A History of Britain, Volume 2 (11 page)

And that duty was to make a harmonious realm of Magna Britannia whether it liked it or not, especially in religion, where it seemed most divided. Charles conceived of his kingship in terms not so much of a political office and high judgeship (as James theorized) as of a triple calling: knight-commander-cum-Caesar, spiritual governor and father of the nation. In the first department he made St George something of a fetish, turning the saint's day into a national holiday and investing the Order of the Garter with immense significance. The badge itself, which he wore every single day, was personally redesigned to feature the enormous silver aureole (borrowed from the French order of Saint Esprit), which gave it the appearance of a numinous sacred emblem. Beyond this sense of chivalric Christian appointment, Charles (like many of his contemporaries in baroque Europe) evidently understood his place in the scheme of things as a Platonist. Plato's vision of a celestially ordered unity of the universe, governed by ineffable ideas and truths, which were beyond the reach or the earthly articulation of mere men but which could be apprehended through beauty by a discerning few, the guardians, had been grafted on to Christian theology to create a fresh justification for the priesthood. Charles undoubtedly thought himself to be guardian-in-chief of Great Britain, and the exacting self-discipline of the Platonic guardian – personal austerity, tireless dedication, emotional and sensual self-denial (not qualities for which his late lamented dad was famous) – was what he tried at all times to uphold and personify. What better aim could there be, given the unhappy experience of his first years on the throne, than to bring Harmony to England and Scotland – whether they damned well liked it or not?

In the Dutch and Flemish paintings Charles loved to collect (and for which he had stupendously good taste), Harmony was symbolically represented by the family, often playing music. It was a truism that the family was a commonwealth in miniature and at the same time a pattern for its proper rule. And, again in contrast to the rather slatternly chaos of his father's household, Charles meant his family to be an exemplary image of firm but benevolent government. After a rough start, relations between king and queen became genuinely and reciprocally warm, and Charles's
devotion to Henrietta Maria was passionate enough to blind him later to its very serious costs. Van Dyck's portraits of the royal family would be unique in the history of dynastic, even if they were just documents of private, sentiment. But as their prominent display in public spaces at Whitehall and Hampton Court makes clear, they were also a faithful visual translation of Charles's own ideology: that in the patriarchal family, with its strict but affectionate regulation of the relations between husband and wife, parents and children lay the foundation of all good order. In this, as in many other respects, his views were surprisingly close to those of the Puritans, and one of the reasons why Puritan nobles like Warwick were at such pains not to break with the king is because they saw in him someone as deeply committed to a moral vision of family and commonwealth as themselves.

But needs must, and needs could, disrupt the Caroline quest for Harmony, especially when it was the perennial want of money that was at issue. ‘Ship money' would become reviled as one of the most notorious impositions ever laid on the country, a classic case of arbitrary and overbearing government, but it was originally introduced as a response to the widely acknowledged neglect of the navy, painfully exposed in the Spanish and French wars, which had left English shipping vulnerable to Dutch privateers and pirates. Initially, only the coastal counties were required either to supply a ship or (as was more practical for most of them) pay the equivalent sum. So Charles was able to defend his imposition of ship money without parliamentary consent as legitimate, since it had been levied in defence of the realm. But an on-going need for naval rearmament was not the same as if the country were facing a second armada, so there were some who thought this merely another edition of the forced loan. It was, though, only when the levy was extended to the inland counties in 1635 that concerted opposition started to gather momentum.

Money was raised. The wheels of local government cooperated with the Crown. The men who ran England and Wales – from lord-lieutenants, through their deputies, to sheriffs, justices of the peace and constables and beadles – even if they had been critics in the stormy days of the 1620s, settled back into the role of political and social leaders of their communities, presiding at quarter sessions, leading the hunt, dominating the pews. But what does this resumption of local leadership really mean? That their criticisms had now been put to sleep by their self-interest or that they could without much difficulty administer justice and government without necessarily abandoning their strong reservations about the court?

Some of them, it is true, became partners in Charles's agenda of modernizing reform and renewal, which often resembles nothing so much as
the Puritan programme in towns like Dorchester: extended poor relief, the suppression of unlicensed alehouses, the foundation of schools and colleges, and projects designed to improve agriculture like the Earl of Bedford's famous drainage of the Fens in the 1630s. But the intense hostility to the Dutch drainage programme on the part of the affected Fenland population is a good instance of the reaction of some local communities to the obsessive intervention of government in their own backyard, however well-intentioned. And the manner in which those ‘improvements' were carried out was not always calculated to allay suspicions that, beneath grandiose declarations about the government promoting the welfare of the commonwealth, there lurked something that smelled of a scam. In the Fens the medieval Court of Sewers had been absurdly revived to move local populations off boggy land. Once conveniently vacated, the land could be transferred to the drainage syndicates, which profited from the enormous capital appreciation of the drained land.

To avoid this kind of odium, Charles's administration did its best to co-opt the county gentry and nobility in its projects. But there were still some schemes in which the intrusiveness of government was bound to be felt much more keenly than its good intentions, never more so perhaps than in the notorious project for the production and conservation of a strategic supply of gunpowder. This was not a trivial issue. The gunpowder shortage was a Europe-wide problem in an age of constant warfare, and a stockpile could make the difference between victory and defeat. What, then, could be a more laudable or necessary patriotic enterprise? In practice, though, what the scheme entailed was the creation of a national store of saltpetre. And the cheapest and most readily available source of nitrous saltpetre was the excreta of animals and humans. Only a monarch as solemnly bereft of a sense of humour as Charles I could possibly have asked his subjects, in all seriousness, to preserve a year's supply of their own urine as a major contribution to the national defence. (This would not, in fact, be the most outrageous attempt to turn body waste into munitions. During the Irish rebellion and wars of the Confederacy in the 1640s and 1650s, the remains of corpses were recycled into gunpowder – the most perfect example, I suppose, of a self-sustaining industry.) But the very energy of Charles's ‘petre-men' quickly turned them into enemies of liberty and private property, as armed with warrants they entered barnyards and private households, digging up floors if necessary to get their hands on the precious and strategically important deposits of dove-droppings or sheep shit. Given the unusual working conditions of this assignment, it seems unlikely that, when confronted by householders understandably
displeased at having their floors dug up without a by-your-leave, the petre-men would have made much of an effort to appease them.

Likewise, Charles's support for Archbishop Laud's programme for the Church was, while perfectly well intentioned, easily open to misinterpretation. The heart of Laudian doctrine was nothing more than the endorsement of ceremony and sacrament that had certainly been upheld by James I and his own favoured ministers and bishops, including Lancelot Andrewes. But James's Scottish apprenticeship had made him in practice, if not in principle, a grudging pluralist. He had spoken for uniformity (and in Scotland pushed it through in 1618), but in England he was more judicious and circumspect. Charles, on the other hand, saw in Laudian theology a way to bring the congregation of Christians together within an orderly hierarchy of the Church. The obsession with sermons and preaching, the privileging of individual reading of the scripture, the harping on the unbridgeable chasm between the saved and the damned he felt to be profoundly divisive. With the débâcle of Laudianism in 1640–1 came the assumption that somehow it was, indeed, an alien growth on the body of the native Church. But there were plenty of adherents in the 1630s who saw as a national duty, for example, Laud's levy for the repair and restoration of the ruinously neglected and profaned St Paul's Cathedral.

Herefordshire may have been home to the Harleys of Brampton Bryan, who turned their castle into a magnet for Puritan teachers and preachers and an asylum for those suffering from the enforcers of the Laudian Church. But it was also home to the Scudamores of Holme Lacy. The Scudamores had been in the business of supplying knights for the royal tilts right into the reign of James, and they took special pride in their horses, kept not just for the hunt but to be at the disposal of the king. As deputy-lieutenant for Herefordshire, the first Viscount Scudamore made public exhortations to the Herefordshire gentry to improve the quality and quantity of the horses they could bring to the service of the king. Arthurian chivalry was not, it seems, quite dead on the Welsh borderlands. But Scudamore was not just a loyal
preux chevalier
; he was also a genuinely learned country gentleman with an Oxford education. And like so many of the post-Baconian generation, he was an enthusiastic amateur scientist, a manipulator of nature. Scudamore's pride and joy was the Red Streak apple, said to produce the best and most commercially sought-after cider in England. All of Scudamore's passions – his veneration of the past, his vision of a Christian monarchy, his instinctive feeling for beauty – came together in a project that must have seemed as though it were the very justification for his authority in the Herefordshire countryside: the restoration of Abbey Dore.

The abbey was a Cistercian ruin. The Scudamores had acquired it along with its land in the mid-sixteenth century and had it reconsecrated, but by the time the viscount came to its rescue it was, like so many monastic wrecks all over Britain, at the point of collapse. The roof was so badly fallen in that the curate was forced to read the service from the shelter of an arch to avoid rain falling on the prayer book. And when Scudamore went looking for the old stone altar slab he found it being used to salt meat and press cheese.

Scudamore, doubtless encouraged by Matthew Wren, Bishop of Hereford and one of the most ardent Laudians, evidently thought of himself as the Hezekiah of Herefordshire: the patron who would rebuild the ruined temple to the greater glory of God. The restoration of decayed churches and abbeys seems to have been a passion among the antiquarian community of the counties, so much so that the earliest date of the ‘Gothic revival' might well be pushed back to the 1640s, when the antiquary and genealogist William Dugdale, in the depths of Puritan Warwickshire, began his monumental work of describing and chronicling all the church monuments of the country. Dugdale also produced the first great illustrated history of St Paul's Cathedral, a crucial weapon in Laud's campaign to cleanse and restore the polluted building and churchyard (freely used as a latrine) and to have the church thought of, as much as Westminster Abbey, as a national temple.

Scudamore busied himself locally much as Laud busied himself nationally. The desecrated altar was returned to Abbey Dore (according to a local story, crushing a servant who tried to make off with it, its surface running with blood). The beautiful green-glazed tiles of the medieval church scattered around farms and hamlets were reused where possible, replaced where not. And from the surviving
in situ
remnant of the crossing of the old abbey church, Scudamore had the Herefordshire craftsman John Abel (who had also designed a gloriously ornamental town hall at Leominster) carve a spectacular chancel screen in the authentic style of the Palladian revival, complete with Ionic columns. On Palm Sunday 1635, the date chosen not just for its place in the sacred calendar but as the anniversary of Scudamore's baptism, Dore was reconsecrated with a full day of prayers and processions, and much kneeling and bowing, the congregation commanded to remember that henceforth Dore was to be considered a ‘Holie Habitation'.

Just across the county at Brampton Bryan Sir Robert and Lady Brilliana Harley would have seen the reconsecration of the Cistercian abbey as the most horrifying and damning evidence that the Popish Antichrist had already made a successful conquest of England, and that
his Laudian minions were abusing their office to re-institute the full monstrous servitude of Rome. But to the Laudians, their work was not in any sense an act of spiritual or ecclesiastical subjugation. On the contrary, they saw the restoration of spectacle and mystery as a way of bringing back to the Church those who had been alienated by its obsession with the Word. To feast the eye rather than tire the ear was a way of appealing to all those whom the Calvinists had told were either damned or saved, a way of giving hope to sinners that they might yet be among the flock of those who would see salvation. So the restoration of propriety was not, in their minds, an affectation but a genuine mission. How could the flock be properly reminded of the redeeming sacrifice of the Saviour at a mean little table on which worshippers were accustomed to deposit their hats and from which dogs made off with the communion wafers? Reverence, order and obedience would make the congregation of the faithful whole again.