Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (16 page)

Any assessment of whether or not Charles I’s regime could have survived must begin with its ability to resist, or at least to neutralise, potential sources of political coercion.
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And in England - the richest and most populous of Charles I’s three kingdoms - possible sources of coercion were few and far between. Charles was the beneficiary of the ‘demilitarisation’ of the nobility, a process which had been virtually complete by the time of his accession in 1625. Rapid technological change in armaments and the techniques of warfare during the sixteenth century had rendered the old aristocratic arsenals redundant.
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The fiasco of the Essex rebellion in 1601 marked, in Conrad Russell’s phrase, ‘the moment when the threat of force ceased to be a significant weapon in English politics’.
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If there were those during the 1630s who wanted to coerce Charles I, they had to resign themselves to the fact that the means to do so were unlikely to be provided by his English subjects - however unpopular the regime might become.
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If Charles I was not merely to be challenged, but coerced, then the means to do so had to be found outside England. Ireland - from 1633 under the iron rule of Lord Deputy Wentworth (the future Earl of Strafford) - was occasionally troublesome, but posed no immediate threat of armed resistance to the crown.
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Only in Scotland, which still remained virtually untouched by the ‘military revolution’, and where large arsenals remained in private hands, was there the possibility that the King’s subjects could raise a private military force against the regime. Without the Covenanters’ military successes in 1639 and 1640, and collusion between the victorious Scots and Charles’s English opponents during 1640 and 1641, the Long Parliament would have been as powerless to bend the King to its will as any of its predecessors had been.
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Had Scotland been defeated in 1639, the chances that Charles could have been coerced by his subjects would have been remote indeed.

But, if further armed revolt seemed unlikely in the event of a royal victory in 1639, there were other, potentially more insidious challenges which the regime would have had to confront. Two developments in English political culture, it is frequently argued, would have constituted insuperable obstacles to the policies of the Personal Rule: first, the rise of revolutionary Puritanism - which was to reach its zenith in the 1640s; and, second, the groundswell of legal and constitutionalist objections to ‘arbitrary government’ - the whole repertory of non-parliamentary exactions, from ship money to forest fines, the powers of Star Chamber and the prerogative courts, and the crown’s high-handed indifference to the subject’s liberties and the traditions of the common law.
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The force which perhaps did more than any other to destabilise English society during the late 1630s and early 1640s was the fear that government and the Church of England were about to succumb to some form of Popish plot.
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In the immediate context of the last years of the Personal Rule, subventions from English Catholics to assist the war-effort in 1639 and the reception of Papal emissaries at court helped give substance to rumours of Catholic infiltration - tales which grew ever more extravagant in the telling.
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Without the succession of anti-Popish scares and scandals of 1639-41, it is all but inconceivable that the political temperature at Westminster (and in the provinces) could ever have risen to the levels at which civil war became a possibility.
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Yet the extensiveness and plausibility of this Popish threat was conditioned at least as much by events in contemporary Europe as by any perceptions of the Caroline court and Privy Council at home. Reports of the disasters befalling Protestants in the Thirty Years’ War inevitably coloured English assessments of the threat posed by indigenous Catholic conspiracies, endowing them with a menace out of all proportion to their actual threat. If the Habsburgs and their Spanish allies were to triumph in Europe, so the argument ran, the fate of Protestantism in England would hang precariously in the balance. To many committed English Protestants, the Thirty Years’ War was an apocalyptic struggle, a contest between the Antichrist and the righteous: the actual historical playing out of the battle between St Michael and the Antichrist foretold in the Book of Revelation - and regarded as such not just by Puritan zealots, but also by such ‘mainstream’ English Protestants as Archbishop Abbot (Laud’s predecessor at Canterbury).
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The Scottish crises of 1639 and 1640 (and the Parliaments which they called into being) thus coincided with a time when the Thirty Years’ War was nearing its climax, and when English apprehensions of Catholic militancy in Europe were as intense as they had been perhaps at any point since the Armada.

Yet if the English elite was at its most jittery about Habsburg belligerence during the late 1630s and early 1640s - and at its most susceptible to tales of Popish Fifth Columnists at home - there was a marked decline in the perceived level of threat from the early 1640s. The reduction continued steadily into the 1650s. Spain, once the most terrifying of the Catholic powers, was beset by internal rebellion in 1640; the Habsburg armies were smashed by Condé at Rocroi in 1643 (thereby abruptly losing their reputation for military invincibility); and by the mid-1640s the crusade to reimpose Catholicism in Europe had manifestly run out of steam. By 1648, the war was over.

Had Charles’s regime withstood the immediate storms of the late 1630s, it should have benefited handsomely from the improved state of confessional politics in Europe, where, by the mid-1640s (and for the first time in the last quarter of a century), the survival of Protestantism seemed assured. As Professor Hirst has argued, this apocalyptic fear of militant Catholicism was one of the major influences sustaining Puritan militancy in England during the mid-seventeenth century. As the Catholic threat receded, ‘the spectre of Antichrist dwindled’, and ‘the waning of anti-Catholicism ... helped sap reformist zeal’. By the late 1640s and 1650s, the claim that Protestantism was about to be devoured by the Catholic Leviathan rang distinctly hollow - a change in circumstances which contributed heavily to the ‘failure of godly rule’ during the 1650s.
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Under a Caroline government during the 1640s and 1650s, and without the zealous support afforded by both the Long Parliament and the Cromwellian regime, Puritanism’s ‘failure’ might well have come yet faster still.

Other influences seem likely, with time, to have weakened the ranks of Charles I’s opponents. Many of the regime’s leading critics were ageing men by the 1640s. Not all had the antiquity of that hoary old Elizabethan, the Earl of Mulgrave - one of the Twelve Petitioning Peers of August 1640 who called on Charles to convene the Long Parliament and whose proxy vote enabled the creation of the New Model Army in 1645: he had actually captained a ship in 1588 against the Spanish Armada. But the overwhelming majority of Charles’s most influential adversaries belonged to the generation which had been born during the 1580s and 1590s - when the threat that English Protestantism might be extinguished by Habsburg Spain was imminent and real. Their religious outlook had been formed in the decades between 1590 and 1620 - the apogee of Calvinist influence on the theology of the English church. But by 1640 some of the most articulate (and, from Charles’s perspective, the most mettlesome) of that generation were already dead: Sir John Eliot, who had been imprisoned after the dissolution in 1629, died in 1632 (no doubt hastened to the grave by the conditions of his incarceration); Sir Edward Coke (b. 1552), the legal sage who had caused the King such difficulties in the parliaments of the 1620s, died in 1634; Sir Nathaniel Rich, another trenchant critic of Charles’s government who ‘might well have emerged as the leader of the Parliamentarians’, died in 1636.
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Others were dead by the mid-1640s: Bedford (b. 1593), the lynchpin of the aristocratic coalition against the King in 1640, died in 1641; John Pym in 1643; William Strode in 1645; Essex (b. 1591), Parliament’s commander-in-chief during the first years of the Civil War, in 1646. Indeed, of the Twelve Petitioning Peers of 1640, the vanguard of the movement to recall Parliament, no less than half were dead by 1646 - all but one of natural causes.
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In 1639, Charles was still a monarch in his thirties; time was rapidly thinning the ranks of his leading critics. As Sir Keith Felling once observed, ‘While there’s death, there’s hope.’ And in this respect the Caroline regime - had it successfully weathered the Scottish crisis - had much to be hopeful about.

A rather sharper light is thrown on the relation between age and attitudes towards the Caroline regime if we turn to the detailed statistics for the 1640s House of Commons. Taking the 538 members of the Commons whose allegiances can be known, a marked pattern emerges. ‘It is at once clear that in every region the Royalists were younger men than the Parliamentarians,’ Brunton and Pennington concluded in their classic study of 1954. ‘The median ages of the two parties for the whole country have been worked out at thirty-six and forty-seven respectively - a very large difference.’
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Thus - in the Commons at least - Charles’s opponents belonged predominantly to the (relatively elderly) generation of the 1580s and 1590s. Conversely, support for the King came disproportionately from the generation still in their thirties - those brought up in the years of the ‘Jacobean Peace’, when the crown pursued a policy of conciliation, if not quite amity, with Spain. A generation gap of almost eleven years - a huge gulf in a society where life expectancy was relatively low - separated those who went to war against Charles I from the younger generation which rallied to defend the royalist cause. The median age of the Twelve Peers who petitioned for a Parliament in 1640 was even older, with the most senior (Rutland and Mulgrave) being sixty and seventy-four respectively. An almost identical disparity between the ages of Parliamentarians and royalists can be found among the ranks of the peerage as a whole.
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A similar pattern also emerges from an examination of responses to the Caroline regime among those attending the universities during the 1630s - though here the statistical evidence is patchier still. In so far as the universities offer clues to the religious sensibilities of those under thirty, the age-group which included not only the undergraduates but also many of the college fellows, the general picture in the universities is one not just of forced compliance with the ‘Laudian innovations’ of the 1630s, but of willing acquiescence - even, at times, positive enthusiasm - and a strengthening of loyalty to the crown. In Oxford, where Laud was an active and interventionist chancellor between 1630 and 1641, the university emerged at the end of the decade, in Professor Sharpe’s phrase, as the ‘stronghold of church and crown’. When the Long Parliament divided between Cavaliers and Roundheads in 1642, ‘most of those Oxford men who had matriculated during Laud’s chancellorship supported the monarchy’.
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In Cambridge, the picture was similar: by the early 1640s, ‘the university was overtly royalist’.
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Laudian ecclesiastical ‘innovations’ seem to have found an extensive constituency of support. In 1641, a Commons committee, chaired by the godly Sir Robert Harley, investigated the goings-on at the university during the 1630s and revealed ‘an interest in catholic tradition, clearly shared by many [at the university]’ which went far beyond the liturgical innovations which even Laud required.
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Old-style Calvinism was not only erroneous in the eyes of the new Laudians; it was passé. As that baffled champion of Calvinism, Stephen Marshall, put it to the Long Parliament in 1641, it was ‘as if we were weary of the truth which God has committed to us’.
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To perhaps the majority of undergraduates during the 1630s, the handful of ‘Puritan’ colleges which remained - pre-eminently Emmanuel and Sidney Sussex at Cambridge - seemed not so much intimidating seminaries of sedition as quaintly old-fashioned backwaters, places where conservative fathers could ensure that sons were tutored in the divinity fashionable, twenty years before, in their youth. Yet even Emmanuel undergraduates, the Commons investigators of 1641 were appalled to find, were slipping out to taste the forbidden pleasures of chapel in the ultra-Laudian Peterhouse.
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By 1639, Laudianism in Cambridge ‘was in a commanding position. Complete dominance was only a matter of time.’
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Inferences from such necessarily imperfect data must be treated with the greatest caution.
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In the case of the figures for age and allegiance within Parliament, there are interpretative problems in using information about allegiances in 1642 to suggest attitudes towards the regime three years earlier, in 1639 - not least because support for the King in the Civil War cannot be read as implying support for the regime’s policies during the 1630s.
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The averaging out of ages conceals the fact that there were, of course, younger men on the parliamentarian side - the likes of Brooke or Mandeville, still in their thirties in 1640 - who might have been a thorn in the regime’s side for several decades to come. Similarly, the evidence for allegiance in the 1640s offers, at best, only a crude indication of the political nation’s attitudes during the last years of the Personal Rule. But if the disparity in age and attitudes towards the regime evident among the 500-odd members of Commons was even very roughly representative of trends within the nation at large, then the political implications were substantial - a conclusion which acquires additional force when viewed against the distribution of age-groups within society as a whole.

Between 1631 and 1641, the distribution of age-groups within the English and Welsh population remained roughly constant; those under thirty accounted for almost 60 per cent of the population; and roughly a third of the population were children aged under fifteen.
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In 1640, half the population (49.7 per cent) had been born after 1616, and thus had been aged nine or younger when Charles I acceded to the throne in 1625. Or to put this in terms of political experience: in 1640 fully one-third of the population had known no other king but Charles. And, for this third of the population, even such recent events as the controversies over the 1628 Petition of Right probably seemed relatively distant - they had been aged four or younger when Charles had dissolved his most recent Parliament in 1629. Had Charles I’s rule without reference to Parliament continued at least as long as his actual life - until 1649 - England would have been a country in which more than half the nation had no direct experience or recollection of Parliament. This was a gulf not only of politics, but of memory, and one which is likely to have had a profound effect upon the way in which the regime’s ‘innovations’, in government as well as in the church, were perceived.