A History of Britain, Volume 2 (17 page)

The Grand Remonstrance became another immense public event in the life of an already feverishly politicized London. Wallington watched daily as troops of gentry and yeomen from Essex, Kent and Sussex clattered on horseback through the streets of the city towards Westminster, where they surrounded the parliament chambers. The showers of paper propaganda had turned into a virtual blizzard. But it was precisely this sense of being held hostage to the people – gentry and farmers in the provinces, artisans and apprentices in London – that turned a considerable number of both the Lords and Commons against the Remonstrance. Sir Edward Dering from Kent spoke for many when he expressed amazement at the ‘descension from a parliament to a people . . . when I first heard of a Remonstrance, I presently imagined that like faithful councillors we should hold up a glass unto His Majesty . . . I did not dream that we should remonstrate downwards, tell stories to the people and talk of the King as a third person. I neither look for a cure for our complaints from the common people nor do desire to be cured by them.' Together with the sense that the gratuitously abusive tone of the Remonstrance had been deliberately calculated to put an accommodation with the king out of reach, it managed to pass the Commons by a majority of only eleven votes.

The discomfiture of Pym naturally presented an opportunity to a moderate group, with Edward Hyde as its presiding talent, to rally a reform-minded but non-Presbyterian party to the support of what he had been led to believe was a reasonably chastened king. Accordingly, Hyde drafted a response to the Remonstrance, which took the tone that royalist ideology would sustain throughout the civil war, namely that it was the king, and not a minority of Puritan zealots, who truly represented the well-being and interests of the people at large; that it was he, and not they, who was the true reformer. Those like Hyde who hoped to see the king wrap himself in the mantle of a non-Laudian, non-absolutist monarchy took heart from the warm reception that Charles, a figure who seemed more wronged than wrongful, had received on his journey back from Scotland to London. The narrow vote over the Remonstrance confirmed Hyde in his optimism that the tide of militancy could be pushed back.

But there was no political situation so fabulously promising for the revival of the king's fortunes that Charles could not still manage to undercut it by his ultimate belief in the arbitration of force. He had been persuaded by Hyde and Viscount Falkland, his new Secretary of State, and
by the vote on the Remonstrance, that Pym and his fellows were indeed an isolated group within the Commons, who, once neutralized, could be brought back to the kind of parliament he cared to deal with and which would vote him money for an army to go to Ireland. But what he meant by neutralization was something more than just parliamentary defeat. So in December 1641 Charles, enthusiastically abetted by Lord George Digby, whose family castle at Sherborne was just a few miles from the Puritan citadel of Dorchester, systematically set about planning a
coup d'état.
The Earl of Essex's men – mostly trained bands from the City – who were guarding the approaches to parliament were replaced by Westminster troopers from the dependably royalist Earl of Dorset's regiment. For the first time the mutually derogatory epithets of' Roundheads' (for the departing apprentices) and ‘Cavaliers' (for the incoming guards) became part of the vocabulary of reciprocal hatred. Some sort of civil war had already started. The Warden of the Tower, right in the centre of the most riotously pro-parliamentary streets of the City, was likewise replaced with the notoriously brutal soldiers of Colonel Lunsford's regiment.

And all this, of course, was exactly what Pym wanted. Since Charles's return from Scotland it had been Pym, not the king, who had been forced on the defensive. The failure of the Remonstrance had made this worse. But now, Charles's transparent and laborious plans for a strike against the integrity of parliament itself had miraculously played right into his hands. Had he himself written the script by which the king suddenly stood revealed not as a reasonable reformer but as a military conspirator Pym could hardly have improved on Charles's own performance. (The queen, as always, helped.) On 3 January 1642 five members of the Commons – Pym, Hampden, Holles, Haselrig and William Strode – together with Viscount Mandeville, were formally charged with impeachment by the Attorney General in the House of Lords. Their immediate arrest (carefully following the procedure used against Strafford and Laud) was demanded. Both houses of parliament made it clear that they would not surrender the accused, but articles charging the six with subverting the fundamental laws of the realm were now made public. If by now Pym, Holles and the rest were not sure of what was coming, the forced search of their houses gave them a pretty good idea. Charles must have felt confident – with control of the areas around both parliament and the Tower – that everything was in place for his strike.

Forewarned by spies at court, Pym and his friends were themselves playing with fire. They could have disappeared to safety on the night of 3–4 January, but they actually wanted the king to come and get them, exposing himself, unequivocally, as the violator of the independence of
parliament. So on the morning of 4 January there they were in the Commons, informed by Lady Carlisle and other spies, of the king's progress from Whitehall. Once they were sure he was on his way, they made their departure. At the last minute William Strode, in a fit of misplaced bravura, nearly wrecked the strategy by announcing that he would rather like to stay and confront the king in person, and he had to be dragged off to the barge waiting to convey the members downstream to the City.

The famous scene played itself out: intruding tyrant versus absent champions of the people. No king had ever before presumed to intimidate the Commons with a display of armed force. The king arrived with a small personal guard, George Digby making sure that the door was left open with a clear view of the soldiers standing guard outside. Before long, the courtyard outside the parliament house was packed with anxious crowds. Doffing his hat in a gesture of respect, Charles asked politely for the use of the Speaker's chair, duly surrendered to him. He then asked for the accused to be delivered up. Silence. When Charles asked Speaker Lenthall to point out Pym and the others, Lenthall replied in the precise terms that Denzil Holles had forced on the terrified Finch in 1629: he had ‘neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me'. As it had always been, this was a drama of long political memories. Charles replied that he had eyes to see for himself and what he saw was that ‘the birds are flown'. A huge caesura, full of silent rage, foolishness and foreboding, hung over the house. The embarrassed king, roiling in chagrin, departed whence he came, shouts of ‘Privilege, privilege' following him through the door.

It was an unmitigated fiasco. The gamble had been worthwhile only if Charles could be absolutely sure of success. In abject failure he now stood nakedly exposed (just as Pym had wanted) as something worse than a despot – a blundering despot. With the abortive arrest of the MPs disappeared the last possibilities of constructing something like a moderate consensus for a reformed but sovereign monarchy. When the king demanded that the city yield up the accused, parliament responded by appointing a professional soldier and veteran of the European wars, Philip Skippon, to command the London militia and by declaring that anyone assisting the assault on parliament and its members was guilty of capital treason. London was, in any case, in uproar. On 11 January, Pym, Holles and the rest emerged to a delirious celebration, in which they appeared to the cheering crowds on a festive Thames barge. Court and government swiftly self-liquidated. Catcalls of ‘privilege' hounded anyone recognized as having a court connection. Charles skulked around the periphery of
London – at Hampton Court, Windsor, Greenwich – trying to find some way back to the moderate position he had already thrown away. But there was no way back. Contingency plans for outright conflict were now, in effect, operational. The queen was sent off to The Hague to pawn the crown jewels so as to fund an army. Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the king's twenty-two-year-old nephew, the laughing Cavalier himself, complete with a toy poodle called Boy, suddenly materialized at court. Preparations were made to try to secure key arsenals and ports. The king turned north, where he believed his best chance of rallying his forces lay. At Newmarket he was asked if he would agree to the militia being transferred to parliament's control for a limited time. ‘By God, not for an hour,' was the answer. ‘You have asked that of me in this which was never asked of a King and with which I will not trust my wife and children.'

What followed accelerated the likelihood, if not the certainty, of armed conflict. Since the king continued to refuse to sign the Militia Bill, its provisions were enacted unilaterally as an ordinance, transferring to parliament the right to commandeer men and munitions, and enabling it to appoint lord-lieutenants and deputy lieutenants in the counties to see to the execution of the orders. From his transplanted court at York the king countered by declaring anyone obeying those illegitimate officers to be guilty of treason. Invoking an ancient Lancastrian form of feudal mobilization, he then appointed his own ‘Commissions of Array' in each shire to supply men to defend the Crown.

In its declaration to the king parliament had, for the first time, formally accused him of conspiring to wage ‘civil war' against his own subjects, The words were out. They could not be unsaid. But even Puritan parliamentarians, like Bulstrode Whitelocke, were momentarily unnerved that actual bloodshed now seemed so near. The country, he told parliament, had ‘insensibly slid into this beginning of a Civil War by one unexpected Accident after another, as Waves of the Sea, which have brought us thus far: And we scarce know how, but from Paper Combats, by Declarations, Remonstrances, Protestations, Votes, Messages, Answers and Replies: We are now come to the question of raising of Forces. ‘There was one last chance at settlement, when parliament delivered its ‘Nineteen Propositions' to the king at York. But they were more a clarification of its own ideas on the future of England's government than any kind of negotiating position, since they included things they knew the king could not possibly concede, like parliamentary control over the education and marriage of his children, the vigorous prosecution of all Catholics (which would include his wife) and the transfer of all ports, forts and castles to their officers. The fact was that parliament, along with Pym, now simply
believed that Charles, together with the Irish, was committed to an English Counter-Reformation. So until he was made harmless they would put the monarchy out of commission – forcing it to exercise its powers through committees – creating, in effect, a parliamentary regency, as if he had become insane.

With that last hope gone, the months ahead were dominated by a scramble to secure martial assets – plate, money, guns, powder, horses and hay – so as to be best placed when hostilities actually began. At the same time attempts were made to sway the undecided. The showers of propaganda sheets now became downpours. The royal printing press had been prudently taken to York so that the work of influencing the north could proceed apace. A battle of the Mercuries took place with the parliamentary newspaper, the
Mercurius Civicus,
answered and satirized by the royalist
Mercurius Aulicus.
And beneath the anathemas and the requisitioning something profoundly sad was happening: the Balkanization of England, not in the sense of its fracturing into coherent, warring regions (for there were virtually none), but in the collapse of communities and institutions – parishes and counties – which, despite differing sentiments and religious beliefs, had none the less managed to contain those conflicts in the interests of local peace and justice. Doubtless there must have been many places where the choice of allegiance was unthinking or even involuntary. Men and women followed habit, prejudice, their landlord, their preacher. And there were certainly those like Robert and Brilliana Harley on the one side and Viscount Scudamore on the other for whom the choice was pretty much a foregone conclusion. Just what they did about it, of course, was another matter. (Surprisingly, Scudamore showed himself to be a rather tepid royalist when the time came for action.) And there must have been many more, like poor Thomas Knyvett, a Norfolk landowner, whose purposefulness was not at all equal to his predicament. ‘O sweete hart,' he wrote to his wife, ‘I am nowe in a greate strayght what to doe.' Walking in Westminster he had run into Sir John Potts, who had presented him with his commission from the Earl of Warwick to raise a company for parliament. ‘I was surpris'd what to doe, whether to take or refuse. 'Twas no place to dispute, so I tooke it and desierd som' time to Advise upon it. I had not receiv'd this many howers, but I met with a declaration point Blanck against it by the King.' Richard Atkyns, then twenty-seven years old and living in strongly parliamentary Gloucester, believed that no one who had heard the trial of Strafford and ‘weighed the concessions of the King' could be against him, but that ‘fears, and jealousies, had so generally possessed the kingdom, that a man could hardly travel through any market town, but he should be asked whether he were for the King, or parliament'.

What is truly extraordinary about the spring and summer of 1642 is the wealth of evidence testifying to the agonies of allegiance, the painful rigour with which many thoughtful souls pondered the weightiest question of their lives and how earnestly and honestly they endeavoured to justify their decisions to their friends, their family and themselves. Different men and women reached their point of no return at different moments in the great crisis, which had been gathering head since the opening of the Long Parliament. Cornwall – which is often thought of, not altogether wrongly, as an especially cohesive community – was shattered right down the middle. For the two leading figures among the Cornish Members of Parliament, who had travelled to London optimistically expectant of peaceful reform, it had been their responses to Strafford's attainder that had separated them. Sir Bevil Grenville was the grandson of the pirate-patriot sea captain Richard Grenville, but after his education at Exeter College, Oxford, he became the very paragon of a learned, energetic country gentleman, devoted to his wife, children and land (in that order), an experimenter with new techniques for tin smelting, a breeder of Barbary stallions and a life-long enthusiast of classical history, philosophy and poetry. In 1626 he had been among the fiercest Cornish critics of the forced loan, had turned out his freeholders on behalf of Sir John Eliot and William Coryton and had been devastated by Eliot's death in the Tower. But in 1641 he was appalled at the attainder of Strafford, seeing it as the kind of naked manipulation of justice he had attacked when it was practised by the court. Grenville was one of eight MPs from Cornwall (including Coryton) who voted ‘nay' and who tried to persuade Sir Alexander Carew to follow their example. ‘Pray, Sir,' wrote Grenville to Carew, ‘let it not be said that any member of our county should have a hand in this ominous business and therefore pray give your vote against the Bill.' Carew's reply was unclouded by equivocation (and would come to haunt him in the years that followed before his execution in 1644): ‘If I were sure to be the next man on the scaffold with the same axe, I would give my consent to the passing of it.' Others in Cornwall who had long been friends, and had lived in mutual amity and respect, now divided: Sir Francis Godolphin of Godolphin (and his son, the poet Sidney) for the king; Sir Francis Godolphin of Trevneague for parliament.