Civil War: The History of England Volume III (36 page)

There was bitter controversy over the size and direction of the military campaign in Ireland. The king said that one man, rather than 400 men, was best able to direct a campaign; the Junto naturally disagreed, claiming that Charles could not raise an army without the express approval of parliament. In the last two months of the year the earl of Warwick set about creating what was essentially a parliamentary force. Charles wanted a wholly volunteer force composed of his supporters, while the Junto insisted upon pressing men into service. At every stage in the process the Commons, with a small majority against the king, was opposed by the Lords.

In the event only one regiment was sent to Ireland, at the end of the year, and a further force of 5,000 men arrived five months later. The English garrisons in Ireland were essentially left to fight their own battles. It might be fair to assume that Pym and his fellows wished to muster their resources for a conflict closer to home.

23

A world of mischief

At the end of 1641 a royalist member of parliament, Sir Henry Slingsby, wrote that ‘I cannot say we have had a merry Christmas, but the maddest one that ever I saw’. He added that ‘I never saw the court so full of gentlemen, every one comes thither with his sword . . . Both factions talk very big and it is a wonder there is no more blood yet spilt, seeing how earnest both sides are.’ The citizens had come to Westminster, their swords by their sides, ready to protect the puritan members. John Venn, one of the London members of parliament, said in a shop off Cheapside that ‘you must go to the parliament with your swords, for that party which is best for the commonwealth is like to be over-voted’. The parliament itself had been warned many times of threats against its activities and even its life.

On 21 December elections were held in London for the common council and the results favoured the puritan cause. On that day the king dismissed the lieutenant of the Tower, Sir William Balfour, and appointed Thomas Lunsford in his place; Lunsford was known to be a zealous and sometimes violent partisan of the king, and was therefore deeply distrusted. If any of the parliamentary or civic leaders were arrested, he would be sure to hold them fast. Simonds D’Ewes wrote that ‘all things hastened apace to confusion and calamity, from which I scarce saw any possibility in human reason for this poor Church and kingdom to be delivered’.

The lightning flash was reserved for the thirteen bishops who sat in the Lords; they provided the majority for the king which was able to override all the bills and declarations of the Commons. When the Lords gathered in Westminster at the end of December a crowd of apprentices and others began to call out, ‘No bishops! No popish lords!’ The archbishop of York lunged at one of the noisiest of the participants, but he himself was hustled and his gown torn. The Lords then asked the Commons to join with them in a declaration against riotous assemblies, to which Pym answered, ‘God forbid the House of Commons should proceed in any way to dishearten people to obtain their just desires in such a way.’ He was on the side of the mob who had threatened the bishops.

An opposing force, made up of military volunteers and soldiers of fortune, had also gathered in the city; they had come to serve the king in Ireland and elsewhere, but they could also be guaranteed to turn upon the crowds who supported parliament. They might prove useful if the king should ever attempt to mount a
coup d’état
. One London news-writer, John Dillingham, reported that these soldiers ‘offered their majesties to untie the knot’ before adding ‘what was meant you may judge’.

This was the period in which the terms of ‘roundhead’ and ‘cavalier’ became common currency, deriving from the short hair of the citizens and the long locks of the royalist soldiers. The latter term, deriving from
caballeros
or Spanish troops, was meant to be one of abuse but it soon became associated with honour and gallantry. It should be remembered that the leaders of the parliamentary cause, in the Commons and in the Lords, also wore their hair long as befitted the members of their social rank.

With the steady formation of two antagonistic powers, there was already talk of a civil war. Argument and dissension sprang up everywhere. Two days after Christmas the crowds once more gathered around Westminster to demand a response from the Lords to another petition against the bishops; a group of soldiers fell upon them but the citizens fought back with ferocity inspired by fear. They attacked the troops with sticks and stones and cudgels; some sailors joined them with truncheons until the soldiers were beaten down or had run away. A number of apprentices had been arrested and detained in the Mermaid Tavern; a group of their fellows
stormed the tavern and released them. On the following morning soldiers charged out of Westminster Abbey and fell upon the citizens with their swords and pistols; that afternoon, they hacked at a group of apprentices. In retaliation the citizens threatened to shut up their shops and refrain from trade.

In the Lords the bishops sat huddled in the torchlight, listening to the rage and menace of the crowds. They were forced to leave the chamber by means of subterfuge, some of them under the protection of the great lords and others directed to secret passages out of the building. The earl of Huntingdon reported that ‘ten thousand prentices were betwixt York House and Charing Cross with halberds, staves and some with swords. They stood so thick that we had much ado to pass with our coaches, and though it were a dark night their innumerable number of links [lights] made it as light as day. They cried “no bishops, no papist lords”, looked in our coaches whether there were any bishops therein, that we went in great danger.’

On the following morning the citizens and apprentices returned to Westminster with the stated intention of murdering any bishops who dared to venture forth. Whenever they spied a bishop’s boat coming across the Thames they called out, ‘A bishop! A bishop!’ and prevented him from landing. It is likely, but not proven, that these angry assemblies were in fact planned and organized by the parliamentary party to bring additional pressure upon the king.

On 29 December a group of twelve bishops laid the complaint that they had been ‘violently menaced, affronted, and assaulted, by multitudes of people’ and that in their enforced absence the proceedings of the Lords were void. This was tantamount to asserting that, without the bishops, any parliament was illegal. The members of the Commons were incensed at what they considered to be the arrogance of the claim, and on the following day the bishops were impeached for high treason and sent to the Tower on a bitter night of snow and frost. The senior dignitaries of the Church, including both archbishops, were now behind locked doors. It was possible that, in their absence, the puritan Junto would at last be able to pass its radical measures through the Lords. The king was by no means alone in his policy of coercion and conspiracy.

On the following day a large number of the king’s old military officers, described by Simonds D’Ewes as ‘desperate and loose
persons’, were seen milling about the court and the environs of Westminster. John Pym ordered that the doors of the chamber be locked. He then declared that he had discovered a plot to destroy the Commons before nightfall. It was yet another rumour thrown upon the fire.

On the first day of the new year, 1642, matters came to a head. Committees from the Commons and the remaining Lords met at the Guildhall to consider their strategy. It was agreed that the trained bands should be summoned on the authority of parliament; at this meeting plans may also have been drawn up to impeach the queen for communing with the Catholic rebels in Ireland. The threat was, perhaps, designed to provoke the king into violent action. The trained bands were indeed raised for the cause of parliament, effectively placing London under its control; to summon armed troops without the king’s permission was an act of treason, but nobody seemed to care any more.

Charles was in any case already drawing up plans to impeach certain members of parliament; he had said previously that their correspondence with the Scots, at time of war, ‘shall not be forgotten’. On 3 January the charges against Lord Mandeville, John Pym, John Hampden, Arthur Haselrig, Denzil Holles and William Strode were read to the Lords. On the following day Pym sent a delegation to the common council of London, newly elected in the puritan interest, to plead for help; on that day the council elected a ‘committee of safety’ for the city.

It was not a moment too soon, since the king was ready to strike later that day. Pym had been alerted to the assault, perhaps by spies at the court, and prepared for a notable act of theatre. The accused men took their seats in the Commons early in the afternoon, knowing full well that the king would be informed of their presence. At three o’clock Charles left Whitehall with an armed guard of 300 men and made his way to Westminster. The news reached the Commons and the indicted members slipped from their seats and hid in the court of the king’s bench before being rowed into the City; even as they made their departure the king’s party could be heard clattering on the stairs into the lobby. The king entered the chamber of the Commons alone but the doors were left open so that the members could see the armed force waiting outside.

‘Gentlemen,’ Charles said, ‘I am sorry to have this occasion of coming unto you.’ He asked for the accused members to be surrendered to him. He then realized that his bluff had been called. He looked about him, and saw that they were gone. ‘I do not see any of them,’ he muttered, ‘I think I should know them.’ He added that ‘I am come to tell you that I must have them, wheresoever I find them. Is Mr Pym here?’ There came no answer. ‘Well, well! ’Tis no matter. I think my eyes are as good as another’s.’ He then asked the Speaker to help him find the offending members.

‘May it please your majesty,’ Speaker Lenthall replied, ‘I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place, but as this House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here; and I humbly beg your majesty’s pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this to what your majesty is pleased to demand of me.’

There followed what contemporaries described as a ‘long pause’ or a ‘dreadful silence’. ‘Well,’ the king eventually said, ‘since I see all the birds are flown, I do expect from you that you will send them unto me as soon as they return hither. If not, I will seek them myself, for their treason is foul, and such a one as you will thank me to discover. But I assure you, on the word of a king, I never did intend any force, but shall proceed against them in a legal and fair way, for I never meant any other.’ He left much discomfited as the cries of ‘Privilege! Privilege’ were raised all around him.

The members of the king’s party in the Commons realized at once that he had committed a major, and perhaps fatal, blunder; his authority was for the moment lost, and in a mood of understandable dismay they meekly submitted to the decision of parliament to adjourn itself to the hall of one of the London guilds as a place of greater safety. On the evening of the failed attempt the city had all the air of an armed camp. Barricades were set up and chains drawn across the principal thoroughfares; the people of the suburbs, as well as the city itself, offered their support to parliament in case Charles’s army should march against them. The women boiled water ready to throw upon any encroaching cavaliers. The members who had absconded were now safely concealed in a house on Coleman Street, a notable centre for radical sectarians. The call went up among some that the king was unworthy to live. Charles had effectively lost the capital.

Yet London was not the only place of disaffection. In the days immediately following, thousands of men from Kent and Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, Essex and Sussex, rode or marched to Westminster with petitions for parliament. They complained in general about the decay of trade provoked by the divisions and distempers in the state. The country was, as a result of the crisis, confronted by sudden economic decline; the loss of confidence restricted trade, and the tradesmen and merchants of London hoarded their money in the hope of better times. The majority of the people yearned for peace. It is important to note, however, that the petitioners from Kent and elsewhere had addressed parliament as the centre of authority in the nation.

On 10 January the king left London for Hampton Court, arriving so quickly and unexpectedly that the beds had not been prepared for him and his family. He told the Dutch ambassador that he had feared for the safety of his wife in the capital; he would not see London again until he returned nine years later as a prisoner. On the following day the members of parliament who had been charged by Charles with high treason came back by water to Westminster where they were greeted by triumphant crowds.

The military arsenal of the nation was placed at Hull, where 20,000 weapons and 7,000 barrels of gunpowder were secured. The king appointed the earl of Newcastle to be the governor of the port and arsenal but he was circumvented by the swift action of a young parliamentarian, John Hotham, who persuaded the mayor of Hull to admit his men. His father, Sir John Hotham, was then appointed as the town’s governor.