Civil War: The History of England Volume III (23 page)

In the absence of Buckingham the king was more uncertain and irresolute than ever. Should he make a treaty with France against Spain, or a treaty with Spain against France? There was no question of waging outright war against either nation. The king did not have the resources to do so, or any realistic prospect of raising money by other means. In any case the zeal for war was rapidly ebbing in the country. There might be some delay in signing the relevant treaties, but a period of peace had become inevitable.

A day after the assassination of Buckingham a prominent courtier, Sir Francis Nethersole, remarked that ‘the stone of offence being removed by the hand of God, it is to be hoped that the king and people will now come to a perfect unity’. Yet the opening of the
parliament in January 1629 did not bode well for national harmony. The abiding issue was still that of religion. A royal declaration had been issued in the parliamentary recess that ‘the Church has the right to decree ceremonies, and authority to decide controversies of religion’. But what Church? William Laud, now bishop of London, had helped to draw up the proclamation and in the same period a number of his supporters had been promoted to vacant sees. These were the Arminians or ‘high churchmen’ who rejected the precepts and practices or Calvinism.

For parliament this was a direct challenge to the old and familiar creed of the Church. Sir John Eliot told his parliamentary colleagues that the prelates, with the king’s authority, might ‘order it which way they please and so, for aught I know, to bring in Popery and Arminianism, to which we are told we must submit’. Another member, Christopher Sherland, said of the Arminians that ‘they creep into the ears of his Majesty, and suggest, that those that oppose them, do oppose his Majesty . . .’

It had become a confrontation, therefore, between the Calvinists of the old Church and the Arminian bishops of the new. The recently appointed prelates declared that theirs was the true creed of the Church of England and condemned their opponents as puritan, synonymous with zealotry and nonconformity. It was claimed, for example, that the Calvinists were ready to take up the cause of individual conscience against the precepts of the established faith and the prerogative of the sovereign. The Arminian bishops were in turn accused by their opponents of preaching passive obedience and the divine right of kings. The Calvinists believed in predestination, grace and the gospel; the Arminians put their faith in free will, the sacraments and deference to ceremonial order. It was not conceived by any contemporary that these were controversies that could stir a civil war, but this was the moment when members of parliament and members of the court party began to take sides.

The Commons, animated by the speeches of Eliot and others, affirmed that they alone had the right to determine the religion of the country. John Pym, who had already earned the king’s wrath, stated that ‘it belongs to the duty of parliament to establish true religion and to punish false’. The members resolved that the faith they espoused was that agreed in the reign of Elizabeth ‘and we do
reject the sense of the Jesuits and Arminians’. The king, perhaps justifiably, considered this to be a breach of his prerogative in spiritual matters; he was, after all, ‘supreme governor’ of the Church of England. The Commons had also laid aside matters of ‘tonnage and poundage’, the customs duties destined for the king’s purse, thus depriving him of his traditional revenue. Charles adjourned parliament on 25 February for a week. Both sides were in fact vying for mastery.

This was the point when Eliot decided to appeal to the country in the face of an obvious threat. If the king took the further step of dissolving parliament, its future would be uncertain. If he could obtain his revenues elsewhere, there was no reason at all why he should ever summon it again. He had had, in any case, enough of parliament; he called it ‘that noise’. The Arminians were eager to avoid parliaments, also, for the simple reason that they believed they would be persecuted by them; they were of course wholly justified in their suspicion. Eliot had already said of them that ‘they go about to break parliaments, lest parliaments should break them’.

So all things were leading to a final quarrel. On 2 March the Speaker, Sir John Finch, announced to the Commons that it was the king’s wish that they should adjourn for a further eight days. Such a request had in the past always been accepted. Now the members stood up shouting, ‘No! No!’ Finch moved to rise from his chair, thus abruptly ending the session, but some of the members barred his way and thrust him back to his seat. ‘God’s wounds,’ Denzil Holles told him, ‘you shall sit till we please to rise.’ Eliot then announced that the members would have the privilege of adjourning themselves after he had read out a declaration of their intentions.

‘What would any of you do,’ Finch asked, ‘if you were in my place? Let not my desire to serve you faithfully lead to my ruin.’ He was in an impossible situation, with incompatible loyalties to parliament and to the king. Some members, realizing the gravity of the approaching confrontation, rose to leave. But the serjeant-at-arms was ordered to close the doors; when he hesitated, another member locked the doors and put away the key.

Eliot once more demanded that the declaration he had prepared should be read. ‘I am not less the king’s servant for being yours,’
the Speaker replied. ‘I will not say that I will not put the reading of the paper to the question, but I must say, I dare not.’ Eliot then spoke out in a ferocious attack upon the evil councillors that surrounded the king; he also assaulted Arminianism as an open door to popery.

Knocks were heard on the outer door. The king had ordered the serjeant-at-arms to bring away the mace, thus depriving the proceedings of any authority. Sir Peter Heyman then turned upon the Speaker. ‘I am sorry’, he told him, ‘that you must be made an instrument to cut up the liberties of the subject by the roots . . . The Speaker of the House of Commons is our mouth, and if our mouth will be sullen and will not speak when we have it, it should be bitten by the teeth and ought to be made an example; and for my part I think it not fit you should escape without some mark of punishment to be set upon you by the House.’ This was one of the first indications of the arbitrary and authoritarian impulses of some parliamentarians.

Talk of punishment was vain, however. It was whispered that the king had sent a guard to force its way into the chamber and end the proceedings. So Denzil Holles swiftly proposed three resolutions. Anyone who tried to introduce popery or Arminianism into the kingdom would be considered a capital enemy. Anyone who should advise the levying of customs duties, without the authority of parliament, would similarly be considered as an enemy. If any merchant should voluntarily agree to pay the duties of ‘tonnage and poundage’, he would be ‘reputed a betrayer of the liberty of England and an enemy to the same’. The resolutions were thereupon adopted. Having delivered his message to the nation, Holles asked that the house now adjourn itself, to which there were immediate calls of ‘Ay! Ay!’ The doors were thrown open and the triumphant parliamentarians streamed out to announce the news. They would not meet again for another eleven years.

Two days later the king announced the dissolution of parliament, and at the same time nine of its members were arrested. Sir John Eliot was the particular object of the king’s wrath; Charles blamed his angry tirades against Buckingham for the favourite’s death. In his speech to the Lords Charles did not censure the majority of the Commons, but reserved his anger for ‘some few vipers amongst
them that did cast this mist of undutifulness over most of their eyes’. It was reported that he was afterwards in very good spirits.

A few days later was published
His majesties declaration of the causes which moved him to dissolve the last parliament
, in which he declared that the men whom he imprisoned had ‘more secret designs which were only to cast our affairs into a desperate condition, to abate the powers of our crown and to bring our government into obloquy that in the end all things may be overwhelmed with anarchy and confusion’. He was not alone in this belief. Many considered that the members had gone too far in their opposition to the king. Even a fervently Protestant MP, Simonds D’Ewes, considered that the events of 2 March represented ‘the most gloomy, sad and most dismal day for England that happened in five hundred years last past’; he also blamed the turmoil on ‘diverse fiery spirits in the House of Commons’.

The immediate aftermath of the dissolution was one of dismay and bewilderment. The majority of the merchants refused to pay the customs duties demanded of them, on the grounds that a future parliament would condemn them as betrayers of the kingdom; so they simply declined to trade. Their recalcitrance lasted for two months until the prospect of financial ruin weakened their resolution.

The nine members of parliament arrested after the scenes in the chamber remained in prison. They could no longer appeal to the Lords or the Commons but they could take their case to the courts; they could appeal to the rule of law in a fundamental attempt to question the powers of the king. They claimed parliamentary privilege, and in particular ‘freedom of speech in debate’ that had been asserted by the Speaker since the late sixteenth century; four of them, including Eliot, refused to answer questions on anything pertaining to parliamentary business. The king wished them to be tried for conspiracy and treason, but the judges were reluctant to do so. The question of privilege was vexatious, and Charles eventually asked them to cease speaking in riddles.

At the beginning of May the imprisoned men sought to obtain their release on the grounds of habeas corpus, according to the precepts of the ‘petition of right’. After much argument and debate the judges decided that the prisoners had indeed the right to bail;
the king then demanded that they reach no verdict until they had consulted their colleagues on the judiciary. This was essentially an appeal for delay, so that the long legal vacation could intervene; the men would therefore languish in gaol for the duration of the summer. At the beginning of October the prisoners were taken from the Tower to Serjeants’ Inn, where they were promised their release as long as they signed a bond of good behaviour; most of them refused to do so, on the grounds that this would implicitly justify their arbitrary imprisonment for the last eight months. They were intent upon inflicting the maximum embarrassment on the king and his officers.

The Venetian ambassador wrote that ‘affairs grow more bitter every day, and by these disputes the king has made his people see that he can do much more than they may have imagined’. The imprisoned members were testing, piece by piece, the lengths to which Charles would go. When the chief judge of the exchequer made it clear that he was inclined to support parliamentary privilege, the king suspended him from office. It was clear that the guilt of the prisoners was simply to be assumed. The king’s action seems to have clarified the opinion of the remaining judges, who declared that the defendants were indeed punishable by law.

The members of parliament had reached the end of the legal process. Three of them, including Eliot, were once more imprisoned at the king’s pleasure; the others were detained for shorter periods before being released. It had been a victory for the king, in theory, but it had gravely impaired his authority and reputation. He had revealed himself to be inclined to arbitrary and perhaps illegal measures in order to sustain his sovereignty; he saw treachery and conspiracy in what others considered to be justifiable dissent; he was wilful, and even implacable. Yet those who supported him put a different interpretation upon his actions. Charles had conducted himself in the manner of a true sovereign; he was determined to rule the country without the intervention of enemies or malcontents. He was guided by God. This may be considered to be the tone or principle of the next period of his reign.

15

The crack of doom

After the dissolution of parliament in March 1629, the king entered upon a period of personal government that lasted for eleven years. To all intents and purposes he had begun an experiment in absolute monarchy, with the prospect of an acquiescent nation obeying his commands. He was not ill-equipped for that role. One prominent lawyer, Sir Robert Holborne, observed that ‘the king could drive a matter into a head with more sharpness than any of his privy council’. Yet in practice he delegated much of his work to various officials, preferring the pleasures of the hunt to the world of practical affairs.

It was in certain respects a time of silence. There were no debates in parliament, and no elaborate declarations or proclamations from the throne. As in a masque, the king had no need to speak; his presence itself ensured majesty and harmony. As in a masque, also, he could command the workings of the great stage of the world. Charles had a high enough opinion of his supreme office, not unmixed with moral self-righteousness, to believe this.

In the absence of parliament, and with a relatively tame judiciary, the freedoms of the subject were to a certain extent reliant upon the judgement and goodwill of the sovereign. The people of England were simply asked to trust his benevolent intentions. It is true that in many respects he was a gentle monarch, in the course of whose reign no political executions took place. Yet some still considered
him to be a tyrant riding over the liberties of the nation and parliament. The continued detention of Sir John Eliot and two colleagues was cited as an example.