Civil War: The History of England Volume III (38 page)

One parliamentarian, Lord Wharton, wrote in June 1642 to the chief justice who was with the king at York. He asked him how it was that the kingdom did not contain one person of prudence and skill ‘to prevent the ruin coming upon us’? His colleagues at Westminster were not disloyal, and he knew that those about the king ‘wish and drive at an accommodation’. So why could not an agreement be reached by both sides? Thomas Knyvett believed, two years later, that ‘the best excuse that can be made for us, must be a fit of lunacy’.

At the beginning of June parliament, guided by Pym’s opportune and careful management, delivered ‘nineteen propositions’ to the king; among them was the wish, or command, that the king dismiss his forces and accept the validity of the militia ordinance. He was to accept the religious reforms outlined by the members of parliament and to exclude popish peers from the Lords. His principal officers should be appointed only with the approval of parliament, and all important matters of state must be debated there. The document became in the words of one parliamentarian, Edmund Ludlow, ‘the principal foundation of the ensuing war’. Ludlow said that the question came to this: ‘whether the king should govern as a god by his will and the nation be governed by force like beasts; or whether the people should be governed by laws made by themselves, and live under a government derived from their own consent’.

The king of course rejected the demands out of hand with the words ‘
nolumus leges Angliae mutari
’ – we do not wish the laws of England to be changed. He said that acceptance of parliamentary demands would ensure that he became ‘but the outside, but the picture, but the sign, of a king’. The propositions were ‘a mockery’ and ‘a scorn. Yet some still held back from confrontation. A parliamentarian, Sir Gilbert Pickering, wrote to a friend that there are now some overtures of accommodation . . . and most men think they smell the air of peace. Yet provide for war.’ Seventeen counties sent forth petitions for such an ‘accommodation’ between the two sides.

At the beginning of July it was reported that the royalists had mustered in Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire; it
was soon known that the king had placed himself at the head of a force of cavalry. On 11 July parliament declared that the king had already begun the war, thus diverting any blame for beginning the conflict. On the following day the earl of Essex was placed in charge of a parliamentary army, and the king promptly declared him to be a traitor. The first blood was shed three days later, when a townsman of Manchester died from wounds inflicted by a group of royalist troopers. The two sides now competed to seize control of the munitions of the local militias.

A ‘committee of safety’ was set up by parliament which, through the summer and autumn, began to organize soldiers, weaponry and supplies; it was a high command in another sense, since it oversaw military strategy and communicated between parliament and the commanders in the fields.

The two sides were now beginning to acquire a definite shape. The early supporters of the king were prompted by loyalty and by the doctrine of obedience. Sir Edmund Verney expressed it best by saying of the king that ‘I have eaten his bread and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him’. Verney lost his life, shortly after writing this, in the first great battle of the conflict. His sense of honour overrode all other considerations. It was a question of what was known as ‘the old service’ or ‘the good old cause’.

A majority of the peers and the greater landowners supported the king, since his privileges guaranteed their own. Twice as many families of the gentry also took the king’s part. The puritan gentry, of course, were parliamentarians. A puritan divine, Richard Baxter, anatomized the situation very well. He claimed that ‘on the parliament’s side were the smaller part, as some thought, of the gentry in most of the counties, and the greatest part of the tradesmen and freeholders, and the middle sort of men, especially in those corporations [towns] and counties which depend on clothing and such manufactures’. An element of popular or lower-class royalism, still to be recognized today, was evident in the zeal of porters and watermen, butchers and labourers, for the king’s cause in the larger towns and cities; the language of the street often condemned ‘parliament dogs’ and ‘parliament whores’. They wore red ribbons in their hats as a sign of their allegiance.

Religious dissenters overwhelmingly took the side of parliament, of course, while the Roman Catholics and those of orthodox faith supported the king or, for fear of reprisals, remained neutral. The universities and cathedral cities were largely for the king, although the clergy were often opposed by the aldermen, while the dockyards and chief ports were for parliament. A great number of towns, however, wished to stay out of the conflict altogether.

In the most general terms the north and west were sympathetic towards the king while the south-east, and London in particular, supported the parliamentary cause. Yet all of the counties were divided. The north of Lincolnshire was largely royalist, for example, while the south remained generally for parliament. It has been recorded of Derbyshire that the belt of iron and coal in the eastern stretch of the county was royalist while the lead areas of the north supported parliament. This maybe an aspect of human society rather than of geology; the lead areas contained many independent small masters, while the areas of coal and iron depended upon larger enterprises controlled by a single master or landlord. In other counties the wooded areas containing isolated and self-sufficient parishes harboured the puritan cause, while the communal villages exploiting ‘mixed’ farming took the royalist side.

More subtle calculations have also been made. It has been estimated that the royalists were slightly younger than the parliamentarians, this statistic boosted by the fact that many young men joined the king in a spirit of bravado as well as patriotism; in parliament itself the royalist members had been on average eleven years younger than their puritan colleagues. It is clear that the judges of the land were divided in their allegiance, some of them worried by the constitutional pretensions of the king, while the staff of the various offices of the state were more likely to be active parliamentarians. The lawyers, too, had a long history of hostility towards the courtiers.

The majority of the population were neither hot nor cold; they may have been indifferent to the opinions of either side, but they were alarmed and intimidated by the change that had come over the kingdom. The partisans on both sides had provoked the conflict, and it was they who would end it. The rest stood by and waited. They did not care about the form of government, according to one
member of parliament, Arthur Haselrig, as long ‘as they may plough and go to market’. Some said that the affair should be decided by a throw of the dice.

Sir William Waller, the parliamentary general in the west, wrote to his royalist counterpart, Sir Ralph Hopton, that ‘my affections to you are so unchangeable that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person; but I must be true to the cause wherein I serve’. He declared that he hated a war without a true enemy but ‘I look upon it as
opus domini
[the work of the Lord] . . . We are both on the stage and we must act those parts that are assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour, and without personal animosities.’ This is one of the noblest sentiments uttered in the period.

There was not a town or county that remained undivided by opinion and argument; factional conflict was everywhere apparent from the largest town to the humblest parish. Some sportsmen named their packs of hunting dogs ‘roundheads’ or ‘cavaliers’, and the children in the streets would engage in mock battles under those names.

Many families were also split in their allegiances, although it was sometimes believed that this was a convenient ploy to save family property if one or the other party finally prevailed. First sons were likely to be royalist, while younger sons remained ‘neutral’ or ‘doubtful’. Yet not all family differences were settled amicably. Sir John Oglander, who took no part in the conflict, wrote in his commonplace book that ‘thou wouldest think it strange if I should tell thee there was a time in England when brothers killed brothers, cousins cousins, and friends their friends’.

On the afternoon of 22 August Charles rode into Nottingham, where the royal standard was taken from the castle and fixed in the ground beside him. It was a silk flag with the royal arms and a motto, ‘Give Caesar his due’; it was suspended from a long pole that was dyed red at the upper part, and was said to resemble a maypole. The king quickly scanned the proclamation of war, and corrected certain words. The declaration was then read in an uncertain voice by the herald, after the trumpets had sounded, but all threw their hats into the air and called out: ‘God save King Charles and hang up the roundheads.’ The standard was blown down that
night in the middle of a storm. Clarendon reported that ‘a general sadness covered the whole town, and the king himself appeared more melancholic than he used to be’. The civil war had begun.

25

The gates of hell

By the late summer of 1642 the king had managed to gather an army, partly comprised of the trained bands of the counties who remained loyal to him and partly of the ready supply of volunteers animated by loyalty or by the desire for pay and plunder. By the time he left Nottingham he was leading seven or eight regiments of infantry, and on his subsequent march he was joined by several regiments of cavalry; altogether he had the command of some 14,000 men.

Others might soon be inclined to join them since, at the beginning of September, parliament declared that those who opposed its intentions were ‘delinquents’ or ‘malignant and disaffected persons’ whose property could be confiscated. Those who had favoured the king without taking any action for him, or those who had remained neutral, now believed themselves to be threatened. The declaration further divided the nation into two parties. Many landowners and grandees who had taken no part in the struggle now decided to raise forces for their king so that their own lives and estates might be defended. Simonds D’Ewes, the parliamentarian diarist, confessed that the declaration ‘made not only particular persons of the nobility and others but some whole counties quite desperate’. The king was greatly hearted by his opponents’ error, and confidently expected many more recruits to his cause. In that hope, he was not mistaken.

On 9 September the earl of Essex rode out to his army at
Northampton. He took with him a coffin and a winding sheet as a token of his fidelity to the end. He commanded an army of 20,000 men and it was widely believed that he would defeat the king with ease. Clarendon wrote of him that ‘his pride supplied his want of ambition, and he was angry to see any other man respected more than himself, because he thought he deserved it more, and did better requite it’. He was a man of great wealth and power. He liked to be known as ‘his excellence’, and was considered to have no equal but the king. He had the habits, and the manners, of a great lord like those of the Wars of the Roses. But it was not yet clear that he was a great commander. His reserve and his aloof manner were perhaps mistaken for wisdom. He was not a natural rebel, in any case, and his position at the head of the parliamentary forces rendered him deeply uneasy. It seems that his ultimate purpose was to detach the king from his ‘evil councillors’ and bring him back to London in the role of a constitutional monarch working alongside parliament. That is not what his parliamentary allies required.

In the course of this autumn some 40,000 men were gathered, and by the summer of 1643 the number had risen to 100,000. The armies were in many respects equally matched. They contained many men who believed that the war would be a short one, and that they would return to their fields in time for the next harvest; it was widely considered that one great battle would decide the issue. Many of them were poor and had been pressed into service by their landlords or employers.

From one Shropshire village, in the army of the king, were a farmer in debt, the son of a man who had been hanged for horse-stealing, a decayed weaver, a vagrant tailor and a family of father and three sons who lived in a cave. The soldiers on both sides were sometimes scorned as ‘the off-scourings of the nation’. Men were released from prison and pressed into service. It was said that some of the best trainees were butchers, because they were used to the sight of blood. For some the war came as a welcome relief from more mundane suffering, and such men eagerly sought the opportunity to seize money or goods. One veteran, Colonel Birch, recalled that ‘when I was in the army some said, “Let us not go this way, lest the war be ended too soon”’. They were also given provisions that were more plentiful than their food at home; the normal ration
was supposed to be 2 pounds of bread or biscuit and 1 pound of meat or cheese each day. They were allowed one bottle of wine or two bottles of beer.

The royalist troops in particular were accused of drunkenness and lechery, and in the early months of the war it was reported that a group of them had murdered an eight-months pregnant woman in Leicestershire. Nehemiah Wallington, a puritan artisan from Eastcheap, wrote that ‘they swagger, roar, swear, and domineer, plundering, pillaging or doing any other kind of wrong’.