Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (20 page)

By the 1630s, the Tradescant collection filled several rooms of the family house at Lambeth, just across the Thames from Westminster,
and John decided to open his‘rarities’ to the public. Taking biblical inspiration, he called England’s first ever museum‘The
Ark’. The public flocked to gaze at such novelties as the hat and lantern taken from Guy Fawkes when he was arrested under
the Houses of Parliament, alongside over a thousand named varieties of plants, flowers and trees — an apparently odd but enduring
combination of English enthusiasms that lives on in the popularity of such TV programmes as
Gardeners’ World
and
Antiques Roadshow.

After John’s death in 1638, his son took over the collection, proving an even more adventurous traveller than his father.
He crossed the Atlantic three times to bring back the pineapple, the yucca and the scarlet runner bean, along with the Virginia
creeper whose green leaves go flame-red in autumn. In his later years John Jr joined forces with Elias Ashmole,
an ambitious lawyer who had helped catalogue the collection, but after Johns death Ashmole became embroiled in a series of
disputes with Tradescant s widow Hester.

One morning, in April 1678, Hester Tradescant was found dead, apparently drowned in the garden pool at her Lambeth home. Foul
play was ruled out, but Ashmole took control of Tradescant’s Ark. The collection came to form the nucleus of the Ashmolean
Museum at Oxford — where you can still see Guy Fawkes’s hat and lantern.

W
HEN JAMES I’S SECOND-BORN SON PRINCE Charles arrived in London at the beginning of his father’s reign, courtiers hesitated
to join his retinue. The child was sickly and backward — he could easily die and his household vanish, leaving them high and
dry. By his fourth birthday in November 1604 the young prince was still not walking properly, and his father was so worried
by his slow speech and stutter that he‘was desirous that the string under his tongue should be cut’.

But Charles was not a quitter. The plodding prince worked hard at overcoming his disabilities, particularly after 1612 when
his more obviously gifted elder brother Henry died of
typhoid. By the time Charles I succeeded his father in March 1625, he was a young man of some grit, principle and piety, already
displaying the taste that would make him, arguably, England’s greatest royal patron of the arts. But the admirable determination
he had shown in his childhood now verged on obstinacy, which was fed by the big idea that would eventually bring disaster
on his family — the Divine Right of Kings.

The notion had been planted by his writerly father, James, who quoted lengthy passages from the Bible in his pamphlet
The Trew Law of Free Monarchies
in support of his argument that an anointed monarch was‘God’s Lieutenant in earth’. This view was taken for granted by the
absolute monarchs of early modern Europe, but the self-righteous James had turned it into a lecture directed at his‘honest
and obedient subjects’. A people could no more depose their King, he told them, than sons could replace their father. I have
at length prooved,’ he concluded,‘that the King is above the law.’

When it came to practical politics, James himself had never pushed his ideas to the limit, particularly when, south of the
border, he found himself dealing with the touchy squires and merchants who dominated England’s House of Commons. But Charles
lacked his father’s subtlety. He felt personally affronted when on his accession Parliament declined to vote him the usual
supply of customs revenues for life, granting the money for one year only. Puritan MPs were suspicious of Charles’s French
Catholic wife and of his personal preference for church ceremonial — and no one liked his reliance on the Duke of Buckingham,
the unpopular
favourite he had taken over from his father. In the govern-ment/ complained one member, there wanteth good advice/

But rather than negotiate in the style of his father — or cajole, as the imperious Queen Elizabeth would have done — Charles
lost his temper. He dissolved Parliament in August 1625 and the following year started raising funds with‘forced loans’, the
ancient, discredited tactic of Empson and Dudley (
see p. 81
) which Charles now extended from a handful of rich targets to
most of the tax-paying community. When his Chief Justice, Sir Randolph Crew, questioned the legality of this non-parliamentary
levy, Charles dismissed him; more than seventy non-payers were sent to prison.

These were serious issues to the MPs whose predecessors had made the laws that had helped Henry VIII break with Rome. James
had written about kings being above the law — Charles was trying to put theory into practice. When a shortage of funds compelled
him to summon Parliament again in 1628, an angry House of Commons wasted no time in preparing a statement of fundamental principles,
the Petition of Right, which prohibited non-parliamentary taxation and arbitrary imprisonment. After some prevarication, Charles
signed the petition, but he did so with ill grace — and then, that August, his friend and confidant Buckingham was assassinated
in Portsmouth.

The murder was the work of a deranged Puritan, John Felton, who had been incited by parliamentary denunciations of Buckingham
as‘the grievance of all grievances’, and Charles blamed his critics in Parliament for the killing. He felt bitterly wounded
by the explosion of popular joy that
greeted the news of Buckingham’s death, and it turned his deepening dislike of Parliament into a grudge match that came to
a head in the spring of 1629.

The issue was religion. Sir John Eliot, the eloquent Puritan MP who had led the assaults on both Buckingham and forced loans,
had produced a resolution against what were known as Arminian’ church practices, so-called after the Dutch theologian Jacob
Arminius whose English admirers had called for a return to church ceremonial. This cause was championed by Charles’s recently
appointed Bishop of London, William Laud, who was busy restoring neglected rituals to the Church of England. In what we would
describe as a battle between High and Low Church, Charles sided enthusiastically with ritual, and rightly interpreted the
Puritan attack on Arminianism as a snub to his royal authority. He sent orders to Westminster to halt all discussion immediately.

The Commons responded with a defiance that would become historic. Heedless of the King’s words, the debate continued. One
MP, Sir Miles Hobart, locked the door against the indignant hammerings of the King’s messenger, while the burly MP for Dorchester,
Denzil Holies, forcibly held down the Speaker, Sir John Finch, in his chair. The Speaker was the Commons’ servant, not the
King’s, Finch was told, and Sir John Eliot took the floor to denounce’innovations in religion’ and royal interference with
Parliament’s right to speak.‘None had gone about to break parliaments,’ he declared,‘but in the end parliaments had broken
them.’

Cries of Aye, Aye, Aye’ rang out around the chamber, and Eliot’s resolution against‘Popery or Arminianism’ was duly acclaimed,
along with a further condemnation of taxation
without parliamentary assent. Anyone who disagreed or disobeyed — and this presumably included the King — shall be reputed
a capital enemy to this kingdom and commonwealth… He shall likewise be reputed a betrayer of the liberties of England/

But two days later, Hobart, Holles, Eliot and six other leaders of the protest were on their way to the Tower. Charles had
the dissidents arrested, then dissolved Parliament on io March. God’s Lieutenant had decided he could rule England more smoothly
without it.

C
HARLES I ATTEMPTED TO RULE ENGLAND without Parliament for eleven years, from 1629 to 1640, and he started off well enough.
He made peace with Spain and France and, alongside his French wife Henrietta Maria, presided over a well-ordered court where
art, music and drama flourished. Under his auspices, the Church of England was stringently administered by William Laud who,
as Archbishop of Canterbury after 1633, organised diocesan inspections that rested the conformity of every priest and parish.
Laud’s effcient policy style came to be known as‘Thorough’, and it was matched by Sir Thomas Wentworth, a former Member of
Parliament who administered first the
north and then Ireland for Charles, before rising to become his principal minister, ennobled as the Earl of Strafford.

Back in 1628, as MP for Yorkshire, Wentworth had spoken out in favour of the Petition of Right, yet he came to feel that many
of his fellow-parliamentarians went too far in their attacks on King and Crown — a view that was shared by many. The austere
and driven Puritans whose voices rang out loudest in the Commons were even calling for the removal of bishops from the Church
of England. Such extremism fortified moderate support for the King, and it was Charles’s tragedy that he would waste England’s
deep-rooted conservatism and loyalty to the Crown. As his own man Laud later put it, Charles I was‘a gracious prince who neither
knew how to be, nor to be made, great’.

One of the virtues of raising money through Parliament was that it minimised direct conflict between taxpayer and King. But
as Charles exploited ancient and obscure sources of revenue like the duty of seaport towns to supply the King with ships,
solid citizens came into head-to-head conflict with the Crown. To widespread support, the opposition to‘ship money’ was led
by a prosperous Buckinghamshire landowner, John Hampden, who fought the tax in court, effectively contending that it was the
King who was the lawbreaker here.

As so often, religion provoked even deeper issues of due process and fair play. When in 1634 the Puritan lawyer William Prynne
denounced as immoral the court masques in which the King and his wife liked to dance, Charles’s arbitrary Court of Star Chamber
(evolved from the Royal Council of earlier times) ordered that his ears be cut off.
Three years later the incorrigible Prynne turned his holy criticism on the bishops — only to have what survived of his ears
sliced away.

Hampden and Prynne became national heroes thanks to the printed newsletters — early versions of newspapers — that were beginning
to circulate between London and the provinces. These publicised the political and religious issues at stake, usually favouring
the underdog, while primitive woodcuts provided dramatic images that got the message to the two-thirds of the population who
could not read. One cartoon showed a smiling Archbishop Laud dining off a dish of Prynne’s severed ears.

Feelings were running high in 1640 when Charles reluctantly resumed dealing with Parliament. His attempt to take’Thorough’
to Scotland and to impose the English Prayer Book (against Laud’s better judgement) on Scotland’s Presbyterians had led to
the so-called Bishops’Wars that drained the royal treasury dry. The early months of 1640 had seen an army of rebellious Scots
occupying the north of England, and the King was urgently in need of money. But his parliamentary critics were bitterly determined
that he should pay a price for it.

Strafford and Laud were their first targets, both indicted for treason as Charles’s accomplices in what would later be known
as the‘Eleven Years Tyranny’. Strafford was sent to trial in March 1641, charged with being the‘principal author and promoter
of all those counsels which had exposed the kingdom to so much ruin’. When he defended himself so ably in court that an acquittal
seemed possible, the Commons contrived another way to get him. They quickly passed
a bill of attainder, a blunt instrument that baldly declared Strafford’s guilt without need of legal process, and as Charles
hesitated to sign the attainder, mobs of shaven-headed apprentices roamed the London streets baying for the blood of‘Black
Tom the Tyrant’.

The campaign against Thomas Strafford was directed by John Pym, the veteran MP for Calne in Wiltshire who, a dozen years earlier,
had been Sir John Eliot’s principal lieutenant in the battle for the Petition of Right. Now Pym masterminded the entire parliamentary
assault on royal powers, plotting with the Scottish rebels to maintain pressure on the King while also stirring up the London
mobs. On to May 1641, fearing for the safety of his wife and children, Charles signed Strafford’s attainder, and two days
later his faithful servant went to the block in front of a jubilant crowd over one hundred thousand strong.