Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (67 page)

31
BL, Add. MS 11045, fo. 27, [Edward Rossingham to Viscount Scudamore], 11 June 1639.

32
There is the possibility that, in reporting the Covenanters’ numbers to the King, Holland deliberately exaggerated their strength in order to discourage him from joining battle; see Russell,
Fall of the British Monarchies
, p.63. The Covenanter leadership (probably accurately) believed Holland to be sympathetic to their cause, and had used him, a few weeks earlier, as their ‘mediator’ in making an approach to leading members of the English nobility. At Duns Law, it seems highly unlikely that he gave the King impartial advice. National Library of Scotland, Crawford MS 14/3/35 (formerly in the John Rylands Library, Manchester), 25 May 1639 (for the approach from the Covenanters). (I owe this point to Professor Russell.)

33
John Aston, ‘Iter Boreale, Anno Salutis 1639’, in J. C. Hodgson (ed.),
Six North Country Diaries
(Surtees Soc. 118, Durham, 1910), p. 24 (printing BL, Add. MS 28566). Henry Guthrie, Bishop of Dunkeld,
Memoirs [of]
...
the Conspiracies and Rebellion against King Charles I
(1702), pp. 49-50 (printing Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, MS 014M3/c. 1640/Bound, ‘Observations upon the arise and progresse of the late Rebellion’).

34
Scottish Record Office, Hamilton MS GD 406/1/1179, Sir Henry Vane Sr to Hamilton, 4 June 1639. This letter recounts the King’s doubts: ‘His Majesty doth now clearly see and is fully satisfied in his own judgement that what passed in the Gallery [at Whitehall] betwixt his Majesty, your lordship [Hamilton], and myself hath been but too much verified on this occasion.’ Nalson, who prints the letter, is probably accurate in glossing this reference to the conversation in the Gallery as concerning the English nobility’s and gentry’s unwillingness ‘to invade Scotland’. John Nalson,
An Impartial Collection of the Great Affairs of State
, 2 vols (1682-3), vol. I, p. 230.

35
Nalson,
An Impartial Collection
, vol. I, pp. 231-3. There seems to be no evidence for the suggestion that it was the king who opened negotiations: see S. R. Gardiner,
History of England
, 10 vols (London, 1891), vol. IX, p. 36; Sharpe,
Personal Rule of Charles I
, p. 808.

36
In practice, however, this condition was only partially met; the Fifth Table (or Covenanter executive) remained in being as a holding committee until February of the following year, in contravention of the treaty. (I am grateful to Professor Macinnes for a discussion of this point.)

37
Sharpe,
Personal Rule of Charles I
, p. 809.

38
E. M. Furgol, ‘The Religious Aspects of the Scottish Covenanting Armies, 1639-51’ (University of Oxford, D.Phil. dissertation, 1982), pp. 3, 7. Dr Furgol’s estimates are accepted by Professor Fissel, who provides the most exhaustive modern account of the campaigns:
Bishops
’ Wars, p. 31n.

39
J. Bruce (ed.),
Letters and Papers of the Verney Family
(Camden Soc. 56, 1853), p. 251.

40
BL, Add. MS 11045, fo. 32r, [Rossingham to Viscount Scudamore], 25 June 1639.

41
Fissel,
Bishops’ Wars
, p. 31n; David Stevenson, ‘The Financing of the Cause of the Covenants, 1638-51’,
Scottish Historical Review
, 51 (1972), pp. 89-94.

42
Fissel,
The Bishops’ Wars
, p. 38.

43
BL, Add. MS 11045, fo. 45, [Rossingham to Viscount Scudamore], 13 August 1639.

44
It has been recently argued that Charles’s government was inherently ‘never really stable’ during the 1630s because ‘it did not rest, like those of Elizabeth I and of his father [James I], upon a foundation of consent’ (Reeve,
Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule
, p. 296). But this is to beg the question: whose consent? Charles did not depend upon a popular mandate to govern, and, although the gentry’s reluctance to confer ‘consent’ could make the government of the localities problematic, in the absence of a successful rebellion the means by which Charles’s subjects could vent their disapproval were distinctly limited.

45
Geoffrey Parker,
The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800
(Cambridge, 1988), ch. 1.

46
Conrad Russell,
The Scottish Party in English Parliaments, 1630-42, or
,
The Myth of the English Revolution
(Inaugural Lecture, King’s College, London, 1991), p. 8. Although the kingdom had been ‘demilitarized in the sense that all bu a handful of nobles had lost the power to raise and arm troops from among their retainers, the belief that military service was the proper concomitant of upper-gentry or noble status remained strong, well into the 1640s; and there are numerous examples of gentlemen or noblemen being aware of the latest developments in European warfare (either from their reading or from personal experience). Barbara Donagan, ‘Codes and Conduct in the English Civil War’,
Past and Present
, 118 (1982), pp. 65-95; J. S. A. Adamson, ‘Chivalry and Political Culture in Caroline England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds),
Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England
(London, 1994), pp. 161-97.

47
In a forthcoming study, Dr Barbara Donagan, of the Huntington Library, will offer evidence that a number of English households held substantial private stocks of arms during the 1630s. Even so, in the absence (during the intermission of Parliaments) of any generally acknowledged authority to sanction or coordinate their use, rebellion in England remained a distant prospect during Charles’s Personal Rule; nor was there any general recognition within the political elite that armed resistance was a realistic or even a necessary option. (I am grateful to Dr John Morrill for a discussion of this point.)

48
Hugh Kearney,
Strafford in Ireland
,
1633-41: A Study in Absolutism
(2nd edn, Cambridge, 1989). Rebellion in Ireland came only after Strafford had been removed as Lord Lieutenant, in 1641; and it was not directed against a tyrannical viceroy, but against an English parliament which appeared to have come under the control of a junta composed exclusively of the crown’s militant Protestant opponents. See Conrad Russell, ‘The British Background to the Irish Rebellion of 1641’,
Historical Research
, 61 (1988), pp. 166-82.

49
For evidence of this collusion, see Peter Donald, ‘New Light on the Anglo-Scottish Contacts of 1640’,
Historical Research
, 62 (1989), pp. 221-9.

50
For contemporary evidence for this perception of Charles’s regime, see John Morrill, ‘Charles I, Tyranny, and the English Civil War’, in
idem
,
The Nature of the English Revolution
, pp. 285-306.

51
Even the most ‘revisionist’ of historians accepts that the ‘fear of Popery’ was profoundly destabilising for Charles’s regime during the late 1630s and early 1640s: see Sharpe,
Personal Rule of Charles I,
pp. 304, 842-4, 910-14, 938-9.

52
John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, Eng. MS 737 (Papers relating to Catholic contributions, 1639), fos 3a, 5-6; and see Caroline Hibbard, ‘The Contribution of 1639: Court and Country Catholicism’,
Recusant History
, 16 (1982-3), pp. 42-60.

53
During 1641 and 1642, reports of sinister ‘Popish plotting’ provided the King’s critics within the Long Parliament with a cast-iron justification for arrogating to themselves ‘emergency powers’ and mustering a party (first in the two Houses and later in the country at large) to defend the Protestant religion and ‘rescue’ the King from the clutches of his evil counsellors. For these rumours see Caroline Hibbard,
Charles I and the Popish Plot
(Chapel Hill, 1983), pp. 168-238; Anthony Fletcher,
The Outbreak of the English Civil War
(London, 1981), chs 4-5.

54
Anthony Milton,
Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English and Protestant Thought, 1600-40
(Cambridge, 1995), pp. 93-127.

55
Derek Hirst, ‘The Failure of Godly Rule in the English Republic’,
Past and Present
, 132 (1991), p. 66.

56
Conrad Russell, ‘Parliament and the King’s Finances’, in
idem
(ed.),
The Origins of the English Civil War
(London, 1973), p. 107.

57
Of the six, the 4th Earl of Bedford died in 1641; the 3rd Earl of Exeter and the 2nd Lord Brooke (killed on military service at the siege of Lichfield) in 1643; the 3rd Earl of Essex, the 1st Earl of Bolingbroke and the 1st Earl of Mulgrave died in 1646.

58
D. Brunton and D. H. Pennington,
Members of the Long Parliament
(London, 1954), p. 16.

59
J. B. Crummett, ‘The Lay Peers in Parliament, 1640-44’ (University of Manchester, Ph.D. dissertation, 1970), appendix.

60
Kevin Sharpe, ‘Archbishop Laud and the University of Oxford’, in Pearl, Worden and Lloyd-Jones (eds),
History and Imagination,
p. 164.

61
John Twigg,
A History of Queens’ College
,
Cambridge
(Woodbridge, 1987), p. 48.

62
BL, Harleian MS 7019, fos 52-93, ‘Innovations in Religion and Abuses in Government in the University of Cambridge’;
Commons Journals
, vol. II, p. 126; David Hoyle, ‘A Commons Investigation of Arminianism and Popery in Cambridge on the Eve of the Civil War’,
Historical Journal
, 29 (1986), pp. 419-25, at p. 425.

63
Stephen Marshall,
A Sermon
(1641), p. 32; quoted in Russell,
Fall of the British Monarchies
, p. 26.

64
BL, Harleian MS 7019, fo. 82, ‘Some of the scholars [of Emmanuel] have received harm by their frequent going to Peterhouse Chapel ...’. Cf. Hoyle, ‘A Commons Investigation’, p. 424.

65
John Twigg,
The University of Cambridge and the English Revolution
,
1625-88
(The History of the University of Cambridge: Texts and Studies, Woodbridge, 1990), vol. I, p. 41.

66
For further caution about the significance of Brunton’s and Pennington’s findings, see G. E. Aylmer,
Rebellion or Revolution
?
England
,
1640-60
(Oxford, 1986), p. 42. (I am grateful to Professor Thomas Cogswell for a discussion of this point.)

67
Viscount Falkland and Sir Edward Hyde, for example, were royalists after 1642; but they had disapproved of many aspects of the government’s conduct during the 1630s. Much of Charles’s success in creating a royalist party in 1642 has been put down to the effectiveness with which he reinvented his public persona during the first two years of the Long Parliament, presenting himself as the defender of the known laws and the established church, and depicting the two Houses as the body which threatened ‘innovations’ in church and state. See, in particular, the brilliant discussion of this theme by Russell,
The Fall of the British Monarchies
, pp. 230, 413, 420.

68
The most reliable estimates for England and Wales are as follows:

69
Esther Cope, ‘Public Images of Parliament during its Absence’,
Legislative Studies Quarterly
, 7 (1982), pp. 221-34. The medieval
Modus Tenendi Parliamentum
was probably the most widely circulated of all political texts in early Stuart England; see N. Pronay and J. Taylor (eds),
Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages
(Oxford, 1980), Appendix I. A copy of the
Modus
is the first item listed as having been found in Viscount Saye’s study when it was searched for seditious papers at the conclusion of the Short Parliament: Bodl. Lib., MS Tanner 88*, fo. 115.

70
As Dr Gill has established,
Hampden’s
case determined that, although the levying of ship-money writs was in accordance with the law, it was not permissible for sheriffs to distrain (that is, to confiscate property, in cases of non-payment, up to the value of the amount owed) on the authority of a writ from the Exchequer alone. Of course, this conclusion still left open to the crown the alternative of imprisoning those who refused to pay - an expedient which it had already shown itself willing to use. See A. A. M. Gill, ‘Ship Money during the Personal Rule of Charles I: Politics, Ideology, and the Law, 1634-40’ (University of Sheffield, Ph.D. dissertation, 1990). If, hypothetically, another parliament had not been called during the 1640s, and ship money had become an annual imposition, it must remain an open question whether the crown would have been forced to imprison on a scale similar to the 1630s, or whether opposition to ship money would have progressively dwindled. (I am grateful to Dr John Morrill for a discussion of this point.)