Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (68 page)

71
For a lucid introduction to arguments deployed in this debate, J. P. Sommerville,
Politics and Ideology in England
,
1603-40
(London, 1986), esp. pp. 160-2.

72
For some suggestive remarks about the impact of Coke’s ideas on the generation entering the Inns of Court in the 1630s, see Alan Cromartie,
Sir Matthew Hale
,
1609-1676: Law, Religion, and Natural Philosophy
(Cambridge, 1995), pp. 11-29.

73
‘The Lord Chancellor Egertons observacons upon ye Lord Cookes reportes’ (1615), printed in Louis A. Knafla,
Law and Politics in Jacobean England: The Tracts of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere
(Cambridge, 1977), pp. 297-318. For the diversity of views on the status and purpose of the common law, see Clive Holmes, ‘Parliament, Liberty, Taxation, and Property’, in J. H. Hexter (ed.),
Parliament and Liberty from the reign of Elizabeth to the English Civil War
(Stanford, 1992), pp. 122-54.

74
Against this contention, it could be argued that Parliament, during the 1620s, was never given the opportunity by the crown to provide adequately for the defence of the realm; see Richard Cust,
The Forced Loan and English Politics 1626-8
(Oxford, 1987), pp. 150-85. But it remains highly questionable whether any Caroline Parliament would have passed subsidies to the value of the sums raised for, and exclusively expended upon, the king’s ship-money fleet during the 1630s.

75
For the scale of the under-assessment, see Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes,
The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500-1700
(London, 1994), pp. 185-6; Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics,
1621-9
(Oxford, 1979), pp. 49-51.

76
K. R. Andrews,
Ships, Money, and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I
(Cambridge, 1991), pp. 128-39.

77
For the origins of this line of argument, see
The King’s Prerogative in Saltpetre
(1607), printed in
English Reports
, vol. LXXVII, pp. 1294-7; cited in Holmes, ‘Parliament, Liberty, Taxation, and Property’, p. 136.

78
Thomas Hobbes,
A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England
, ed. Joseph Cropsey (Chicago, 1971), p. 63; and see the subsequent section: ‘Also the king (as is on all hands confessed) hath the charge [i.e. duty] lying upon him to protect his people against foreign enemies, and to keep the peace betwixt them within the kingdom; if he do not his utmost endeavour to discharge himself thereof, he committeth a sin ...’ (
ibid
.).

79
For Hutton’s views, see Wilfrid R. Prest (ed.),
The Diary of Sir Richard Hutton
,
1614-39
(Selden Soc. supplementary series, IX, 1991), pp. xxvi-xxxv;
Dictionary of National Biography
, ‘Sir Richard Hutton’.

80
Conrad Russell, ‘The Ship Money Judgements of Bramston and Davenport’, in
idem
,
Unrevolutionary England
(London, 1990), pp. 137-44.

81
Sir John Bramston (1577-1654), who found against the crown on a technicality (that, from the record, it did not appear to whom the money levied was due), nevertheless concurred with the majority on the question that the service was due to the King. Bramston had defended Sir John Eliot in 1629, and it is possible that he might have remained on the bench as a critic of the regime into the 1640s - albeit outnumbered on the bench, and probably ineffectual. See Russell, ‘Ship Money Judgements’, p. 143. Of course, age was not the only determinant of outlook among the legal profession; the young Matthew Hale, who was to be one of the most influential members of the post-Restoration bench, was thoroughly imbued with the traditions of Sir Edward Coke and John Selden; see Cromartie,
Sir Matthew Hale
, chs 1-2.

82
J. S. Cockburn,
A History of English Assizes
,
1558-1714
(Cambridge, 1972), pp. 231-7. Professor Cockburn discusses the decline of ‘popular confidence in the impartiality of [the judges’] proceedings’ (p. 231) during Charles’s reign. Whether or not this would have created an insuperable crisis in the English legal system - in the absence of a Parliament - must remain an open question.

83
The judges who found for the crown in
Hampden’s
case stopped well short of any such endorsement, as the overall question of royal fiscal policy was not at issue. What Finch and his colleagues determined was that the King had an obligation to defend the kingdom, and to take the measures necessary to achieve this end. (I am grateful to Professor Russell for his advice on this point.)

84
Francis Hargrave,
A Complete Collection of State-Trials
, 11 vols (1776-81), vol. I, col. 625.

85
BL, Add. MS 27402 (Misc. historical papers), fo. 79, Charles I to the Earl of Essex, 6 August 1644.

86
John Harris and Gordon Higgott,
Inigo Jones: Complete Architectural Drawings
(New York, 1989), pp. 238-40. The inscription on the entablature read: ‘CAROLUS ... TEMPLUM SANCTI PAULI VETUSTATE CONSUMPTUM RESTITUIT ET PORTICUM FECIT’ (Charles ... restored the Cathedral of St Paul, [which had been] consumed by age, and erected [this] portico).

87
John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, Eng. MS 737, fo. 3a, the Queen to Sir John Wintour, 17 April 1639. See also the circular letter from the Revd Ant[hony] Champney, dean of the English Catholic secular clergy, 30 November 1638, urging Catholics to be particularly earnest in their protestations of loyalty to the King at the time of the Scottish crisis (Eng. MS 737, no. 32).

88
Donald,
An Uncounselled King
, pp. 320-7; Fissel,
Bishops’ Wars
, p. 4.

89
Jonathan Israel,
The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall
,
1477-1806
(Oxford, 1995), pp. 637-45.

90
House of Lords Record Office, Main Papers 29/7/1648, fos 59-60, lists of priests imprisoned or executed, 1643-7. In contrast, only three priests had been executed during the fifteen years of Charles’s reign from his accession to 1640. See Robin Clifton, ‘Fear of Popery’, in Russell (ed.),
Origins of the English Civil War
, p. 164.

91
Scottish Record Office, GD 406/1/10543, Charles I to Hamilton, 18 April 1639, printed in Gilbert Burnet,
The Memoires of the Lives and Actions of James and William, Dukes of Hamilton
(1677), p. 155.

92
Northumberland to Strafford, 29 January 1639, printed in William Knowler (ed.),
The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Dispatches
, 2 vols (1739), vol. II, p. 276; Northumberland to Leicester, 31 December 1640, printed in Arthur Collins (ed.),
Letters and Memorials of State ... from the Originals in Penshurst Place
, 2 vols (1746), vol. II, p. 666. Northumberland, who disliked Hamilton, was exaggerating; but, if not the ‘sole power’ over the King, Hamilton was certainly one of the most powerful figures at court during 1639-41.

93
In the summer of 1638, for example, Lord Newburgh (the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster) complained to Secretary Coke that it was Patrick Maule, one of the Bedchamber Scots, and the Marquess of Hamilton who were the King’s principal confidants concerning the Scottish crisis. Kevin Sharpe, ‘The Image of Virtue: The Court and Household of Charles I, 1625-42’, in David Starkey (ed.),
The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War
(London, 1987), p. 251.

94
In what may have been a token of things to come, the Council of War (the Privy Council committee, presided over by Arundel and charged with the planning of the 1639 campaign) had succeeded in persuading the King to revoke a series of unpopular patents and monopolies over the winter of 1638-9. Bodl. Lib., MS Clarendon 15, fo. 36, Sir Francis Windebanke’s and Lord Cottington’s notes, 11 Nov. 1638; see also the discussion in Fissel,
Bishops’ Wars
, p. 69n.

95
Scottish Record Office, Hamilton MSS GD 406/1/1505, 1506, 1509, 1510 (for Saye); GD 406/1/1427 (for Mandeville); GD 406/1/1316, 1319 (for Danvers). Such was Hamilton’s reputation as a figure open to ideas about the reform of government that in 1642 Danvers sent him a presentation copy of a treatise he had commissioned on the reformation of the two kingdoms from Henry Parker, the nephew of Viscount Saye and Sele. Scottish Record Office, Hamilton MS GD 406/1/1700, Danvers to Hamilton, 1 July 1642; H[enry] P[arker],
The Generall Junto, or the Councell of Union
(1642), BL, 669, fo. 18/1; and see Michael Mendle,
Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Public’s ’Privado’
(Cambridge, 1985), pp. 18-19, 54-5, 97. I am grateful to Dr John Scally for a discussion of this point.

96
Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, MS O14M3/c. 1640/ Bound ([Bishop Guthrie], ‘Observations upon the arise and progresse of the late Rebellion’), p. 82. Hamilton was clearly out of favour with the Queen, whose Chamberlain had accused him of treasonable collusion with the Scots; see also Barbara Donagan, ‘A Courtier’s Progress: Greed and Consistency in the Life of the Earl of Holland,’
Historical Journal
, 19 (1976), p. 344.

97
For Arundel and the ‘old nobility’, see Kevin Sharpe,
Sir Robert Cotton, 1586-1631
(Oxford, 1979), pp. 140, 213-14; and his ‘The Earl of Arundel, his Circle and the Opposition to the Duke of Buckingham, 1618-28’, in Kevin Sharpe (ed.),
Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History
(Oxford, 1978), pp. 209-44.

98
Arundel had originally wished to have Essex in the senior office of general of the horse: see Northumberland to Strafford, 29 January 1639, printed in Knowler (ed.),
The Earl of Strafforde’s
Letters, vol. II, p. 276.

99
BL, Loan MS 23/1 (Hulton of Hulton corr.), fos 170-84, 190, letters from the Earl of Holland to Essex [undated].

100
The phrase is Burnet’s,
Lives of the Hamiltons
, p. 518.

101
For the efforts of Hamilton and Vane on Gustavus’ behalf see Scally, ‘The Political Career of James, 3rd Marquis and 1st Duke of Hamilton’, pp. 50-67.

102
Hibbard,
Charles I and the Popish Plot
, pp. 104-24.

103
BL, Add. MS 11045, fo. 27, [Rossingham to Viscount Scudamore], 11 June 1639. In June 1639, Hamilton was reported to have predicted that ‘the business in Scotland will soon come to an end, the Covenanters do differ so much among themselves’ (
ibid
.). This was an exaggeration, as Hamilton underestimated the solid support enjoyed by Argyll among the gentry and burghs; nevertheless, a split within the Covenanter leadership remained a real possibility, and would have been made a virtual certainty amid the recriminations which would have followed a Covenanter defeat in the summer of 1639. (I am grateful to Professor Allan Macinnes for a discussion of this point.)

104
Any long-term solution to Scottish rebelliousness depended on the King granting at least some of the demands of the National Covenant, and the construction of a pro-royalist party in Scotland to govern the country in the King’s name. Even such prospective recruits to a new pro-royalist government as the Earl of Montrose would have been unlikely to have agreed to the wholesale abandonment of the aims of the Covenant. Of course, magnanimity in victory was not a quality for which Charles I was renowned; but, ironically, an English military success in 1639 would have greatly strengthened the hands of precisely those English councillors who were most likely to have promoted a lenient post-war settlement with the Covenanter lords - particularly Holland (the Covenanters’ chosen ‘mediator’) and Hamilton.

105
PRO 31/3/71, fos 85, 141v. (I owe my knowledge of this reference to Professor Kevin Sharpe.)

106
Israel,
Dutch Republic
, pp. 537-8; for a strongly argued alternative view of Charles’s prospects, see Derek Hirst,
Authority and Conflict: England 1603-58
(London, 1986), pp. 174-7.

107
Collins (ed.),
Letters and Memorials of State ... from the Originals at Penshurst Place
, vol. II, p. 636, Northumberland to Leicester, 13 February 1640.

108
Valerie Pearl,
London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution
(Oxford, 1961), p. 96.

109
Robert Brenner,
Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders
,
1550-1653
(Cambridge, 1993), pp. 281-306; for a more pessimistic view of the crown’s relations with the City, Robert Ashton,
The Crown and the Money Market, 1603-40
(Oxford, 1960), pp. 152-3, 174-84;
idem
,
The City and the Court
,
1603-43
(Cambridge, 1979), pp. 202-4.

110
For the decline in royal revenues from land in the early seventeenth century see R. W. Hoyle, ‘Introduction: Aspects of the Crown’s Estate, c. 1558-1640’, in
idem
(ed.),
The Estates of the Crown
(Cambridge, 1994). Dr Hoyle points out that in c. 1600, about 39 per cent of the crown’s overall income was derived from its landed estate; by 1641 that figure had declined to 14 per cent (
ibid
., pp. 26-8).

111
Conrad Russell, ‘Parliamentary History in Perspective’,
History
, 61 (1976), pp. 1-27; Michael Braddick,
Parliamentary Taxation in Early Seventeenth-Century England
(Royal Historical Society, Studies in History, 70, London, 1994). I am grateful to Dr Braddick for a discussion of this point.

112
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon,
The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England
, ed. W. D. Macray, 6 vols (Oxford, 1888), vol. I, p. 85. Even without ship money, Charles could probably have balanced his books, so long as he avoided involvement in foreign wars (a point I owe to Dr Morrill).