Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (18 page)

Among Charles’s councillors, the repercussions of a victory in 1639 would have been extensive. The immediate beneficiaries would have been the architects of the royal victory: the circle within the Privy Council who supported the King’s decision to go to war and who were most intimately involved in the planning and execution of the campaign against the Scots - none more so than the Marquess of Hamilton, the Earl of Arundel and Sir Henry Vane, the men whom the King described in April 1639 as the only counsellors who enjoyed his complete trust.
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Hamilton, Charles’s most loyal lieutenant in Scotland ever since the first signs of ‘rebellion’ in Edinburgh in 1637, stood to gain most. With his exalted rank, vast Scottish estates and polished English manners, Hamilton enjoyed an easy intimacy with the King, and was set to occupy an unrivalled position at the Whitehall court. Indeed, Hamilton was perhaps as close as Charles came to finding a surrogate for the murdered Duke of Buckingham (whose office as Master of the Horse passed to Hamilton on the Duke’s death in 1628). His ’credit and power with the king’ was reported to have increased markedly in January 1639, ‘since his late employments into Scotland’; by December 1640, he was described as having ‘sole power with the king’.
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In the event of a Covenanter defeat in 1639, Hamilton’s position at court (and in the King’s affections) would have been unassailable.

The major institution to lose out as a result of the victory - other than Parliament itself - would have been the English Privy Council. It had already been effectively sidelined in the planning of the King’s response to the Scottish crisis on the ground that its jurisdiction did not extend north of the Tweed. Its deliberative role - the business of offering advice to the King - is likely to have been increasingly weakened. Responsibility for the ‘imperial’ aspects of government - those matters which concerned all three kingdoms - would probably have been consolidated in the hands of a small group of trusted confidants chosen by the King, including Laud, Arundel, Hamilton, Sir Henry Vane the elder and probably the Bedchamber men Patrick Maule, George Kirke and Will Morray. This process had already begun during the crisis of 1637-9.
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Yet there are strong grounds for thinking that this trend towards a more authoritarian royal government in the event of a victory in 1639 would have been tempered by countervailing influences at court which were themselves the consequences of the Scots’ defeat.
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Many of those at court whose status would have been enhanced by a royal victory in 1639 were on close terms with the ‘discourted’ aristocratic leadership of ‘country’ opinion during the 1630s. Hamilton’s circle included Viscount Saye and Sele (the initiator of the legal challenge, subsequently taken over by Hampden, to ship money), and was shortly to include Viscount Mandeville (later Cromwell’s commanding officer in the Eastern Association), Sir John Danvers (a future regicide) and members of the Covenanter leadership in Scotland.
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Indeed, Hamilton’s openness to discussion with the regime’s critics caused his loyalty to come under suspicion in some ultra-royalist circles during 1639, precisely ‘because of some private correspondence which his lordship keeps with the ring leaders of the Covenanters’ faction’.
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So, too, with the other major
dramatis personae
of 1639. The Earl of Arundel, the Lord General in the 1639 campaign, was second only to Hamilton in the trio of counsellors who, Charles declared, exclusively enjoyed his trust. Yet Arundel had been Buckingham’s arch-enemy during the 1620s, and was widely regarded as a champion of the privileges of the ‘ancient nobility’ - the pre-Stuart peerage, from whose ranks the noble opposition to Charles was largely drawn.
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Even closer to the regime’s critics were Arundel’s two field commanders, the Earls of Holland (the General of the Horse) and Essex (Arundel’s lieutenant-general), both of whom were identified with patronage of the ‘godly’ cause.
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Holland, the younger brother of the ‘Puritan’ 2nd Earl of Warwick, was detested by Laud for his interventions on behalf of Non-Conformist ministers threatened by the ecclesiastical authorities ; his brother Warwick was an intimate of the circle which included such critics of the regime as the Earl of Bedford, Viscount Saye, Lord Brooke, John Pym, and Oliver St John. A military victory in 1639 would also have consolidated the Earl of Essex’s position at court, where Holland (his first cousin) had worked hard to restore him to the King’s favour.
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As the son of the popular Elizabethan hero executed for the abortive coup of 1601, Essex was the closest England came to having a living Protestant hero.

Just as defeat forced the King into the promotion of policies and personnel during 1640 which gave substance to the damaging libel that there was a ‘Popish conspiracy’ afoot at court (Arundel, Essex and Holland were dismissed from their commands, and negotiations begun to secure loans from the Papacy), so a victory would have removed many of the factors which enabled such rumours to take hold. Holland, Essex and Hamilton (that ‘zealous enemy to Popery’)
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were men of impeccable Protestant credentials. Holland and Essex had both seen service in Europe on the Protestant side against the Habsburgs; and Hamilton had actually campaigned with the sainted Protestant hero of the Thirty Years’ War, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1631 - when his closest ally at court had been Sir Henry Vane, the Comptroller of the King’s Household, and in 1639 the third member of the group Charles referred to as his ‘most trusted counsellors’.
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Their enhanced standing would probably have served as a counterbalance to the increased influence of Catholics at court in the aftermath of a royal victory in 1639, and have lessened the credibility that could be given to claims that the court was in the grip of a Popish plot. Charles might well have continued to deal courteously with Papal envoys;
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but the humiliating need to negotiate with them in the hope of financial subventions from Rome would have gone - and, with it, the danger to the public image of the monarchy which such negotiations obviously entailed.

It would be naive, of course, to assume that opposition to Charles’s policies would have been extinguished permanently by a victory against the Covenanters in 1639. What, then, might the likely flashpoints have been? Even if the Scottish crisis had been successfully resolved, the King would almost certainly have faced a factional struggle at court over the question of the proper extent of clerical power within the state. Episcopal influence at court had provoked a strong anti-clerical reaction in the Privy Council (where the Archbishop was despised by Pembroke, Northumberland and Salisbury); and clericalism would no doubt have become an increasingly sore point in the localities, where local squires were already disconcerted to find their parsons - newly appointed as JPs - taking their places during the 1630s on the Quarter Sessions bench. Here was a rich source for personal feuds and endless squabbles over precedence and jurisdiction. But, without the presence of a victorious Scottish army in England, such tensions were eminently containable. The relations between Laud and his fellow councillors would no doubt have continued to be prickly; but, with a victory in 1639, the Archbishop would have had every reason to assume that he would die, comfortably, in his Lambeth bed.

Scotland would have been more problematic. As earlier monarchs had learnt to their cost, defeating Scotland was one thing; holding the country down quite another. The scale and vehemence of the Covenanter revolt suggests that Scotland would have continued to present problems for the regime, even if Charles had won in 1639. But, so long as the Caroline regime’s control of England remained secure, there is no reason to suppose that the remaining pockets of Covenanter resistance would not have been containable - much as the security of Elizabeth’s regime had been frequently vexed, but rarely seriously threatened, by the rebelliousness of late sixteenth-century Ireland. Moreover, the Covenanter leadership was itself not without factional divisions and personal feuds.
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Had Charles won in 1639, he would almost certainly have precipitated much sooner the split between hardliners (such as the Earl of Argyll) and more moderate nobles (such as Montrose) which eventually occurred in the summer of 1641.
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The decade or so after 1639 would inevitably have been a period which required political and fiscal consolidation; and that depended, in turn, on maintaining the diplomatic stance Charles had adopted since the early 1630s: the avoidance of foreign war. War with Spain seemed highly unlikely. Opinion within the Privy Council had moved strongly towards alliance with Spain from 1638; by July 1639, Bellièvre, noting the shift with dismay, reported that most councillors were in receipt of Spanish pensions.
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And, after the 1640 Catalan revolt, Spain posed relatively little threat throughout the remainder of the decade. War with France, on the other hand, was more of a possibility. Charles had given sanctuary to Marie de Médicis, Richelieu’s arch-enemy, in 1638 - and to the string of grand and tetchy dissidents (including the Duc de Vendôme and the Duc de Soubise) she had brought in her train. Yet, with France heavily committed against the Habsburgs and beset internally, from 1643, with the problems of a royal minority, the prospect of opening up war on another front against England had little to commend it. Commercial rivalries with the Dutch also constituted a potential source of conflict (as the wars of the 1650s and 1660s were to prove). But, in the immediate term, relations remained harmonious (in spite of the Dutch Admiral Tromp’s incursion into English waters in October 1639 to harry the Spanish fleet), and they were further consolidated in 1641 by the marriage of Charles I’s daughter, Mary, to the Stadholder’s son and heir, Prince Frederik Hendrik of Orange-Nassau.
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In short, so long as Charles did not go out and seek a fight, there was a strong possibility that his government could have avoided war at least until the 1650s. After his experiences during the 1620s, Charles was all too well aware of the debilitating costs of foreign wars. Even had he been successful in 1639, the government’s borrowings would have needed to be repaid; and re-establishing royal government in Scotland would have required substantial recurrent annual expenditure. It seems unlikely that the government would have been in the mood for military adventures abroad. As the Earl of Northumberland observed after the war of 1639, ‘we are so set upon the reducing [of] Scotland, as, till that be effected, we shall not intend the re-establishing the broken estate of Europe’.
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The greatest area of uncertainty, however, remained the royal finances. Could the crown make ends meet in the absence of parliamentary subventions? The answer to this, in peacetime, seems an unequivocal yes. Charles had succeeded in doing what had consistently eluded his father: he had managed, by the mid- 1630s, to balance his books. His major problem was liquidity and access to credit in times when there were exceptional calls on the Exchequer. The lesson of 1639 was that he could do this, without recourse to Parliament - but only just - by financing expenditure through loans from members of the nobility and affluent City merchants (£100,000 reportedly coming from the customs farmer Sir Paul Pindar alone).
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About London there seems little doubt. Victory in 1639 would almost certainly have precluded the coup in the government of London which destroyed the dominance of the old aldermanic elite in 1640-1 and effectively cut the crown’s line of City credit. With the Covenanters defeated, the crown’s generally cosy relationship with the City’s aldermanic government - which had continued up until June 1639 - might well have carried on, to mutual advantage, indefinitely.
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The real question lay on the revenue side.
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Could the crown move beyond its mid-1630s levels of income, and so augment its revenues that it could manage without Parliament - even, in the long term, to the extent of being able to finance a war? Two questions needed to be resolved. Was the political nation able to bear the cost of further non-parliamentary levies? And second, if such levies were imposed, would they be acceptable - politically and legally - to the bulk of the nation’s taxpayers? About the first question there is little doubt. On the whole, England was one of the most lightly taxed nations in Europe, even taking into account the full weight of Charles’s exactions during the 1630s. As we have seen, during the half-century between 1580 and 1630 the English gentry had effectively institutionalised a system of undervaluing their property for tax purposes; most properties were assessed in the subsidy rolls at probably little more than a tenth of their real worth.
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The rating system which Charles introduced for ship money, however, was based on a far more realistic assessment of individuals’ real worth (ironically, it was adopted by Parliament as the basis for its ‘weekly assessment’ in 1643). Had Charles succeeded in making ship money an annual levy, imposed throughout the country, as he was almost certainly planning to do, he would have been provided with a regular and highly lucrative revenue source - what Clarendon feared would become an ‘everlasting supply of all occasions’.
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Impositions were already bringing in around £218,000 per annum during the 1630s - the equivalent, in cash terms, of three parliamentary subsidies annually.
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There was the further likelihood that an excise or sales tax (which had long been considered as an option and was first introduced by the Long Parliament in 1643) would also probably have become one of the fiscal mainstays of the regime. With a reconstituted bench, there is little doubt that the King could have obtained the judiciary’s imprimatur for such further extensions of prerogative finance. The experience of the 1640s and early 1650s leaves little doubt that the gentry could have sustained much higher levels of taxation: by 1651, taxation in most parts of the country was running at six or seven times what it had been at the height of the Personal Rule.
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As Gerald Aylmer has observed, ‘perhaps what is most astonishing’ about the new fiscal exactions of the 1640s and 1650s ‘is the amount raised in taxes and the paucity of the sustained opposition to their collection’.
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Had Charles’s Personal Rule continued into the same period, there is a high probability that the regime could have increased its revenues substantially, without provoking more than the minimal opposition encountered under Cromwellian rule. Moreover, so long as Charles avoided further large-scale wars, he would have had no need to raise taxation to anything like the levels imposed under the Commonwealth; an increase of two-fold or three-fold upon what he was already receiving in ship money would have made Charles an affluent king.