Civil War: The History of England Volume III (19 page)

But he made a wider plea to the king. ‘Sir, I beseech you cast your eyes about! View the state we are in! Consider the loss we have received! Weigh the wrecked and ruined honour of our nation!’ Eliot might be described as one of the first great parliamentarians in English history, ready to curb the abuses of the royal prerogative. He went on to say that ‘our honour is ruined, our ships are sunk, our men perished; not by the sword, not by the enemy, not by chance, but, as the strongest predictions had discerned and made it apparent beforehand, by those we trust’. The aspects of international affairs were not promising. The Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Emperor were advancing through Bohemia and Germany; the Protestants of France were being threatened, and even destroyed, by the French king.

A committee was established in order to enquire into the problems of the state finances, but it came to no settled conclusions. On 10 March, therefore, Charles let it be known that he wished for an immediate supply for the necessities of the state without any further questions of his past or future conduct being raised. The statement raised the temperature of the debates. The member for Boroughbridge,
Sir Ferdinando Fairfax, wrote to his father that ‘if we give nothing, we not only incense the king, who is in his own nature extremely stiff, but endanger a ruin of the commonweal, as things now stand; and if we do give, it may perhaps not be employed in the right way, and the more we part with, the more we shall want another time to bestow’.

It was now generally believed that the cause of all grievances was the duke of Buckingham. He had appointed incompetent officers and was responsible for the calamity at Cadiz. He had taken Crown lands for his friends and family. He had sold many of the offices of state and acquired others for his own aggrandizement. His mother and his father-in-law were both recusants, and might be considered enemies of the state. He was the man to be named.

The king replied to the parliamentarians at Whitehall five days later in a speech in which he declared that ‘I would not have the House to question my servants, much less one that is so near me’. He added that ‘I would you would hasten for my supply, or else it will be worse for yourselves, for if any ill happen, I think I shall be the last that shall feel it’. Sir John Eliot, addressing his colleagues two days later, counselled steadfastness. ‘We have had a representation of great fear,’ he said, ‘but I hope that shall not darken our understandings.’ The king once more ordered them to desist. ‘Remember’, Charles told them, ‘that parliaments are altogether in my power for their calling, sitting, and dissolution; therefore, as I find their fruits good or evil, they are to continue, or not to be.’

The Commons, in no mood now for retreat, still pursued the duke; they were hounds slipped off the leash, all the more confident because they knew that the Lords were supporting them; the nobility, too, had had enough of the overweening favourite. The old peerage were incensed by his control of patronage and by his domination of the king. The earl of Bristol, who as ambassador at the court of Spain had witnessed the conduct of Buckingham in Madrid, brought his own testimony against the favourite. He charged him with the attempt to change the prince’s religion; he accused him of kneeling to the sacrament ‘to give the Spaniards a hope of the prince’s conversion’. He was in effect denouncing Buckingham for treason.

The king was irate at what he considered to be the vainglory of the houses. Yet they were not to be diverted. On 10 May a deputation was drawn up to prepare the articles of impeachment
against Buckingham; one of its members, Sir Dudley Digges, stated in perhaps unprecedented terms that ‘the laws of England have taught us that kings cannot command ill or unlawful things. And whatsoever ill events succeed, the executioners of such designs must answer for them.’ Digges also compared Buckingham to a comet, exhaled ‘out of base and putrid matter’. When the members of the deputation presented themselves to Buckingham, however, it was reported that he laughed in their faces. The duke knew the loyalty, or rigidity, of the king. Charles would never abandon him.

The day of the impeachment debate was an occasion for passion and theatrical confrontation. When one member, John Glanville, delivered an exordium in favour of parliament Buckingham ‘jeered and fleered him. ‘My lord,’ Glanville replied, ‘do you jeer me? Are these things to be jeered at? My lord, I can show you a man of greater blood than your lordship, as high in place and power, and as deep in the favour of the king as you, who hath been hanged for as small a crime as the least of these articles contain.’

Sir John Eliot rose to launch a general invective against the favourite. ‘What vast treasures he has gotten! What infinite sums of money, and what a mass of lands!’ The banquets, the buildings, the costumes, the gold and the silver were the visible tokens of his greed; his wealth was keeping the sovereign, and the nation, poor. Eliot then hinted at the prevailing rumour that Buckingham and his mother had poisoned James I. He compared the duke to a legendary beast, known to the ancients as Stellionatus, that was ‘so blurred, so spotted’ that it was filled with foulness. By this extraordinary speech, the king was of course much offended.

On the following day, 11 May, the king visited the Lords where he tried to exonerate Buckingham from all the charges attached to him by the Commons. ‘I can bear witness,’ he said, ‘to clear him in every one of them.’ On the same day the lower house broke up in turmoil when it was discovered that Sir John Eliot and Sir Dudley Digges had been taken to the Tower. When the Speaker rose on 12 May to commence business he was told to ‘sit down’. There was to be ‘no business until we are righted in our liberties’. The French ambassador warned the king that if his power did not prevail, he would be as impotent as the doge of Venice, who could do nothing without the approval of his senate.

Parliament stood firm and finally prevailed. Within a week both Digges and Eliot were set at liberty. It was not a good precedent for the king, who appeared to be resolute but in truth prevaricated. He then compounded the offence by appointing Buckingham to be chancellor of the university at Cambridge; such was the displeasure of the Commons that they drew up a general remonstrance for Buckingham’s dismissal from public life.

The war of words now intensified. Charles responded with the demand that parliament should proceed immediately to pass a Subsidy Bill, furnishing him with more funds, or he would be obliged ‘to use other resolutions’. The Commons debated the matter and decided that the remonstrance should come before any bill for subsidies. They had not in fact proved the charges of venality and corruption laid against Buckingham, but they now pressed for his forced resignation on the sole grounds that the Commons did not trust him. If they succeeded in their purpose, their authority would then outweigh that of the sovereign himself.

If parliament on the other hand were forced to yield, and to grant Charles supply without the redress of grievances, it would set an unfortunate precedent in which the king might be the permanent victor; the members did not, in a current phrase, wish to give posterity a cause to curse them. Court and parliament, at cross-purposes one with another, had reached an impasse. A conversation between the king and Buckingham was overheard and widely reported. ‘I have in a manner lost the love of my subjects,’ Charles is supposed to have told him. ‘What wouldst thou have me do?’ On 14 June the king determined to dissolve parliament. The Lords begged for two days more to resolve the situation. The king replied quickly enough. ‘Not a minute.’

The day before the dissolution of what was called ‘this great, warm, ruffling parliament’ a storm of thunder, lightning and hail fell upon the Thames at Westminster and created the phenomenon of a ‘whirlwater’ or ‘water-pillar’. The water was dissolved into a mist and formed a great revolving funnel some 30 yards across and 10 feet in height; the interior was hollow and white with froth. This prodigy of nature crossed the Thames and then began to beat against the walls of the garden of York House, the residence of the duke of Buckingham; as it struck against the bricks it broke into a thick
smoke, as if it came from a chimney, and rose high into the air. It then vanished out of sight with two or three peals of thunder. It was considered to be an omen, and perhaps a warning to the duke himself.

Handbills were printed on clandestine presses and distributed through the streets of London.

Who rules the kingdom?
The king
.

Who rules the king?
The duke
.

Who rules the duke?
The devil
.

Three days after the dissolution the king ordered that all copies of the parliamentary remonstrance against Buckingham should be destroyed. By continuing to favour the duke, Charles had provoked a determined and vocal opposition in parliament; the antagonism did not as yet directly touch the person of the king himself, but there were some who looked ahead to possible changes in public affairs. A great constitutional historian, Leopold von Ranke, once suggested that the coming conflict between king and parliament was the product of ‘historical necessity’; whether we accept the phrase or not, it is at least evident that there were forces at work that could not easily be contained or averted.

In the course of this parliament, amid the turmoil of domestic affairs, the bishops had also been considering the issues of religion. In particular they had debated the controversy between the puritan members of the Church and those who were already known as ‘Arminians’. These latter were the clergy who believed in the primacy of order and ritual in the customary ceremonies; they preached against predestination and in favour of the sacraments, and had already earned the condemnation of the Calvinists at the Synod of Dort seven years earlier. Some of them were dismissed as mere papists under another name, but in fact they were as much estranged from the Catholic communion as they were from the puritan congregation; they wished for a purified national Church, and their most significant supporter was already William Laud, a prominent bishop now in royal favour. The English Arminians in turn became
known as ‘Laudians’, with one of their central precepts concerning ‘the beauty of holiness by which they meant genuflections and bowings as well as painted images. There was even room to be made for an incense pot.

The Arminians had been in an equivocal position during the previous reign because of James’s residual Calvinist sympathies and his unwillingness to countenance doctrinal controversy. His son was made of sterner, or more unbending, material. In the weeks after James’s death, Bishop Laud prepared for the new king a list of senior churchmen, with the letters ‘O’ or ‘P’ appended to their names; ‘O’ meant orthodox and ‘P’ signalled a puritan. So the lines were drawn.

The powerful bias towards ‘adoration’, with all the ritual and formality it implied, was deeply congenial to the young king who had already brought order and ceremony to his court; just as he delighted in masques, so he wished for a religion of splendour and mystery. Charles had in any case a deep aversion to puritanism in all of its forms, which he associated with disobedience and the dreadful notion of ‘popularity’; he thought of cobblers and tailors and sharp-tongued dogmatists. Above all else he wanted a well-ordered and disciplined Church, maintaining undeviating policies as well as uniform customs, with the bishops as its principal representatives. It was to be a bulwark in his defence of national stability. Laud himself used to quote the phrase ‘
stare super antiquas vias
’ – it was important to stand upon ancient roads.

With a sermon delivered in the summer of 1626, Laud aimed a direct hit against the puritans by claiming that the Calvinists were essentially anti-authoritarian and therefore anti-monarchical. In the following year George Abbot was deprived of his powers as archbishop of Canterbury and replaced by a commission of anti-Calvinist bishops. When one Calvinist bishop, Davenant of Salisbury, delivered a sermon in which he defended the doctrine of predestination, he was summoned before the privy council; after the prelate had kissed the king’s hand, Charles informed him that ‘he would not have this high point meddled withal or debated, either the one way or the other, because it was too high for the people’s understanding’. After 1628 no Calvinist preachers were allowed to stand at Paul’s
Cross, the centre for London sermons. A joke soon followed, asking a question about the Arminians’ beliefs.

‘What do the Arminians hold?’

‘All the best livings in England.’

Yet the Calvinists, and the puritans, did not go gently into the dark. The victory of the Laudian cause in the king’s counsels, more than anything else, stirred the enmity between opposing religious camps that defined the last years of his reign. It should be added, however, that these doctrinal discontents wafted over the heads of most parish clergy and their congregations who attended church as a matter of habit and took a simple attitude towards the gospels and the commandments.

Within a few weeks of the dissolution of parliament Charles finally determined to banish his wife’s priests and ladies-in-waiting from his court. While parliament had still been in session the queen’s religious counsellors advised her to go on a pilgrimage to Tyburn, in bare feet, in order to pray for the souls of those Catholics who had been executed there. It was soon murmured she had offered up her prayers for the cause of dead traitors rather than of martyrs.

Resentment, and even anger, had already risen between husband and wife. She was merry enough with her French followers but in the presence of the king she was sullen and morose; she apparently took no delight in his company. They quarrelled over her wish to distribute some of her lands and houses among her entourage. ‘Take your lands to yourself,’ Charles himself reports her as saying. ‘If I have no power to put whom I will into these places, I will have neither lands nor houses of you. Give me what you think fit by way of pension.’