Civil War: The History of England Volume III (25 page)

It is also an image of the sovereign controlling animal nature, bringing the strength and energy of the horse into harness with his own will and desire. The Spanish ambassador, in the same spirit, had once flattered Charles by noting that the horses upon which he was mounted ‘laid down all their natural and brutish fierceness in his presence’. The equestrian portraits are thereby a depiction of the manner in which reason must be able to control passion. This is of a piece with Charles’s own conception of his rule and of his evident belief that he must control his own nature, by restraint and formality, before he could properly govern the entire kingdom. Art was for the king one of the great emblems of power. Yet it was more than that.

Lucy Hutchinson observed that ‘men of learning and ingenuity in all the arts were in esteem and received encouragement from the king, who was a most excellent judge and great lover of paintings, carvings, gravings and many other ingenuities . . .’ Charles had seen the artistic wealth of the royal court in Madrid and wished to cultivate a similar state of magnificence. He was in addition an adept and instinctive judge of painting and sculpture; if he had not been a king, he would have been a connoisseur. He was able to recognize the identity of an artist at first glance; this was known as a ‘knowledge of hands’. He knew where ‘
gusto
’, passion or taste, was to be found. He commissioned Rubens, Mytens, Inigo Jones and Van Dyck; by the end of his reign he had collected some 500
paintings and tapestries, among them nine Correggios, thirteen Raphaels and forty-five Titians. The Dutch once sent him five paintings to persuade him to resolve a dispute about herring fisheries; the city of Nuremberg gave him two Dürers. He also collected coins and medals; he enjoyed composing music. His love of order was everywhere apparent. When a collection of the busts of senators and emperors of ancient Rome reached Whitehall, he himself took pains to arrange them in chronological order.

A papal emissary to England recalled the occasion when the king, in the company of Inigo Jones, was informed that a consignment of paintings had arrived from the Vatican; he ‘rushed to see them, calling to him Jones . . . the very moment Jones saw the pictures he greatly approved of them, and in order to study them better threw off his coat, put on his eyeglasses, took a candle, and together with the king, began to examine them very closely, admiring them very much . . .’ The gift included works by Leonardo and Andrea del Sarto. This excitement reveals a sovereign very different from the conventional image of his coldness and reserve. Rubens was to say of Charles’s court that it was remarkable ‘not only for the splendour of the outward culture’ but for ‘the incredible quality of excellent pictures, statues and ancient inscriptions which are to be found in this court . . . I confess I have never seen anything in the world more rare.’

The authority of the king’s image was amplified by the evidence of his fertility. In the spring of 1630 Henrietta Maria presented him with a son and heir, also to be named Charles. She wrote to a friend in France that her child was ‘so serious in all that he does that I cannot help deeming him far wiser than myself’. The baby never clenched his fists, and so it was predicted that he would be a king of great liberality. He was also healthy and strong, looking at four months as if he were already a year old. So the birth augured well. The infant Charles was also the first in English history to be born as heir to the three kingdoms.

Thomas Carew, gentleman of the bedchamber, told the earl of Carlisle that the king and queen were ‘at such a degree of kindness as he would imagine him a wooer again and her gladder to receive his caresses than he to make them’. Charles wrote to his mother-in-law, Marie de’ Medici, that ‘the only dispute that now exists
between us is that of conquering each other by affection’. More importantly, perhaps, the birth of a son seemed to indicate that the Stuart dynasty might continue until the crack of doom.

16

The shrimp

All seemed quiet. The appearance of calm may have been deceptive, but it was peaceful enough in comparison with the violent years yet to come. Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon, claimed in his
History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England
that during the personal rule of Charles ‘the like peace and plenty and universal tranquillity for ten years was never enjoyed by any nation’. Another historian, Sir Philip Warwick, in his
Memoirs of the Reign of Charles I
, wrote that ‘from the year 1628 unto the year 1638, I believe England was never master of a profounder peace, nor enjoyed more wealth, or had the power and form of godliness more visible in it’.

On 9 January 1631,
Love’s Triumph
, a masque devised by Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson, introduced Henrietta Maria as the Queen of Love in Callipolis or ‘the city of beauty and goodness’. When the scene dissolved the ‘prospect of the sea’ appeared, into which setting the king himself walked in the guise of Neptune with a train of sea-gods and Cupids. He was then apostrophized as ‘the centre of proportion, sweetness, grace!’ At the end of the performance ‘the throne disappears, in place of which there shooteth up a palm tree with an imperial crown on the top’.

In that same month, by royal command, a ‘book of orders’ was published. It decreed that two justices of the peace should meet each month in petty sessions to maintain the operations of local
government. The overseers of the poor were to ensure that poor children were placed in apprenticeships; the constables and churchwardens of the parish were ordered to discipline offenders and to chase away vagrants. It was also the responsibility of the two justices to make certain that the roads were in a good state of repair and that, in general, law and order were imposed. They were also obliged to submit reports to London concerning ‘how they found the counties governed’.

Although the king himself may not have drawn up these provisions, they bear all the marks of his paternal authority and of his predilection for good order. Charles was also determined that the local gentry and nobility should play an active part in the government of their neighbourhoods; a proclamation was issued ordering any of them still dwelling in London to return to the countryside where they belonged. At a later date another royal declaration ordered that urban vintners should stop selling tobacco and that innkeepers should not dress or serve game birds; this was believed to be a device to make the city less attractive to the country gentry.

The servants of the Crown were going about their duties. At the beginning of March William Laud preached at Paul’s Cross in celebration of the sixth anniversary of the king’s accession. He remarked that ‘some are so waspishly set to sting that nothing can please their ears unless it sharpen their edge against authority’; he added, in sententious fashion, that ‘I hope I shall offend none by praying for the king’.

The king’s other great councillor, Sir Thomas Wentworth, had been dispatched to York as lord president of the north in order to curb disorder. At the beginning of 1632 he was further promoted to become lord deputy of Ireland, where his cause of promoting ‘good and quiet government’ could be tested. He was a man of strong will and of commanding temper. He believed implicitly in royal authority and in public duty. He told one of his relatives that ‘a life of toil and labour’ was his effective destiny. The portraits of him by Van Dyck show him to be profoundly animated by zeal or, perhaps, by vision.

Laud and Wentworth shared similar precepts and preoccupations that were embraced by them under the name of ‘Thorough’, by which they meant a disciplined and energetic response to the
problems of the realm. They would not be diverted from their self-imposed task, and held nothing but contempt for those ministers of the state whom they regarded as lax, cowardly, or concerned only with enrichment. The administration of the king and his councillors – parliament was put to one side – should be enabled to push through those policies that were in the public interest. The vital alliance was that between Church and Crown in the cleansing of the kingdom.

The lord treasurer, the earl of Portland, was described by them as ‘Lady Mora’ or ‘Lady Delay’; Laud also described the chancellor or the exchequer, Lord Cottington, as ‘Lady Mora’s waiting maid’ who ‘would pace a little faster than her mistress did, but the steps would be as foul’. This represented the difference between complaisant councillors and committed reformers.

Wentworth, like Laud, believed that only royal sovereignty could bring order out of disorder and discipline out of anarchy. As lord deputy of Ireland, therefore, he was inclined to drive himself over any opposition, to consolidate the authority of the king, to lead the people – and in particular the recent English settlers – into the pastures of obedience and docility. He was intent upon recovering the powers of the king, as he said, by ‘a little violence and extraordinary means’. By his own light he succeeded, but only at the cost of arousing hostility and even hatred. He brought to his task a less than attractive combination of austerity and obstinacy. It was said, in
A Collection of Anecdotes and Remarkable Characters
, that ‘his sour and haughty temper’ meant that he expected ‘to have more observance paid to him than he was willing to pay to others’.

Laud was more practical than the inspired Wentworth. The bishop wrote to the lord deputy that ‘for the State, indeed my Lord, I am for thorough . . . and it is impossible for me to go thorough alone’. ‘Thorough’ and ‘through’, spelt in an identical way in the seventeenth century, were for all intents and purposes the same word. Laud added that ‘besides, private ends are such blocks in the public way, and lie so thick, that you may promise what you will, and I must perform what I can and no more’. Nevertheless Wentworth was relentless, describing himself at his subsequent trial as ‘ever desiring the best things, and never satisfied I had done enough, but did always desire to do better’.

In this period, too, the proclamations of the privy council were given legislative authority; the privy councillors could make laws on those matters which the actual courts of law neglected or avoided. The other governors of the realm maintained the emphasis upon law and order. It was reported in London by a news-writer, John Pory, that ‘on Sunday, in the afternoon and after supper, till midnight, my lord mayor visited as many taverns as he could, and gave warning to the vintners not to suffer any drinking in their houses, either that day or night; and the same afternoon also he passed Moorfields and put down the wrestling of the western with the northern men, which was there usual on that afternoon’. The Star Chamber also enjoyed new authority with its enforcement of the proclamations from the council and its pursuit of transgressors.

One of the most prominent of these public offenders, William Prynne, had already aroused controversy with his strongly puritan opinions. He wrote tracts and pamphlets endlessly, his servant bringing him a bread roll and pot of ale every three hours; he was known as a ‘paper-worm’. John Aubrey wrote that he ‘was of a strange saturnine complexion’, and Christopher Wren said that he had the countenance of a witch.

In the late autumn of 1632 Prynne’s
Histriomastix: A Scourge of Stage Players
launched a general assault upon the plays and players of London, with a particular attack upon the practice of boys playing female roles and of women themselves appearing on the stage. He wrote that the actresses were ‘notorious whores’ and asked if ‘any Christian woman be so more than whorishly impudent as to act, to speak publicly on a stage (perchance in man’s apparel and cut hair), in the presence of sundry men and women’.

Unfortunately for Prynne the queen, Henrietta Maria, took part in a theatrical pastoral entitled
The Shepherds’ Paradise
just a few weeks after the publication of his tract. The play itself was in the best possible taste. It was recorded of its audience that ‘my lord chamberlain saith that no chambermaid shall enter, unless she will sit cross-legged on the top of a bulk’. It was a serious affair, and was of such complexity that the production lasted for seven or eight hours.

Nevertheless Prynne’s attack upon female players was interpreted as an attack upon the queen herself; he had also denounced public
dancing as a cause of shame and wickedness, and it was well known that the queen was fond of dancing. Prynne was sent to the Tower, where he faced prosecution by the Star Chamber and by the high commission on religious affairs. He was sentenced to imprisonment for life, fined £5,000 and expelled from Lincoln’s Inn where he had practised law. The severity or the judgment was enhanced by the brutal order that both of his ears should be cut off as he stood in a public pillory. The sentence was duly carried out. One of his ears was cut away at Westminster, and the other in Cheapside.

Another opponent of the court, Sir John Eliot, died in confinement at the end of 1632. The king’s enmity against him was such that, despite pleas for his health, he had never been allowed to leave the Tower in the course oi his imprisonment. He had sent a petition to the king in which he declared that ‘by reason of the quality of the air I am fallen into a dangerous disease’; he also stated that ‘I am heartily sorry I have displeased your majesty’. The king replied that the petition was not humble enough. Eliot’s humiliation was continued after his death. His son petitioned the king to allow his father’s body to be carried into Cornwall for burial. Charles scrawled at the bottom of the petition, ‘Let Sir John Eliot’s body be buried in the church of that parish where he died.’ He was in other words to be interred in the Tower.