Civil War: The History of England Volume III (37 page)

The Commons drew up a declaration to the officials of all the counties urging them ‘to put themselves in a position of defence’, and a day or two later asked them to nominate their own lieutenant-generals in the place of those loyal only to the king. The king then sent a letter to Westminster in which he proposed that he would preserve the privileges of its members and protect the interests of true religion in exchange for a commitment to preserve his authority and his revenues. The Lords wished to send a simple reply of thanks but the Commons responded with the demand that the fortresses and militia of the country should be placed in the hands of their supporters.

At the end of January Charles summoned all of his faithful lords to Windsor, to which castle he had now retired; fourteen of the peers joined him there, thus tipping the majority of those remaining in Westminster to the side of the puritan Junto. The lords of the puritan coalition could now rely on a majority in their own house to pass all the necessary legislation. Thus on 5 February the Commons sent up to the Lords a bill concerning the exclusion of the bishops from parliament. The pace quickened. By the middle of that month Charles and Henrietta Maria were at Canterbury, on their way to Dover where the queen would embark for Holland. She was travelling ostensibly to escort her daughter to an arranged marriage with the prince of Orange, but she also had more covert aims; she was attempting to buy men and
matériel
since, as she told the Venetian ambassador, ‘to settle affairs it was necessary to unsettle them first’.

The bill for the exclusion of the bishops now reached the king. He was advised that, if he did not give royal assent to the document, the queen’s journey might be prevented by parliamentary supporters; the queen herself then added her voice urging him to assent. As far as she was concerned, the bishops were dispensable. So Charles consented, even though he had promised in his coronation oath to maintain the ecclesiastics in all their privileges. He may have calculated, however, that he could rescind his decision at a later time and in more favourable circumstances.

When Charles travelled back to his palace at Greenwich, he sent for his eldest son. He was determined to keep the prince of Wales with him as a guarantee for the preservation of the royal family; father and son would remain together for the next three years through all the vicissitudes of warfare. The members of parliament now asked him to stay in the vicinity of Westminster; his presence elsewhere might provoke conflict and danger. He replied that ‘for my residence near you, I wish it might be so safe and honourable that I had no cause to absent myself from Whitehall; ask yourself whether I have not’. He did not, in other words, feel safe in proximity to parliament and the citizens of London.

On the following day he set out for royalist York rather than the capital. While en route, at Newmarket a parliamentary delegation came to him in order to present their case; they read out a
declaration in which all the king’s actions, including his recent attempt to arrest the five members of the Commons, were detailed. The king was very uneasy. ‘That’s false,’ he said at one point. ‘That’s a lie!’ He gave his answer to them the next day. ‘What would you have? Have I violated your laws? Have I denied to pass any bill for the ease and security of my subjects?’ He then added, ‘I do not ask what you have done for me.’

The earl of Pembroke, a member of the puritan Junto, urged the king to return and set out his demands or wishes. ‘I would whip a boy in Westminster School’, Charles replied, ‘that could not tell that by my answer.’ Pembroke then asked him to grant power over the army to parliament. ‘By God,’ the king said, ‘not for an hour!’ He added that ‘you have asked that of me in this, which was never asked of a king’. A king would not surrender his troops to what was effectively the enemy.

On 16 March the members of the Commons issued a proclamation claiming supreme power for parliament within the nation. When Lords and Commons ‘shall declare what the law of the land is, to have this not only questioned and controverted, but contradicted, and a command that it should not be obeyed, is a high breach of the privilege of Parliament’. At the same time the members issued an ordinance requiring the leaders of the local militias to be appointed by them; these men would in turn raise forces on behalf of parliament. An Act was then passed to levy new taxes for that cause, much to the horror of the regional communities.

The members of parliament were becoming unpopular. Clarendon wrote that ‘their carriage was so notorious and terrible that spies were set upon, and inquiries were made upon, all private, light, casual discourses which fell from those that were not gracious to them’. It seemed to many that they had become despots rather than representatives, inquisitors rather than champions. As a supporter of the Crown Clarendon may have been a biased witness, but he mentioned the case of one member of the Commons who was expelled from the house and sent to prison for having said that parliament could not provide a guard for itself without the king’s consent.

There was as yet no necessity for war. The local communities of the realm were at peace; the borough sessions, the leet courts
and the quarter sessions still met. Bread was weighed and the quality of ale was measured. In the wider world it still seemed possible that a political solution could be reached. Neither side appeared to have the power, or resources, to raise and command an army. No one wanted to be found guilty of having started a civil war. Nobles on both sides were eager for some form of compromise.

The king, in the company of his son, made a slow journey to York. Charles heard an oration at Cambridge as the cry of ‘
Vivat rex!
’ came from the scholars; the sheriff, however, did not appear to greet him. The prince of Wales reported to his sister that their father was ‘disconsolate and troubled’. The king’s reception in Yorkshire was not designed to reassure him. He had arrived at York with only thirty-nine gentlemen and seventeen guards, but the gentry did not flock to his side; the recorder of York, in his address of welcome, urged him ‘to hearken unto and condescend unto’ his parliamentary opponents. Margaret Eure, the Yorkshire gentlewoman mentioned before, expressed the wish: ‘Oh that the sweet parliament would come with the olive branch in its mouth. We are so many frighted people; for my part if I hear but a door creak I take it to be a drum. Things stand in so ill a condition here as we can make no money of our coal-pits.’ This may be said to summarize the mood of the nation, a compound of fear and dismay. No one could quite believe what was happening. Surely a solution could be found? The participants seemed to be sleep-walking towards disaster.

The king himself still professed a measure of optimism, saying that he could easily assemble an army of 16,000 men. He declared that he would raise a force in Cheshire and descend upon the rebels in Ireland. He wrote to parliament explaining that he had ‘firmly resolved to go with all convenient speed into Ireland, to chastise those wicked and detestable rebels’; he added that, for this purpose, he intended to raise a force of 2,000 foot and 200 horse which should be armed ‘from my magazine at Hull’. He may of course have had a different enemy in mind.

Here lay the problem. Hull was in the hands of parliament represented by its governor, Sir John Hotham. Hotham knew, as well as anyone, that the king may have required arms for ‘wicked and detestable rebels’ closer to home than Ireland. He also knew that the king would soon ride out and demand obedience. The
members of parliament had already anticipated this action, and had told him not to open the town gates except by their authority. The members stated later that ‘the king’s supreme and royal pleasure is exercised and declared in this high court of law and counsel [themselves], after a more eminent and obligatory manner than it can be by personal act or resolution of his own’. They could not have declared in a clearer or more unambiguous manner that they were the masters now.

In the last week of April Charles approached Hull with a company of 300 horsemen, preceded by a message that he had come to dine with the governor. Sir John Hotham resolved with the municipal leaders to curtail any triumphant entry; when the king arrived he found the gates shut and the drawbridge raised with a guard upon the ramparts. He demanded entrance as their lawful sovereign, but was told by Hotham that ‘I dare not open the gates, being intrusted by the Parliament with the safety of the town’. Charles replied that ‘I believe you have no order from the Parliament to shut the gates against me or to keep me out of the town’. To which Hotham answered that the king’s force was so great that ‘if it were admitted I should not be able to give a good account of the town’. It seems that Hotham then told him that he might enter with a company of twelve men. He refused the condition as an affront to his person and, to the sound of a trumpet, proclaimed Hotham to be a traitor. His dignity, and his self-respect, had been deeply injured.

When he returned to York he sent a message to parliament acquainting the members with the insult given to him by Hotham ‘who had the impudence to aver that Parliament had directed him to deny His Majesty entrance’. The two houses stated in reply that ‘Sir John Hotham had done nothing but in obedience to the commands of both Houses of Parliament’ and that ‘the declaring of him a traitor, being a member of the House of Commons, was a high breach of the privilege of Parliament’. They also ordered the sheriff of Yorkshire to ‘suppress’ any further forces raised by the king. All parties prophesied a world of woe.

24

Neither hot nor cold

In the spring of 1642 the two houses resolved that ‘the king, seduced by wicked counsels, intends to make a war against the Parliament’. So they began to prepare men and arms. In May a levy of 16,000 soldiers was ordered. The trained bands of London were secured for service, and were mustered in Finsbury Fields; the weapons at Hull were transferred to the Tower. A forced loan, to be repaid at an interest of 8 per cent, helped to fill the coffers of the parliamentary treasury with coin or with plate. In the course of this spring parliament nominated the earl of Warwick to be lord high admiral of the English fleet. He worked quickly to gain the loyalty of his men, and ships that supported the cause of the king were promptly boarded and overpowered. Clarendon later observed that ‘this loss of the whole navy was of unspeakable ill consequence to the king’s affairs’. A king of England without sovereignty of the sea could scarcely be considered a king at all.

Men and money were also arriving for the king at York. Members of the nobility and the clergy, together with the gentry and the scholars of both universities, sent him jewellery and plate as well as ready money. Some ventures were less successful. The queen dispatched a vessel from Holland containing ammunition and sixteen pieces of cannon, but it was captured off Yarmouth. Just as parliament had sent out a ‘militia ordinance’ to recruit troops, so the
king now sent out ‘commissions of array’ to raise a volunteer army. These commissions were formal documents, written in Latin and impressed with the great seal, sent to every city and county in the nation; they named certain leading men who would secure their territory for the king and at the same time gather men and money for the royal cause. Yet the soldiers on either side had not yet necessarily been raised to fight; they might be used to deter the other side from violence or to provide support in any subsequent negotiations.

The contradictory commands of the militia ordinance and the commissions of array caused much disquiet. While walking in Westminster on a May morning a notable moderate and former soldier, Sir Thomas Knyvett, was approached by two men of parliament who brought with them an order ‘to take upon me, by virtue of ordinance of Parliament, my company and command again’. He told his wife that ‘I was surprised what to do, whether to take or refuse’; he accepted it, however, since this ‘was no place to dispute’. Then a few hours later ‘I met with a declaration point blank against it by the king’. He consulted with others in the same predicament, and they agreed that they would be obliged to follow their consciences in the matter. Meanwhile, Knyvett wrote, ‘I hold it good wisdom and security to keep my company as close to me as I can in these dangerous times, and stay out of the way of my new masters till these first musterings be over.’ These are the words of a modest and relatively impartial man caught between the two factions. His voice, like that of many others, would soon be muffled by the increasingly rebarbative tones of those urging stronger and stronger action against their opponents. One Londoner who refused to follow the lead of parliament was advised ‘to leave the town lest his brains were beaten out by the boys in the streets’.

Events now had a momentum of their own, each move prompting a counter-move and each rumour producing a further reaction. Bulstrode Whitelocke, a parliamentary supporter, remarked later that ‘it is strange to note how we have insensibly slid into this beginning of a civil war, by one unexpected accident after another, as waves of the sea, which have brought us thus far’. Many volumes have been written on the social or religious ‘cause’ or ‘causes’ of the civil war, but one principal motive may simply have been that of
fear. Pym and his colleagues knew that, if the king were to prevail, they could all suffer a traitor’s death.