A History of Britain, Volume 2 (16 page)

Once both the earl and the institutional symbols of the old regime – the prerogative courts, ship money, communion rails – had been swept away in the summer of 1641, many on the benches of both the Lords and the Commons, and many more among the county communities of gentry and justices, began to ask themselves why the self-appointed tribunes like Pym continued to bang on relentlessly about tyranny and conspiracy. Although the Root and Branch Petition to abolish the episcopacy was steered through two readings in the Commons by Sir Robert Harley (to the proud delight of Lady Brilliana), it stalled badly in the Lords. Harley had to content himself with becoming the new
Thomas
Cromwell, overseeing a survey of the condition of parish churches (an ominous inquiry) and in Herefordshire pulling down the cross at the local Wigmore church in September 1641, causing it ‘to be beaten to pieces, even in the dust, with a sledge and then laid . . . in the footpath to be trodden on in the churchyard'. To overcome the opposition of the Lords, compromises were made, disappointing the more intensely Calvinist Scots. If this were Presbyterianism, it was a very English kind: committees of nine laymen
to replace the bishops, Church government by the hunting classes. Even so, there were many among the hunting classes who wanted none of it, who were prepared to see an end to the surplices and kneeling, and perhaps even see crucifixes trodden in the churchyard, but who thought bishops – plain and modest bishops, not the lofty, over-ornamental, theologically obscure, philosophically grandiose, Laudian bishops – were a proper part of the Church of England.

Others reacted to the outbreak of iconoclasm with deep horror. It was in the summer of 1641 that William Dugdale, the Warwickshire antiquary and genealogist, became convinced that there would shortly be a great and terrible obliteration. As he wrote in the introduction to his wonderful history of St Paul's Cathedral: ‘Prudently foreseeing the sad effects thereof which by woeful experience were soon after miserably felt often and earnestly incited me to a speedy view of what Monuments I could find – the Principal Churches of the Realm, to the end that by Ink and Paper, the Shadows of them with their Inscriptions might be preserved for Posterity, the Things themselves being so near to Destruction.' And off Dugdale went, sketching and transcribing, poring through muniments and cartularies, spending furtive mornings in front of tomb effigies and stained-glass windows, working just as fast as he could to outpace the image-breakers, haunted by Lord Brooke's threat to St Paul's that he hoped ‘to see no one stone left upon another of that building'.

Not everyone was quite so frantic. Noticing the backlash against the anti-bishop campaign, which by December included a decision to impeach twelve of them, a group of more moderate reformers, among them Edward Hyde, saw that Charles had a precious opportunity to exploit the divisions. It was their instinct (borne out by events twenty years later) that a non-absolutist but non-emasculated monarchy, the governor of the Church and the army, still possessed of legitimate prerogatives, including the right to choose its own government and to summon and dismiss parliaments, truly represented the wishes of the majority of the political nation. And it was from the clarity and strength of their convictions that constitutional royalism – hitherto a Stuart oxymoron – was born.

But Charles was not thinking with either clarity or strength of purpose about how the monarchy could best be renewed. He was thinking, when he was thinking at all, about how its full sovereignty might be restored. His most trusted advisers had been taken from him or had departed in the interests of self-preservation. Strafford was dead. Laud was in the Tower and most likely would follow him. Lord Keeper Finch (who had been Speaker during the stormy debates of 1629) and Secretary of State Windebanke had both fled to Europe to escape arrest. More than
ever Charles depended on the queen for counsel, and her instincts were militantly against compromise. Any show of moderation that Charles now affected was just that. Not for a moment had he abandoned his deeply held conviction that the divine appointment of kingship required him to be faithful to the plenitude of its power. A mean little kingship seemed to him unworthy of the name, a kingship that said yea to whatever a parliament might propose was not the crown he had received from his father, nor one he could pass on to his son without the deepest sense of shame and betrayal. So when he travelled to Scotland in August 1641, ostensibly to conclude a peace settlement with the Covenanters, Charles was actually casting about for some way to use the Scots against the English as he had once hoped to use the English against the Scots. Even there, though, Charles was incapable of deciding between persuasion and plotting, between a campaign to win over aristocratic generals, like James Graham, Earl of Montrose, and the physical seizure of Covenanter leaders, like Archibald Campbell, eighth Earl of Argyll. It was, in any case, all moot. For while Charles imagined that he might order the affairs of one of his kingdoms to settle the disorder of a second, a third, Ireland, now exploded in violent rebellion.

It was as much of a jolt as the Covenanter rebellion had been four years earlier. The fall of Strafford's ‘thorough' government, both Charles and the English parliament must have imagined, had probably removed most of the grievances of which those who counted in Ireland had complained. But as usual in the politics of Stuart Britain, everyone was looking the wrong way, addressing the problems of the last crisis, not the next one. To the Catholic communities of Ireland, especially the native Irish, the destruction of the Wentworth regime was a cause of apprehension, not of rejoicing. Bullying, grasping and thuggish though his administration had been, its tough independence (and willingness quite often to co-opt the native Irish in its schemes) was immeasurably better than what seemed most likely to replace it: the unrestricted domination of the New English and Scots Presbyterians. As recently as 1639 Wentworth's ‘Black Acts' had been directed at the Protestant, rather than the Catholic, communities. Now that he was gone, the situation seemed especially ominous to the Catholic gentry of Ulster. They looked across the North Channel and saw the Covenanter conquest and settlement of the western Highlands and islands by the Earl of Argyll and could only imagine that it would be their turn next. For years they had been forbidden to increase their own land holdings while the Protestant New English and Scots had been encouraged to settle in ever greater numbers, and in responding to Wentworth's challenge to turn their own estates into models of ‘improvement' they had
incurred huge debts, building themselves grandiose English houses and attempting to introduce fine livestock and tillage. Now the improbable victory of the English parliament over the king, symbolized so dramatically by the execution of Strafford, had robbed them of any prospect of harvesting the fruits of all this hard work and money by securing their position in a rapidly changing Ireland. Instead, they were facing the nightmare of Presbyterian encirclement. And for the moment the Catholic Old English, in the middle of the conflict, had shown no wish to swerve from loyalty to the English state. So Ulster lords, like Phelim O'Neill, who claimed descent from the great leader of the Nine Years War, Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, now turned to armed resistance as a last line of self-defence. When Phelim O'Neill captured Charlemont Castle early in the rebellion, he settled all kinds of scores by killing his chief creditor there, a Mr Fullerton.

Paradoxically, then, the leaders of the Irish rebellion thought that by planning to seize strongholds, including Dublin Castle, towards the end of October 1641 they were actually coming to the aid of the beleaguered king. At least at the beginning their action was presented not as a protonationalist, but as a fervently loyalist revolt. On 4 November O'Neill even went so far as to claim that he had had the commission of the king himself for his military action. It was an outrageous fabrication, probably targeted at the Old English (always the most genuinely loyal of the three communities), who, as yet, had stood aloof from the rebellion. O'Neill may have been hoping that by purporting to do the king's work he could draw the Earl of Ormonde, the most powerful of the Old English (a Protestant but very definitely not a Presbyterian), into the revolt. Instead, the ruse did massive damage to Charles's credibility in England. To many of the godly he now seemed beyond all doubt to be conniving at an Irish-Catholic plot.

Paranoia is the oxygen of revolution. But in November 1641, to men such as Harley and Wallington, Pym and St John, there seemed a great deal to be paranoid about. The king was still in Scotland and was reported to have attempted to overthrow the Covenant by a coup. News was beginning to pour across the Irish Sea, not just of castles and fortifications being over-run, but of much darker things – massacres visited by the Catholic rebels on isolated Protestant towns and villages of the New English. By the time it was recycled for the Irish insurrection, anti-Catholic atrocity propaganda had become a formulaic part of the cultural war dividing Europe. The same pornography of violence, graphically illustrated with woodcuts and ‘eye-witness' reports, which had been used to describe the behaviour of the Spanish in the Netherlands or of Wallenstein's troops in
Germany, was rehearsed all over again: babies impaled on pikes; the wombs of pregnant women sliced open and the foetuses ripped out; skewered grandpas; decapitated preachers. Which is not to say that monstrous killings did not actually occur. At Portadown there was, unquestionably, terrible butchery: a hundred New English were herded on to the bridge, stripped and thrown into the river to drown. Those who looked as if they were swimming were clubbed or shot until they disappeared in the bloody water.

Little of this was countenanced by the military leadership of the rebellion, but they had only tenuous control over some sections of the Catholic rural population, which had suffered for generations at the hands of the planters and in some parts of Ireland now took the opportunity to make their point in blood. If they were not encouraged, neither were they stopped. The more isolated the plantations and villages – in Munster, for example – the more likely the target. Something like 4000 people lost their lives directly as a result of this violence and countless more as a result of being evicted, stripped naked and sent starving and unprotected into the cold, wet Irish winter. Among them were relatives of the Wallingtons, the family of Nehemiah's sister-in-law, the Rampaignes, rich farmers in Fermanagh. Attempting to flee to the coast, they were tracked down and Zachariah Rampaigne was killed in front of his children. The survivors had to protect themselves as best they could. Before long, of course, murderous retaliation would be inflicted on innocent Catholic populations, and the miserably unrelenting cycle of murder and counter-murder that stains Irish history would be well under way.

In England the Irish rising was immediately seen as an integral element in a pan-British conspiracy, ultimately aimed at itself. Wallington quoted in one of his notebooks the proverb ‘He that England will win/Must first with Ireland begin'. Worse even than that, the rebellion brought back Elizabethan memories of Ireland being used as a back door to England by the armed league of Catholic powers. Whether England liked it or not, its fate now seemed to be tied up with the international wars of religion, a suspicion confirmed when Owen Roe O'Neill, nephew of the Earl of Tyrone, who had fled to Rome in 1607 and had served for thirty years in the armies of the king of Spain, crossed from Flanders in the spring of 1642 and took command of the rebel forces. It was not long before a papal nuncio, Cardinal Giovanni Rinuccini, arrived to press an all-out Counter-Reformation agenda on the rebels: the restoration of the Church as it had been before the Henrician Reformation.

This was a tragic turning-point in the life of the Old English Catholic community in Ireland. It was now in the same quandary over
allegiance that had been so disastrous for its English counterpart during the Spanish-papal offensive in the 1580s. It seemed impossible to make men like Owen Roe O'Neill grasp that it had been historically feasible, especially under Strafford, to live a life of loyal Catholicism, practising their faith quietly and being tacitly tolerated as long as they kept clear of sedition. But the collapse of the protecting authority of the Crown had suddenly taken away this vital living space. They were now between the rock of the Roman Church and the hard place of the Presbyterians. So in December 1641 some of the leading Old English entered into an agreement with the Irish rebels. By the following spring they were being asked, more pressingly, to contribute men and money, and with some trepidation many of the Old English peers (though not the Protestant Ormonde) actively joined the revolt. One of them, John Preston, became the confederation's commander in Leinster. They may have consoled themselves with the thought that even in the spring of 1642 and the years ahead, the official line of the confederation, affirmed on its flags, was one of intense loyalism to Charles I. But that was not the way it was seen in England, either by the king or by his opponents. And once Robert Monro, a Scottish Presbyterian veteran of the Thirty Years War, took command of the Protestant forces, commissioned by the intensely Protestant Scots parliament, the polarization of Ireland into two armed religious camps was tragically complete. At Newry, where sixty men and women and two priests were murdered, Monro, who had been much affected by the atrocity literature, showed that he was perfectly capable of unloosing a massacre every bit as ugly as Portadown. ‘Anti-Christ marcheth furiously,' wrote Wallington, and this was good news for it meant that the unsparing, long-heralded battle between the angels and demons could at last get under way.

Charles returned to London towards the end of November 1641 as news of the Irish slaughter, real and fictitious, was arriving, each day apparently bloodier than the last. A bill proposing to place control of a militia in the hands of parliament had already had a reading in the House of Commons, and Pym must have assumed that the Irish rebellion would work to complete, irreversibly, a momentous transfer of power from king to parliament. All sorts of demands – that Catholics be removed from the army, that parliament now have a decisive say in foreign policy – were being voiced. And, as a prelude to the capture of sovereignty, a Grand Remonstrance, drafted by the militants, was to capture history. The document represented a complete rewriting, for the present and for posterity, of the reign of Charles I, recording that from the beginning he had planned to violate the liberties of his subjects and impose on them
a monstrous and detestable despotism. It recapitulated what had been done by the people's representatives to withstand that conspiracy and what still needed to be done.