Civil War: The History of England Volume III (30 page)

There was one group or faction in this parliament that helped to shape the session. The Providence Island Company had first been established to assist the emigration of ‘godly’ settlers to an island off the coast of what is now Nicaragua; it was hoped that a little republican commonwealth would then emerge that would finance itself with tobacco and cotton. Among the begetters of this scheme were the most prominent puritans in the country, among them Oliver St John, John Pym, John Hampden, Viscount Saye and Lord Brooke; the most eminent of them, however, was the earl of Warwick. All of these men now took their seats in parliament, both in the Commons and in the Lords, where they could plan their strategy in concert. They had familial as well as religious connections, lending them a unity and strength of purpose that were almost without precedent. The court party, in contrast, was riven with conflicts over personality and policy.

On 21 April the king summoned both houses to Whitehall, and demanded that the financial subsidies be granted to him. Two days later the Commons went into committee and requested a conference with the Lords on the grounds that ‘until the liberties of the House and kingdom were cleared, they knew not whether they had anything to give or no’. At this act of defiance Charles was extremely angry. On 1 May the Commons decided by a large majority to call before them a cleric who had stated that the king had the authority to make laws without parliament; this was considered by the court to be another act of insubordination. On the following day the king demanded an immediate answer to his request for money; he was met with prevarication. On 4 May Charles sent another message in which he agreed to give up the collection of ship-money in return for twelve subsidies amounting to approximately £850,000. The committee of the Commons again broke up without reaching any definite conclusions. One of the royal councillors, Sir Henry Vane, told the king that there was now no hope that they ‘would give one penny’.

It had become apparent, at least to the court party, that the Commons had no real desire to support the king’s war against Scotland; it might even be supposed that they were leaning towards the Scottish covenanters. The king had asked for supplies five times, and five times he had been rebuffed. He had twice appeared in person, to no palpable effect. He had tried to negotiate but his offers had been rejected with silence. He had pressed for speed in their decisions, with the possibility of an imminent invasion from the north, but parliament had been dilatory and evasive.

Rumours now reached the king that, under the influence of Pym, a petition was even then being drawn up asking him to come to terms with the Scots. He summoned the Speaker and forbade him take his place on the following day, thus avoiding the possibility of any debate. He then hurried to the Lords and on 5 May summarily dissolved the parliament. Since it had endured for only three weeks, it became commonly known as the ‘stillborn parliament’; posterity christened it the ‘Short Parliament’. It had achieved nothing, but it had changed everything. It had given voice to the frustration and anger of the country at the behaviour of the king; it had become a national forum where none had existed before.

One newly elected MP, Edward Hyde, who would later become better known as Lord Clarendon, was disconsolate. He supported the king but did not know what the future might hold for him. He wrote later that one of the leaders of the parliamentary revolt, Oliver St John, ‘observing a cloudiness in me, bade me “be of good comfort; all would go well; for things must be worse before they could be better”’. St John added that ‘we must not only sweep the house clean below, but must pull down all the cobwebs which hang in the top and corners’. He was hoping for a crisis or disaster, in other words, that would overturn the familiar order.

Another member may be introduced here. Sir Philip Warwick came into the house later in the same year,

and perceived a gentleman whom I knew not, very ordinarily apparelled; for it was a plain cloth suit that seemed to have been made by an ill country tailor; his linen was plain and not very clean and I remember a speck or two of blood upon his little band which was not much larger than his collar; his hat was without a hatband; his stature was of a good size; his sword stuck close to his side; his countenance swollen and reddish; his voice sharp and untunable and his eloquence full of fervour.

Such was the young Oliver Cromwell, who had sat unnoticed in the parliamentary sessions of 1628 and 1629. Now he had found his voice.

On the afternoon of the dissolution the king’s council met in which the newly ennobled earl of Strafford, according to notes taken at the time, advised the king to ‘go on with a vigorous war as you first designed, loosed and absolved from all rules of government, being reduced to extreme necessities. Everything is to be done that power must admit.’ He added that ‘you have an army in Ireland you may employ here to reduce this kingdom’. It was, perhaps, not clear which ‘kingdom’ needed to be reduced; this was an ambiguity that would cost him dear.

The dissolution aroused much discontent. The calling of the first parliament for eleven years had been hailed as a victory and as a deliverance from bondage; yet it had ended in defeat. Clarendon recalled that ‘there could not a greater damp have seized upon the spirits of the whole nation’. The king blamed ‘the cunning of some few seditiously affected men’; he genuinely believed, for example, that the members of the Providence Island Company were in direct contact with his Scottish enemies in an effort to defeat him.

Many in London and elsewhere, however, were ready to condemn the king and his councillors, principal among them the earl of Strafford and Archbishop Laud. Strafford now became known as ‘black Tom Tyrant’, the hatred for him compounded by the suspicion that he was indeed planning to bring over an Irish army to subdue English dissent. Yet William Laud was still the principal target. He was, in the judgement of many, the secret power behind the throne.

On 7 May, two days after the dissolution, the lord mayor and his aldermen were summoned before the council and ordered to provide the king with a loan of £200,000. If they refused they were to return three days later with a list of the wealthiest Londoners who could furnish the necessary funds. On 10 May they returned, bearing no list. ‘Sir,’ Strafford said to the king, ‘you will never do
good to these citizens of London till you have made examples of some of these aldermen. Unless you hang up some of them, you will do no good upon them.’ The king did not execute them, but he did commit four of them to prison. This added more fuel to the fire that was about to break out in the streets.

Placards had been posted at the Royal Exchange, and elsewhere, calling upon the apprentices to meet at St George’s Fields in Southwark and ‘hunt William the fox, the breaker of the parliament’. A force of 500 attempted, on the night of 11 May, to storm the archbishop’s palace at Lambeth; the protestors were driven off by gunfire from the trained bands. Three days later the prisons that held some of the rioters were broken open, and the men released. The trained bands of Essex, Kent and Hertfordshire were summoned to the capital where they successfully restored a semblance of peace. Yet there were still victims. One captured apprentice was, on the orders of the king, tortured on the rack in the vain hope that he would name his accomplices; his crime had been to beat the drum in the vanguard of the rioters. It was the last example of judicial torture in English history. A sailor was convicted of high treason for attempting to open the gates of Lambeth Palace with a crowbar; he was hanged, drawn and quartered as punishment for his mighty offence.

The anger against the archbishop was augmented by the deliberations of the convocation. This body of the higher clergy always met at the time of parliament but, on this occasion, it was not dissolved after the abrupt conclusion of the recent short session. It continued to meet, granted a subsidy to the king, and announced seventeen new canons that exalted the sovereign’s power. It was ordered that, four times in each year, the clergy should preach to their congregations on the theme of divine right. It was further decreed that all of the clergy must take an oath to maintain both the doctrine and the discipline of the Church and not to allow any alteration in its government by ‘archbishops, bishops, deans and archdeacons etc.’. This became known derisively as ‘the etcetera oath’. How could clerics obey a ruling of which the contents were so uncertain? Without the assent of parliament, in any case, the decree was illegal. When the chancellor of the bishop of London entered one church to exact the oath, with a great mace carried
before him, the verger stopped him with the words: ‘I care nothing for you, nor for your artichoke.’ The new canons were similarly derided. A drawing by Wenceslaus Hollar depicted some clergymen standing about a faulty cannon as Laud lights it. A verse beneath it read:

This cannon’s sealed, well forg’d, not made of lead

Give fire. Oh no, ’twill break and strike us dead.

The Scots were greatly heartened by events in England. A parliament met in Edinburgh at the beginning of June, despite an effort by Charles to prorogue it. Its members now believed that the people of England were no longer inclined to support their king; they passed into law, without royal assent, various Acts that removed the bishops from the Kirk and materially diminished the king’s authority. It was a tacit declaration of war.

Yet what could the king do? He had formed no fresh army, and the troops still quartered at Newcastle after the last conflict were untrained and impoverished. Once more the king demanded ship-money from London. The sheriffs went from house to house to exact the tax but only one man, in the entire City of London, agreed to pay it. Schemes for loans from France, and from Genoa, came to nothing.

The labourers and craftsmen of England were again pressed into service, in the king’s army, for a cause about which they knew or cared little. News of disorder came from most of the southern counties, and one of the first open mutinies broke out in Warwickshire. Some men of Devon, stopping at Wellington in Somerset, murdered a Roman Catholic lieutenant who refused to accompany them to church. When all of these unlikely and unwilling recruits arrived at Selby, in North Yorkshire, their commander described them as ‘the arch-knaves of the country’. Thus began the Second Bishops’ War.

19

A great and dangerous treason

In July 1640, the lord general of the Scottish forces, Alexander Leslie, began to create the nucleus of an army to take the fight once more into England. His intention was first to seize Newcastle; with its mineral wealth in his hands, he knew that he could exert pressure upon London that depended upon ‘sea-coal’ for its fuel. He believed that he would meet no resistance from the northern counties; the dissolution of parliament, and the general belief in a ‘popish plot’ led by Laud, had put an end to any appetite for a struggle against Scotland. Leslie’s contacts in England had in fact assured him that the next parliament, when summoned, would demand peace; otherwise, it would give no financial assistance to the king. There may have been a closer connection. It seems probable that the leaders of the ‘godly’ cause in England had effectively invited the Scots to invade as a way of curbing or destroying the power of an authoritarian king. Leslie’s march would be welcomed by some, therefore, and treated with indifference by the rest.

On the morning of 20 August the king set out from London to meet his forces in the north. On that night a Scottish army of 25,000 men crossed the Tweed. As soon as they entered English territory, their ministers formed the vanguard with Bibles in their hands. A declaration was issued to the effect that they were not marching against the English but against the papists, the Arminians
and the prelates. They would remain in England until their grievances were heard by a new parliament.

They informed the people of Northumberland, too, that they would not take any food or drink without paying for it; they were well disciplined and respectful. Thomas Wentworth, the earl of Strafford, had hoped that the mere sight of an invading army would enrage all good Englishmen, but that proved not to be the case. The English commander in the north, Viscount Conway, noted that ‘the country doth give them all the assistance they can. Many of the country gentlemen do come to them, entertain and feast them.’ In London, after the king’s departure, all was in confusion. A courtier, Sir Nicholas Byron, wrote that ‘we are here, and in every place, in such distraction as if the day of judgment were hourly expected’. The constable of the Tower was ordered to prepare his fortress for a possible siege. Meanwhile the Scots were still marching southward.

Viscount Conway had been ordered to fortify the banks of the Tyne, and to defend Newcastle; he left two-thirds of his troops to protect the city, and took the remainder some 4 miles above Newcastle to a ford in the river at Newburn. The Scots took up a commanding position on the north bank, from where they fired on the enemy; the English soldiers, unaccustomed to gunshot, fled after some of their number were killed. The cavalry also retired in disarray. It was the first major victory of the Scots over the English for 300 years. Charles I had failed in battle, the single most important disgrace that stained the honour of a king. The battle of Newburn might also be considered the first of the civil war, since two rival parties had fought on English soil.