
Charles’s trial in Parliament was a spectacle to savour. A people putting their king on trial: It had never happened before. This act showed that the people, not the king, were sovereign. You can see why Charles I refused to recognise that the court was in any way legal and sat in dignified silence throughout the trial. Doing so didn’t save him. The court found Charles guilty of treason, and Cromwell himself signed the death warrant, along with 59 other MPs.
On a cold January morning in 1649, Charles I stepped out of the window of his father’s great Banqueting House in Whitehall onto a scaffold and laid his head on the block. A terrible groan was heard as the axe came down, and people rushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs in his blood - were they after a holy relic, or just a souvenir?
Oliver!
Oliver Cromwell was a Puritan and a gentleman landowner from Huntingdon. He sat in the Long Parliament (see the earlier section ‘Parliament: It’s back and shows who’s boss’) as MP for Cambridge. He wasn’t all that prominent until he proved a superb cavalry commander in the Civil War. Cromwell trained up the New Model Army (see the earlier section ‘War stories’), and from then on he was right at the centre of events.
Levellers levelled and Scots scotched
After Charles I had been dealt with and dispatched to the great beyond, Cromwell and Fairfax turned on the Levellers, a group who wanted to destroy all differences of rank. The army commanders (gentlemen landowners to a man) sent the Leveller leaders to the Tower.
The Scots were outraged that the English had executed their king (Charles I was King of Scotland too, don’t forget) without so much as a by-your-leave. So, to teach the English a lesson, the Scots defiantly crowned Charles I’s son as King Charles II in Edinburgh. That action brought Cromwell charging north with an army. He defeated the Scots at the Battle of Dunbar (only just, which convinced Cromwell that he must have had God on his side) and saw off the rest of Charles II’s men at the Battle of Worcester. Charles II, who was no fool, had to run for his life. Cromwell even put a price on Charles II’s head and issued a description (WANTED: One tall, dark featured man. Goes by the name of King Charles II). According to one story, Charles II once had to hide up an oak tree while Cromwell’s men were searching the bushes underneath. Charles II managed to escape into exile on the continent. In England, Oliver Cromwell took charge.
England becomes a republic
This fact often comes as a surprise to people who think of England as a monarchy, but England under Oliver Cromwell became a republic.
Parliament abolished the monarchy and the House of Lords, and decided that all this hereditary power was ‘unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to liberty’. Henceforth England was a commonwealth - a republic to you and me. But the republic wasn’t very democratic. The MPs of the ‘Rump’ Parliament, which was all that was left of the Parliament that had been elected back in 1640 (we’re in 1653 by now), were trying to keep hold of their seats for life. So, in 1653 Cromwell closed down the Rump Parliament. He marched in and drove them all out with the famous words ‘you have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’
No ball games or Christmas or fun
You could have a fine time in Cromwell's England as long as you didn't want to sing, dance, go to the theatre, or generally get out a bit. Okay, maybe that description's a bit unfair, but it is true that many Puritans disapproved of 'frivolous' music and pastimes, and the government certainly closed the theatres on public health and decency grounds. They also banned Christmas because they reckoned it was a pagan festival, which had nothing to do with the birth of Jesus. And Cromwell allowed the Jews back into England (see Chapter 9 for info on why he needed to). But Cromwell was merciless with some of the new radical religious sects that had sprung up, like the Ranters, who appeared to preach that Sin was Good, and the Quakers, who completely turned their backs on conventional worship. Cromwell had Quaker, James Nayler, whipped and branded, and a hole bored through his tongue.
Almost three hundred years later, in 1940, those words were quoted across the House of Commons at Neville Chamberlain, after the Germans had invaded Norway and Denmark (see Chapter 21 for more on this). Chamberlain took the hint and resigned, and Churchill became prime minister.
Cromwell replaced the Rump Parliament with a blatantly rigged affair known as the Barebones Parliament. This parliament offered Cromwell the crown, but he preferred the army’s offer (the army was doing all the real day-to-day governing in England by now): To be Lord Protector. ‘Cromwell is our king,’ one Englishman explained to a German visitor, and when he was made Lord Protector, the ceremony certainly looked suspiciously like a coronation, which meant that both the (real) royalists and the republicans hated him. However, Cromwell went to war with Holland and Spain and beat them both; he unified Scotland and England into one country with one Parliament, which gave the Scots free access to English markets; and above all, he kept the peace. No mean feat for the seventeenth century.
Ireland: The Curse of Cromwell
The Irish had put their rebellion (the one where the Irish Catholics rose up against the Protestants; see the section ‘Civil War: Battle Hymns and a Republic’) on the back burner, but Cromwell hadn’t forgotten it. In 1649 he came over to Ireland looking for revenge. He marched straight for Drogheda, which had played no part in the rebellion but was commanded by English royalists. Cromwell’s men besieged it, took it, and massacred everyone they could find. They battered the commander to death with his own wooden leg. Then they marched on Wexford and did the same there. Finally Cromwell confiscated any land still in Catholic hands and gave it to his officers. The native Irish were banished to ‘Hell or Connaught’, and Connaught was worse.
Cromwell genuinely believed he was doing God’s work. He saw the Catholic Irish as dangerous savages, serving a religion he believed to be the work of the devil (compare it with nineteenth-century European views of Africans or American views of the Indian tribes). Ireland took centuries to recover from the ‘Curse of Cromwell’, but then, that was the idea.
Restoration Tragi-Comedy
Cromwell died in 1658. His son Richard became Lord Protector (what was all that about rejecting the hereditary principle?) but he was too weak, and he couldn’t control the army. Over in the Netherlands, Charles II (still in exile; see the earlier section ‘Levellers levelled and Scots scotched’) announced that if the English took him back he’d offer a free pardon, freedom of religion, and he’d pay the army. An officer called General Monck decided this was too good an offer to miss. He marched down to London from Scotland with an army, got a new Parliament together, and persuaded it to take Charles II up on his offer. They invited him to come home and he came. They called this event the Restoration.
Charles II comes to England
Wild cheering broke out when Charles II came home. Suddenly everyone had been a secret royalist all along, as Charles did not fail to notice. He very sensibly decided not to inquire too closely as long as they hadn’t actually signed his father’s death warrant. But he never really trusted Parliament, and it’s hard to blame him. Instead he negotiated a secret deal with King Louis XIV of France and, in effect, lived off French money. He even went to war with the Protestant Dutch on Louis’s behalf, although this loyalty didn’t do him any good because the Dutch won.
Some relief for Catholics and Puritans alike
In 1672 Charles issued a Declaration of Indulgence, allowing complete freedom of worship to everyone, even Catholics (Charles wasn’t a Catholic, but his wife and his brother were). The Declaration was too much for Parliament to swallow, and Charles had to grit his teeth and agree to the Test Act, which said that only members of the Church of England could serve in the armed forces or Parliament or go to university. But he bided his time.
Double whammy - plague and fire
The occasional outbreak of plague was an occupational hazard in the seventeenth century, but the outbreak that hit London in 1665 was special: Nothing like it had been seen since the Black Death. Thousands died, and infected houses had to be sealed up with the people inside them. No one had a cure because no one really knew what caused it. The next year, the city burnt to the ground in a terrible fire that started with an overheated baker's oven.
Charles II himself had to take command, ordering houses to be blown up to deny the fire the chance to spread. By the end the city was a smoking ruin, including the great Cathedral of St Paul. The fire gave the chance for a complete rebuilding programme, of course, which is where Sir Christopher Wren came in with his famous designs, but at the time, it seemed like yet another blow from an angry God on a country that had suffered enough.
Titus Oates was a clergyman and professional liar who in 1678 claimed that a huge Popish (Catholic) Plot existed to kill the king. There wasn’t, but the claim provoked a huge panic, and Catholics found themselves under arrest. The Archbishop of Armagh, Oliver Plunkett, was among twenty-four Catholics who were actually put to death; many others died in prison. Parliament even tried to get Charles’s Catholic brother James excluded from the succession to the throne. When the truth came out - no such Popish Plot existed - Charles pounced. He dissolved Parliament and ruled without it, living off money from his good friend Louis XIV. When some old Cromwellians really did hatch the Rye House Plot to kill Charles, he had them arrested and executed. He was still firmly in control when he died in 1685.
So, Who Won - the Crown or Parliament?
These wars that were fought during this period were as much about running Scotland and Ireland as they were about the Crown and Parliament, which is why some historians speak of the British Civil Wars. The army won the Civil War, but Charles II came out on top in the end, though he had to play his cards very carefully to stay there.