Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (33 page)

In this fevered atmosphere rumours of every kind circulated like hurricanes. It was said that a papist cavalry was concealed in caves in Surrey; it was reported that a plot had been hatched to blow up the Thames with gunpowder and thus drown the city. One of Pym’s colleagues, Sir Walter Earle, told the Commons that a conspiracy had been discovered to demolish parliament; in their excitement the members leaned forward in their seats better to hear him, and part of the floor of the gallery gave way. One member exclaimed that he smelled gunpowder and another, leaving his seat, shouted that ‘there was hot work and a great fire within’. The news soon spread, and a mob flew to Westminster. It was of course a false alarm, but the sudden panic testifies to the agitated state of the capital.

It was a world of change; as the king had said to parliament earlier in the year, ‘You have taken the government all in pieces.’ ‘The Brothers of the Blade’, a dialogue issued in 1641, considered ‘the vicissitudes and revolutions of the states and conditions of men in these last days of the world’. ‘Revolution’ meant in conventional terms recurrence or periodic return; in these years it became associated with more earthly disorder. It was widely believed that the times were awry; anxiety and even despair were experienced by many. Brilliana Harley, a royalist letter-writer, expressed her belief that ‘things are now in such a condition that if the Lord does not put forth his helping hand his poor children will be brought low’.

In the weeks after Strafford’s death the king seems to have become resigned to his loss of power. He signed the bill for abolishing tonnage and poundage, telling both houses of parliament that ‘I never had other design but to win the affections of my people’. He made a leading puritan, the earl of Essex, his lord chamberlain. Yet he was in fact playing for time.

There were already the makings of a king’s party from those outraged at the pretensions of parliament in assuming executive powers; others were displeased at the idea of a puritan state Church controlled by parliamentary lay commissioners in place of bishops. The ‘root and branch’ party, which favoured such a change, was still in a minority. In this year many petitions reached Westminster from those who wished to preserve the Church and protect the Book of Common Prayer from more change. Some supported the maintenance of the episcopacy on the basis that the office was good even if the man was indifferent. From Oliver Cromwell’s own county of Huntingdon, for example, it was pleaded that ‘the form of divine service expressed and contained in the book of common prayer’ was the best. These petitioners wished to extirpate those immoderate and bitter reformers who fomented nothing but trouble and disorder in the churches of the country.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that those who were moderate or orthodox in their religion were beginning to take the side of the king and to believe that the political settlement imposed by parliament had gone far enough. Instead of relief and liberty, it had brought anxiety and division. The imposition of taxes had not improved the temper of the nation. One gentlewoman from Yorkshire, Margaret Eure, wrote: ‘I am in such a great rage with parliament as nothing will pacify me, for they promised us all should be well, if my lord Strafford’s head were off, and since then there is nothing better, but I think we shall be undone with taxes.’ It was agreed by many that the king should take wise counsel but few accepted that parliament had the power to choose who those counsellors should be. It was also possible that the king could still divide the Lords from the Commons; in June 1641, the peers threw out a bill excluding the bishops from their number. They were not prepared to consider any ‘further reformation’.

In the same month of June John Pym introduced what were known as the ‘ten propositions’, measures that were designed to increase parliamentary control of the king’s court and council. All priests and Jesuits were to be banished from the court and, in particular, from the queen’s entourage. Henrietta was defiant; she would obey her husband, she said, but not 400 of his subjects. Another proposition demanded that the king remove his ‘evil’ counsellors, and insisted that none in future were to be appointed unless they were such ‘as his people and Parliament may have just cause to confide in’. The armies of Scotland and of England were to be disbanded as quickly as possible. There was no reference to the king. This might be seen as a step towards a republican government, however carefully obscured by the rhetoric of loyalty.

The ‘ten propositions’ had been in part prompted by the king’s recent and carefully resolved decision to travel to Scotland. It was feared that in fact his destination would be York, rather than Edinburgh, where he might take control of his English army garrisoned there; hence the call that the English and Scottish armies should stand down. But if he did indeed journey to Edinburgh, what then? He might, for example, enlist his native subjects in some attack upon Westminster. If he agreed to grant the Scots the ‘pure’ religion they demanded, and allowed them to resume their just liberties, they might return to their old allegiance to the Stuarts; Charles had already written to the earl of Argyll, chief of Clan Campbell, with the pledge to ‘establish the affections of my people fully to me’. If the Scottish and English armies were joined together, under the command of the king, they would represent an almost irresistible force.

John Pym and his supporters were now seized with anxiety and alarm. They even convened parliament on Sunday morning, at the beginning of August, to debate the nature of the threat. They begged for a delay to the king’s journey, and he consented to a pause of one day. He had in the interim been engaged in talks with the Scottish commissioners and, according to the Venetian ambassador, the Scots were boasting that ‘they would do all in their power to place the king in his authority once again. When he appeared in Scotland, all political differences would be at an end, and they would serve their natural prince as one man in such a cause.’

As the king prepared to go on his journey a crowd gathered in Westminster entreating him not to leave. It may be that his presence in London acted as a form of reassurance, at a time of great disorder, or it may be that some in the crowd suspected his intentions. He went to parliament on the morning of his departure in a mood of ill-concealed hostility and impatience. He named a commission of twenty-two men who would administer affairs in his absence; among them was the earl of Newcastle, a notable enemy to the parliamentary cause.

The Commons immediately retired to their chamber and debated the means ‘of putting the kingdom into a posture of defence’. An ‘ordinance’ was passed, the first of its kind, appointing several key parliamentarians to attend the king in Scotland; they were of course to be spies rather than companions, hoping to supervise his actions. An ordinance had in the medieval period been a device by means of which the king could make a declaration without the consent of parliament; now the two houses were issuing ordinances without the consent of the king. Another confrontation seemed to be inevitable.

Charles was greeted in Edinburgh with every sign of acclamation. He at once proceeded to gain the approval of the Scots. He attended the services of the Scottish Church with an outward display of piety, and agreed to the demand of the covenanters that bishops be excluded from the reformed Church. He attended the sessions of the Scottish parliament, and agreed to the terms of an Anglo-Scottish union whereby his powers over parliament and the army were severely circumscribed. Some at Westminster believed that they might obtain similar benefits, but it occurred to others that Charles had simply managed to neutralize the Scots in any future conflict.

In these months parliament had begun to govern; it paid the army, and it issued orders to royal officials such as the lieutenant of the Tower. It had made decrees about the liturgy and the forms of religious worship. Laud had been impeached and imprisoned, while Strafford had been executed; various of the supposed ‘evil counsellors’, among them Lord Keeper Finch, had fled. The judges and sheriffs who had supported the king’s exactions had been summoned to parliament and asked to explain their conduct. The Star Chamber, the northern council and the high commission, the seats of Charles’s rule, had been abolished. Laud’s judicial victims, such as Prynne and Bastwick, had been liberated and brought back to London in triumph. Most importantly, perhaps, it had been decreed that the present parliament could not be prorogued without its own consent.

It is possible, however, to see these developments in another light. Parliament had acted in an arbitrary and imperious manner. It had misinterpreted the polity or unwritten constitution of the country, and arrogated powers to itself that it had never before possessed. It had illegally hounded Strafford to death. It had colluded with the king’s enemies and an alien army. It had organized mobs to intimidate its opponents. It had proposed a new system of religion to be enforced upon an unwilling people. It had passed a bill ensuring its permanence. In the process the king had been stripped of his royal prerogative and had suffered a severe defeat in all the matters that touched him most closely. He had always said that his enemies wished to relegate him to the status of the doge of Venice. He was not mistaken.

22

Worse and worse news

Parliament reassembled on 20 October 1641, determined to wring from the king the same concessions that the Scottish parliament had already obtained from him. This was the period when the title of ‘King Pym’ came into general use. John Pym had started his career, perhaps surprisingly, as a receiver of Crown lands, and he was in general a good man of business. He was the great orchestrator of parliamentary affairs and had the ability to direct various men and factions towards one end; he was an effective, if not eloquent, debater but his real energy and power lay in his handling of parliamentary committees. By his use of such committees, in fact, he proved that parliament could govern as ably as the king. He sat close to the Speaker in the Commons, together with the other parliamentary leaders, and it was reported that ‘the Speaker diligently watches the Eye of Pym’.

He was shrewd, and tireless, with a fierce hatred of popery and a genuine commitment to what he considered to be the true religion; his maiden speech was an attack upon one of his colleagues who had branded a Sabbath bill as a ‘puritan’ bill, and in another speech he declared that ‘no impositions are so grievous as those that are laid upon the soul’. He possessed a round face, full lips and heavy jowls; he also sported a curling moustache and short pointed beard. Yet he was not necessarily of a severe disposition; he was known for his cheerfulness and conviviality.

At the beginning of this session a letter was delivered to him as he sat in his place in the Commons. A gentleman had hired a messenger on Fish Street Hill, and given him a shilling to deliver the missive. When Pym opened it a rag dropped out that was, in the words of Clarendon, ‘foul with the foulness of a plague sore’; it was a rag that had covered a plague wound. It was accompanied by a letter that denounced Pym for treason and threatened that, if the plague did not kill him, a dagger surely would. It ended with ‘repent, traitor’.

Pym and his colleagues were now intent upon stripping Charles of his prerogative power, namely his ability to appoint his officers and councillors without reference to parliament. Yet they had first to deprive the upper house of its majority in favour of the king, and so they moved to expel the thirteen bishops who sat there. A bill was passed by the Commons to disqualify any cleric from accepting secular office, but naturally enough it was delayed by the Lords themselves.

Pym tried to raise the temperature of the debate with news of fresh army plots and of a furore in Edinburgh, where three covenanter lords had fled the king’s court in fear of their lives; this became known as ‘the incident’. The king then fervently declared before the Scottish parliament that he had played no part in any such plot to assassinate them and asked for ‘fair play’. The fact that the principal conspirator had been Will Murray, the groom of the king’s bedchamber, served to throw doubt upon the king’s protestations of innocence. Whether true or not, the rumours only deepened parliamentary alarm about the king’s intentions; it simply confirmed the fact, known by all, that he could not be trusted. Yet, in turn, why should he trust those who conspired against his throne? It still seemed very likely, in the early days of the parliament, that any attempt at more radical reform would come to nothing. Many members were now of the opinion that the changes in religion, in particular, were coming on too fast. Here were the makings of the king’s party.

Just at that moment, at the very beginning of November, news reached parliament that a rebellion had broken out in Ireland. The information was brought to the Commons by seventeen privy councillors, and Clarendon reported that ‘there was a deep silence … and a kind of consternation’. It aroused all the fears of the Protestants of England, and one courtier who had been asked to remain at Westminster and report on parliament, Edward Nicholas, wrote to the king in Edinburgh that ‘the alarm of popish plots amaze and fright the people here more than anything’. It was reported that papists were storing weapons and stocking gunpowder. A pamphlet circulated with the question ‘Oh ye blood-thirsty papists, what are your intents?’ The rebellion came as a cataclysmic shock, but the conditions for it had been slowly gathering.

There were three defined elements in Irish society. The New English were the Protestant settlers who had established themselves after the Reformation; they controlled the Dublin parliament and were intent upon imposing English ‘standards’ upon the natives. The Old English had arrived before the Reformation, some as early as the twelfth century, and had become so acclimatized that they identified themselves with Ireland rather than with England; many of them were Catholic while some merely conformed in public to the Protestant Church of Ireland. They owned about one third of the best land. The third group, known by their masters as the ‘mere Irish’ or ‘natives’, made up the largest part of the population but, like most of the downtrodden of the earth, have left little record of their loyalties or beliefs.