Read Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy Online
Authors: David Starkey
The answer came on Sunday, 28 July 1637, when the new prayer book was used for the first time in St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh in the presence of the assembled Privy Council of Scotland. As soon as the dean had begun the service a great shout erupted from the crowds at the back of the church. Heavy clasped Bibles and folding stools were hurled at the councillors and the clergy, and the rioters were ejected from the church by the guards only with difficulty. And even outside they continued pounding on the doors and pelting the windows, until the service was finished.
It was the same throughout Scotland wherever the prayer book was used. Then the protest turned political. And in Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh an influential group of citizens and noblemen drew up and signed an undertaking to resist Charles and ‘the innovations and evils’ he had introduced into the Kirk. Borrowing the name from God’s solemn compact with the Jews in the Old Testament, the undertaking was known as the Covenant, and its adherents were called Covenanters.
The scene at Greyfriars was repeated in churches all over the Lowlands. It was now the Covenanters, not Charles, who controlled Scotland. Britain, which so far had escaped the wars of religion that had devastated much of the rest of Europe, now faced the horrors of sectarian conflict on its own soil. The Covenanters demanded that Charles withdraw what they saw as a Catholic prayer book and all the rituals and innovations. But Charles would not tolerate any challenge to his royal authority, in matters of money and especially in matters of religion. ‘I will rather die’, he bluntly stated, ‘than yield to their impertinent and damnable demands.’
IV
By 1640, Charles’s religious policies had brought about a crisis throughout Britain. Scotland was in the hands of the Covenanters, while in England Charles’s opponents drew strength north of the border. But it was the recall of Parliament after eleven years which brought things to a head.
Charles had no choice, since only Parliament could vote the money needed to suppress the Covenanters, but equally Parliament provided an unrivalled public forum for the king’s opponents. Most dangerous and effective of these was the hitherto obscure lawyer and MP for Tavistock, John Pym. Like other Puritans, Pym believed that Charles’s policies in Church and state were the result of a Catholic conspiracy to subvert the religion and liberties of England. But instead of wasting his time in fruitless opposition, he had used the eleven years without a parliament to build up a compelling dossier for his case.
During the 1630s Pym read voraciously; followed every detail of politics at home and abroad, and noted down useful headings and extracts in his notebook. This meant that, when Charles was forced to recall Parliament in April 1640, Pym was the best-informed and the best-prepared man in the House, ready with both a rhetoric of opposition to Charles’s government and a plan of action for curbing royal power. Charles had hoped to prey on English xenophobia to persuade Parliament to impose an immediate and vast tax to crush the traitorous Scots. Pym countered by dragging up his list of political and religious grievances against Charles’s government of the 1630s. Parliament was willing to listen and to support Pym’s demand as well as to avenge itself after over a decade of neglect and unlimited royal government. Charles countered with a move designed to break the deadlock. He hinted at the surrender of ship money, but the hint only emboldened Pym.
Finally Charles lost patience with a parliament that had, once again, refused to deliver, and whose demands proved troublesome. The Short Parliament was dissolved after less than a month. Rather than help their king fight the rebellious Scots, most parliamentarians admired, in secret at least, their stand against Laud’s offensive religious policies. In the face of their resistance, Charles resolved to fight the Scots without a parliamentary grant. It was a catastrophic decision.
The disaster happened at Berwick-on-Tweed, which Henry VIII had fortified with mighty ramparts as a border fortress to protect England from the Scots. Expensively refortified by Charles, it stood as a seemingly impregnable barrier between the two countries. But in August 1640, the Scots army, large, well armed, well disciplined and well provisioned, took the daring decision to outflank Berwick; cross the River Tweed further upstream and head straight for Newcastle, which in contrast to Berwick was only lightly defended. Only the River Tyne now stood between the Scots and Newcastle. They forced a crossing at Newburn, and entered Newcastle in triumph on 30 August 1640. Never had so many run from so few, it was said, and never had Scotland won a greater victory on English soil or one with such momentous consequences.
With the Scottish army camped in England, Charles was forced to call Parliament again. Once again Charles faced Pym. And, once again, Pym cleverly focused on the financial, constitutional and religious grievances against Charles. Here Parliament was united in its opposition, and Charles was forced into a wholesale surrender of ship money and all the other objectionable aspects of his reign. His court was purged of the men Parliament regarded as ‘evil counsellors’, including Laud. Most humiliatingly, he was forbidden to dissolve Parliament without the consent of its members. It seemed as if opposition to the king would be permanent and that his powers would be stripped one by one in return for a dribble of cash. Charles believed that Parliament had ‘taken the government all in pieces, and I may say it is almost off the hinges’.
But Charles would not accede to Pym’s demand that he should abandon all his religious policies, to the extent of abolishing bishops. ‘No Bishop, No King,’ as his father had famously said. The parliamentarians also wanted to remove Catholics from Henrietta Maria’s court and to appoint a ‘well-affected person’ to teach the prince of Wales ‘matters of religion and liberty’ so that he would not repeat his father’s mistakes when he came to the throne. Not only had Parliament taken away most of his powers, it now wanted to dictate the day-to-day running of the court and, worst of all, his family.
There was only one way out of this intolerable situation. Boxed in by his opponents in the English Parliament, Charles tried to break out by coming to terms with the Scots. In the summer of 1641 he journeyed to Edinburgh and in an astonishing change of front accepted the religious and political revolution of the last three years. He worshipped in the kirk; agreed to the abolition of bishops and filled the government of Scotland with the leading Covenanters and his own sworn enemies. The king also played several rounds of golf and, reasonably confident that he had solved one of his problems, returned in an excellent mood to England.
Events in England also seemed to be moving in Charles’s direction. He was greeted with joy in London, as if nothing had happened over the last few years. And the parliamentary alliance that had exacted so many concessions was beginning to fracture. For, with Charles’s surrender of ship money and other unconstitutional measures, the religious divisions in the Commons between Puritans like Pym and those who were sympathetic to Charles’s ceremonious religion were opened up. Pym tried to whip his troops into line and put ‘The Grand Remonstrance’ to the vote. This was Pym’s searing condemnation of Charles’s conduct throughout his entire reign, and an explicit statement of dissatisfaction with his government, in particular in religious matters. These amounted, the Remonstrance claimed, to an all-embracing Catholic conspiracy to subvert the religion and liberties of England. The king himself, it was careful to point out, had been only the unwitting agent of the conspiracy. Nevertheless, Charles’s gullibility meant that he could never be trusted to choose his own advisers or to command his own troops again. And, most importantly, after a hundred years the Royal Supremacy would be abolished in all but name. All Charles’s and Laud’s reforms would be reversed and Catholicism would be suppressed.
The Remonstrance was nominally addressed to the king. But in fact it was a manifesto, for a constitutional revolution at the least, perhaps even for an armed revolt. The Remonstrance was also bitterly divisive and, after days of acrimonious debate, it was passed on 1 December 1641 by 159 votes to 148 – a bare majority of eleven. The vote showed that the broad-based opposition to Charles had broken up. And the more Pym pushed the Puritan attack on Charles’s Church reforms, the more his majority risked disappearing entirely. But then Charles overreached himself.
By dismissing Parliament’s armed guard, he fuelled dark rumours that he intended to restore his power by force. Plenty of Irish Catholic veterans from the Scottish war were skulking in London. Henrietta Maria was suspected of negotiating with a Catholic country to help her husband. Suddenly, all those conspiracy theories regarding a Catholic coup were revived, and Parliament’s united hostility to Charles was renewed. Pym said that he had picked up on ‘whispering intimation’ that there was ‘some great design in hand’ to ensure that ‘the necks of both the parliaments should be broken’.
As if to confirm the fears, Charles made his greatest blunder. Convinced, probably correctly, that among MPs there were traitors who had colluded with the invading Scots in 1640, Charles determined to bring five Members of Parliament, including John Pym and John Hampden, to trial on charges of high treason. He ordered Parliament to give them up, but instead they voted him in breach of parliamentary privilege.
Charles was unsure how to deal with this latest rebuff. His mind was made up for him. ‘Go you coward!’ Henrietta Maria shouted at him, ‘and pull those rogues out by the ears, or never see my face more.’ On 4 January 1642, King Charles strode into the chamber of the House of Commons to arrest his principal opponents. His guards stood outside, fingering their weapons as, to uneasy silence, the king sat himself in the Speaker’s chair. ‘Where are the five members?’ the king demanded, calling them by name. In response, the Speaker fell on his knees, protesting that he could answer only as the House directed him.
In fact, the five members, forewarned of the king’s movements, had made good their escape by boat from the back of the Palace of Westminster as Charles and his guards had entered on the landward side at the front. Instead, it was Charles himself who had walked into a trap. By trying to seize the five members by force, he had shown himself to be a violent tyrant. By failing, he had revealed himself to be impotent. As Charles left the chamber empty handed, he murmured disconsolately, ‘All my birds have flown.’ So too had most of his power.
Parliament exploited its advantage and took control of all aspects of government, including the militia. MPs claimed to be ‘watchmen trusted for the good and welfare of the King, Church and State’. It was, they said, only temporary. They had been forced to act in this way because Charles had proved himself unfit to rule. The king could only complain that he was ‘no idiot, nor infant, uncapable of understanding to command’.
Battle lines were now drawn up. Charles’s violent, ill-thought-through gesture not only preserved Pym’s parliamentary majority but also turned London decisively against the king. Throughout the rest of the country it was a different story as Pym’s increasingly extreme Puritan attack on the Church won Charles a devoted following. But in fact Charles was no longer really king of Great Britain or even of England. Instead he was only the leader of a faction.
For history had come almost full circle. The attempt to expand the powers of the Imperial Crown so that it ruled both Church and state, and Scotland as well as England, had backfired. Instead England was about to return to the factional strife of the Wars of the Roses and Britain to the national struggles of the Anglo-Scottish wars. And it began at Nottingham in August 1642, when Charles raised his standard in a war against his Parliament and half his people. He had fewer than four thousand men under his command.
Cromwell
ON 23 NOVEMBER 1658,
a solemn procession wended its way through the silent streets of London towards Westminster Abbey. It was the funeral cortège of the most powerful ruler the British Isles had known since the fall of Rome.
For this latter-day emperor had achieved what had eluded the greatest warrior kings of the Middle Ages. He had welded the countries of England, Scotland and Ireland into one United Kingdom. He had bent Parliament to his will; levied taxes as he pleased; stilled the fratricidal religious conflict of the Reformation and created the most feared navy and army in Europe. He lay in his robe of state, a sceptre in one hand, an orb in the other, with an Imperial Crown laid on a velvet cushion a little above his head. Yet this ruler was not a king. He was in fact a regicide – a king-killer.
His name was Oliver Cromwell, and his story is the tale of how England abolished its age-old monarchy only to find that it couldn’t do without it after all.
I
Just fourteen years before, in 1644, England had been embroiled in a bloody civil war. On one side was King Charles I, insisting on his supremacy over Church and state. And on the other, parliamentary forces that believed the king’s powers should be limited and that religion was a matter for individual conscience (providing it was Protestant), rather than royal decree.
Despite thousands of dead and an economy in tatters, neither side had been able to force a decisive victory. And Parliament’s original war aims, which were, in essence, to limit Charles’s authority in matters of state and religion, and to place his authority under the control of Parliament, were about to be replaced by the almost inconceivable notion of executing the king for treason. Playing with increasingly high stakes, Parliament fell to bickering.
Matters came to a head in November 1644 when Edward Montagu, earl of Manchester and major general of the parliamentary forces, questioned how the war should be prosecuted. Were they fighting the king to crush him, or merely to bring him to the negotiating table? The latter was Manchester’s view. Aristocrat that he was, he couldn’t conceive of a kingless world. He also had a thoroughly realistic fear of Charles’s residual authority. ‘If we fight the King 100 times, and beat him 99, he will be King still,’ he said. ‘But if he beat us once or the last time, we shall be hanged, we shall lose our estates and our posterities will be undone.’