The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (44 page)

Angry messages flew back and forth across the border from a newly created committee of prominent Scotsmen led by the Earl of Argyll and the Earl of Montrose. Known as the Tables it became in effect the government of Scotland, committed to protecting Scots Presbyterianism. Although Charles now withdrew the prayer book, it was too late. A General Assembly of the Church had met at Glasgow, abolished the bishops whom James had introduced and Charles had reinforced, and declared that the king had no right to interfere in the Church of Scotland. It paid no attention to Charles’s order from London that the Assembly was to dissolve itself.

A more sensible king would have backed off at this point but Charles was infuriated by the challenge to the royal authority by Scottish subjects. To him there was no question but that he must go to war against the Scots, and the standoff between himself and the Scots in the summer of 1639 is called the First Bishops’ War. But since he had no army and no Parliament to raise money for one, he could only appeal to the ancient hatred of the English for the Scots, and the angry mood the English were in meant he raised very few that way. He was rapidly forced to make peace, and by the Treaty of Berwick he allowed a free parliament and General Assembly of the Church to thrash out their discontents.

But when it became clear that the Scots still had no intention of deviating from their course of maintaining the Covenant, abolishing the prayer book and getting rid of the bishops, for Charles the issue meant war. He dissolved their gatherings and recalled Wentworth (newly created Earl of Strafford) from Ireland. Strafford nobly lent the king a great deal of money of his own and managed to convince him that the only way he could raise enough money to fight the Scots was by recalling Parliament. In April 1640 the first Parliament for eleven years came together. Charles had hoped to use the Scottish threat of invasion to make MPs do his bidding. But having been denied free speech for so long, the Commons was not in the mood for obedience. Strafford counselled the king to listen to its demands and, in particular, to end ship money. But after three weeks Charles dismissed what is known as the Short Parliament and began the Second Bishops’ War.

Without the money from Parliament to raise a proper army, the king had to rely on borrowing more money from friends. The Second Bishops’ War ended in a rout, with the Scots army camped in the northern English counties as far south as Newcastle. With general disaffection throughout England, the king was eventually forced to make a very expensive truce with the Scots. He had to pay them the then enormous sum of £25,000, and to summon a new Parliament to meet on 3 November 1640.

The Long Parliament as it was called would endure in various guises for the next twenty years. Given the continued presence of the Scots army in Northumberland and Durham–with which it is almost certain Pym was secretly in communication–the king was powerless. Unless he made concessions to Parliament and thus could raise money for an army to drive out the Scots, they would advance further into England. In the first session both the pillars of Charles’s government, Strafford and Laud, were arrested for treason and impeached–Laud was accused of conspiring illegally to return the Church of England to Rome and Strafford of plotting to overthrow Parliamentary government.

While the Lords hesitated over whether Strafford could really be said to have committed treason when treason was a crime against the king and Strafford was the king’s faithful minister, the Commons saw that the trial might end in Strafford being released and the slippery king get away again. One of the more violent Puritans, Sir Arthur Hazelrigg, jumped to his feet and demanded a Bill of Attainder against Strafford–in other words, that he be condemned to death without trial. Although the Lords hesitated again, the discovery of an apparent plot by the king and queen to ask the northern army to save Strafford hastened his end. Hysteria was rising uncontrollably in London, encouraged by Pym. He announced that Queen Henrietta Maria had sent for French soldiers who would shortly be landing at Portsmouth.

Throughout the proceedings against him Strafford had kept his head, urging the king to counter-attack by impeaching the Puritan leaders for their treasonous letters to the Scots Covenanters. But the king was apparently paralysed by the awfulness of his predicament. He sat watching Strafford’s trial, staring vacantly into space for much of the time, his face working nervously. Beside him was his son, the ten-year-old Prince of Wales. As the City of London trained armed bands for the coming crisis, and Parliament passed the Attainder against Strafford, Charles hesitated.

He alone could have saved his devoted servant from these trumped-up charges by refusing to sign the bill. Perhaps he should have done so, because he had constantly assured Strafford that he should have no fear, that he would never be executed because the king would protect him. Ever the good servant, Strafford wrote to the king saying that he would willingly forgive him for his death, ‘if it leads to better times’. Secretly he never really thought it would come to it. But with violent men patrolling the streets and fears for his wife and children, Charles made his decision. He threw Strafford to the lions. The king had already offered never to employ Strafford in a confidential capacity again and had even suggested life imprisonment, but now he signed the Attainder.

Charles never forgave himself for it and believed that his subsequent ill luck was the result of his betrayal. He even sent the young Prince of Wales with a message down to Westminster after he had signed the Attainder, pleading for Strafford’s life. But it was too late. Strafford shook his head with disbelief when he heard that he was to die. As he went out to his execution at Tower Hill on 12 May 1641, he was heard to say, ‘Put not your trust in princes.’ Imprisoned in the Tower Archbishop Laud heard the drum roll and then the sudden thud as Strafford was beheaded in front of 200,000 people. He wrote bitterly that Charles was a prince ‘who knew not how to be or to be made great’. But as one contemptuous Puritan remarked brutally, ‘Stone dead hath no fellow,’ and that summed up the reactions of the Puritans in the House of Commons.

Robbed of his two chief counsellors, the king had to rely on the bad advice of the politically inept Queen Henrietta Maria. As a foreigner she was incapable of appreciating that the Long Parliament was becoming the senior partner in government throughout 1641. Now that Strafford was dead and Laud as good as, the Commons concentrated on destroying all the instruments of government Charles had used during what was described as the eleven-year tyranny. The judges who in 1629 had pronounced forced loans to be legal were committed for trial. All the king’s methods of raising taxes without Parliament such as ship money, tonnage and poundage were pronounced illegal and unconstitutional. All the prerogative courts were destroyed, the Star Chamber, the Council of the North and the hated Court of High Commission. Prynne was released, without his ears but otherwise hale and hearty. By the Triennial Act, it was ordered that no more than three years should elapse between Parliaments and elections were to be held whether the king had summoned Parliament or not.

However, when by the Root and Branch Bill the Commons set about removing the bishops from the Church of England and substituting in their place a Presbyterian system of Church government consisting of lay elders, a royalist party began to emerge, led by the lawyer Edward Hyde (the future historian Lord Clarendon) and Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland. Now that Charles’s worst abuses of power had been removed, the more moderate members of Parliament did not want what was becoming a revolution to be taken any further. The royalist party were offended by the Puritans’ hatred of tradition, their joylessness and their contempt for anything elaborate, whether it was clothes, manners, books or religion. Of course the Puritan party numbered great poets and thinkers among them, such as John Milton, arguably England’s greatest poet. But a considerable proportion were also uneducated people who feared what they could not understand. English people who valued their cultural heritage became uneasy that much that was of value built up over many centuries could be destroyed by destructive zealots.

But, despite the development of a royal party in Parliament, it was rapidly becoming evident that Charles had no real interest in ruling through Parliament and observing the rules of the game. During the Parliamentary recess in the summer of 1641 he rushed off to Scotland, intending to persuade the Scots and their army to come in on his side and mount a coup in England. But he fell foul of infighting among the Scottish nobility, and succeeded only in increasing suspicion of himself even among the royalists.

Then the real crisis began. With Strafford dead, the Catholic Irish realized that the time was ripe for a rebellion and massacred the Protestant settlers in Northern Ireland. On 23 November 1641 the dispossessed landowners, the Norman Irish and the ancient Celtic Irish, turned on the English colonists, driving them off their lands and destroying the system of ‘thorough’ in Ireland. Although the numbers killed were exaggerated thanks to anti-Catholic hysteria, the Parliamentary party interpreted the rising as the first action of an Irish Catholic army about to invade England on behalf of the king.

The Irish rebellion raised the stakes of the game at Westminster considerably. An army now had to be mustered to put it down, and that army could not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands–that is, used against the Parliamentarians by the king. Vicious rumours were sweeping the capital: not only had the king and queen inspired the massacre, but the foreign queen was in touch with Catholic powers abroad. She was said to have authorized them to send armies to invade England and crush Protestantism. In an atmosphere of acute tension and distrust Parliament, led by Pym, agitated for further revolutionary changes. To rally his followers against Hyde’s and Falkland’s royalist party, that same November Pym issued the Grand Remonstrance, which listed all Charles I’s crimes to date and accused him of a ‘malignant design to subvert the fundamental laws and principles of government’. The document went on to demand the power to vet the king’s ministers and to call for a Presbyterian Church settlement.

Fortunately for Charles, like the Root and Branch Bill the Grand Remonstrance gained him more friends. The royalist or constitutional party now consisted of almost half of the Commons. At the end of November 1641 the Grand Remonstrance was passed in the House of Commons by a mere eleven votes and was probably far too revolutionary to get through the Lords. But at the beginning of January 1642 Charles spoilt all by trying to arrest the most prominent members of the Parliamentary party–five MPs (Pym, Hampden, Holles, Hazelrigg and Strode) and Lord Mandeville. Evidently the leopard had not changed his spots. Charles had not really repented his bad old ways and had become over-confident again when he saw that support for him against the extremism of Pym was growing.

In fairness to Charles, Pym was hardly playing strictly by the constitutional rule book himself. A rowdy mob was permanently in attendance outside the Houses of Parliament menacing anyone who was not for Pym. Pym was unwilling to restore safety to the streets because the pressure of the mob would help him achieve his aims. Charles had been secretly warned that Parliament was about to impeach Queen Henrietta Maria for inciting the Irish massacre and conspiring against the people. Where there was impeachment there might well be attainder. That is why on 3 January 1642 Charles struck first. He accused the five MPs and Lord Mandeville of high treason. But neither House of Parliament would arrest them, claiming that the king was encroaching on their privileges. When she heard this, Henrietta Maria is supposed to have shouted at her husband, ‘Go, you coward, and pull these rogues out by the ears, or never see my face more.’ But when Charles broke all precedent and marched to Parliament with several hundred soldiers to arrest them, he found, as he said, that ‘all the birds were flown’. They had escaped to the walled City of London where they were protected by citizen train-bands and sailors from the port.

The train-bands then moved to surround Parliament, so that within a week the five MPs had returned to their seats in the Commons. On 10 January, having learned that the Commons was about to arrest the queen for treason, Charles and the royal family abandoned the royal palace of Whitehall and fled like thieves in the night to Hampton Court, to Windsor, to Canterbury and finally to the port of Dover. The king would not be seen at Whitehall again until another January seven years later when he stepped out from the Banqueting Hall to be executed.

From Dover on 23 February Queen Henrietta Maria left the country, taking with her the magnificent crown jewels which she intended to pawn in Holland to pay for an army to rescue her husband. With her was her eldest daughter, the Princess Mary, who had been married by proxy to the important Dutch ruler William II of Orange the year before. They were to seek refuge with her husband. Meanwhile Charles set about rallying support in the country, for clearly there was to be no going back.

War was declared six months later on 22 August. In the intervening months Charles had made some attempts to achieve consensus with Parliament–he had even signed a bill removing bishops from the House of Lords. The Militia Bill, which was to remove royal control of the army, and the Nineteen Propositions, which sought to restrict royal power so that the king would be ruler in name only, were the last straw. Charles saw that the only way to save his throne was by war. But his attempts to seize a great cache of arms stored at Hull and to commandeer the fleet both failed: the fleet was thoroughly pro-Parliament, as was the governor of Hull.

Charles meanwhile retreated north to York, and in June sent out directions to all his loyal supporters and friends across England to call out their local militia on his behalf. In the north and west men armed themselves as they had never done before and came out for the king. But all over the south and east an equal number of men, such as the MP Oliver Cromwell, a Cambridge squire who would have left England for America had not the Grand Remonstrance passed, also called their horses in from the plough and armed themselves to the teeth.