A History of Britain, Volume 2 (13 page)

Verney was not exaggerating. The machinery of mustering the trained bands in the Midlands and northern counties to make up the English army was showing signs of imminent breakdown. It was proving difficult, and in some cases impossible, to raise the ship money that had been extended into the inland counties. County commissioners for troops and
sheriffs for ship money were disappearing or protesting the impossibility of delivering funds. The men themselves – trained bands of literate artisans, such as clothiers – often failed to show up at the mustering places, and replacements had to be rounded up from wherever the impressment officers could find them. They, too, failed to understand why they were being called on to fight this ‘bishops' war'. The trained bands were supposed to be called out strictly in defence of the realm against invasion, and it was known, not least from the propaganda the Covenanters were already circulating south of the border, that the Scots had explicitly disavowed any such aim. The reluctance of the trained bands was shared by many of their social superiors and officers. The king sensed this strained loyalty but only made matters worse by demanding of his officers an oath of loyalty, which the Puritan nobles, Viscount Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke (of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire respectively), point blank refused. The dissident nobles were immediately imprisoned in York for their shocking rejection of the royal command, thus covering themselves with glory among the godly. As for the rank and file, it was, as Sir Edmund Verney noted, a surly, underpaid (in many cases unpaid), poorly armed, wretchedly led force that trudged north from York towards the border.

At Kelso, just inside Scottish territory, all of Verney's pessimism seemed borne out. A small force of cavalry, led by the Earl of Holland and including Sir Edmund himself, was confronted by what seemed at first a manageably modest Scots army. But as Holland got his men into battle order the Scots army seemed to grow before their eyes, pikemen and dragoons and horse becoming more and more numerous until it was appallingly obvious that any kind of engagement would end in a calamitous rout. Hastily, Holland withdrew his troops to camp where they (necessarily) exaggerated the size of the waiting enemy. Charles, whose own mood had gone from supercilious complacency to grim irritation at the news of discontent and desertion, now thought better of an impetuous campaign. The Scots' request to clarify their own position (for they did not at any time consider themselves rebels) was accepted, and a meeting of delegations organized at Berwick-on-Tweed in June 1639. Charles himself appeared at this meeting, where he had his first chance to encounter the full, glaring Calvinist hostility of Archibald Johnston. As usual, the king's idea of diplomacy was to chide the Scots for their ‘pretended' assembly and to concede nothing, except that the issues might be aired and, it was hoped, resolved by the calling of a Scottish parliament rather than on the field of battle. Pending that resolution, both armies were to be disbanded. Johnston suspected that this was merely a ploy on the part of the king to play for time, and he had the bad manners to say
so, more or less to his face. But suspicious or not, a ‘Pacification' was duly signed. The ink was hardly dry before Johnston's scepticism was vindicated as Charles made it known that he would expect a new general assembly to be called that would nullify all the reforms of Glasgow.

In Scotland in July that year there were near-riots when the terms of the Pacification became known, since it was felt not unreasonably that an opportunity to defeat the king had been frittered away and that the Scots were now locked into a truce, pending the onset of a round of more serious warfare. And perhaps, for a time, Charles may have been smilingly deluded, imagining that he had got the better of the Scots tactically and would shortly get the better of them militarily, too. For he was now listening to the counsellor he thought would without question bring him victory, vindication and retribution against the Covenanters: Thomas Wentworth, his Lord Deputy in Ireland. Wentworth had been a kind of miracle for the king. From being one of his most aggressive critics in parliament, he had become the most unflagging and uncompromising upholder of the absolutism of the Crown. Psychologically, Charles must have felt that the flinty, saturnine Wentworth was truly one of his own: a man who understood that the destiny of the Crown was to apply the balm of royal adjudication to nations hurting from confessional wounds. Except that the Wentworth medicine invariably had a nasty sting to it. Those who begged to differ with the Lord Deputy found themselves smartly disadvantaged: their land title investigated, their property taken, themselves in prison. But the policy of ‘thorough' had kept Ireland quiet, and that in itself was a recommendation for his understanding of the obscure and irate war of the sects – Old English Catholics, Ulster Presbyterians, Gaelic Irish. As far as Charles could see, Wentworth had kept the royal ship of state sailing high above the fray like some celestial galleon in a court masque. So when he gave the king advice about the Scottish crisis, Charles paid attention. Call a parliament, Wentworth advised. Without it, your army will never be well supplied nor the country truly disposed to fight the war. And fear not. Parliaments, however truculent they might seem, are manageable, especially when the defence of the realm can be legitimately invoked. To show the king what could be done, in March 1640 Wentworth called an Irish parliament at Dublin, which behaved like a lamb, the Old English voting with enough New English to produce solid majorities and fat little subsidies for the Crown. Strategy two was admittedly a little trickier. Wentworth was proposing to use an Irish army to deal with the Scottish rebellion. The only problem was how disciplined troops in numbers sufficient to make any impact on the Scottish war could be expeditiously raised. Needless to say, they could
hardly be drawn from the New English and Scottish Presbyterians of the Ulster plantation, whose sympathies were all with the Covenant.

A solution was at Charles's right hand in the shape of Randal Macdonnell, the Marquis of Antrim. He was a unique figure in northern Ireland, a native Irish Catholic, but one who had profited from Wentworth's bargain, by which his own fortunes were expanded to the degree to which he made room for planters on his enormous estates. At the same time, Antrim had become a familiar, if not entirely trusted, figure in the inner circles of Charles's court. So when he offered to raise his own native Irish army to be put at the king's disposal Charles was tempted to take the proposal very seriously, even though Wentworth had deep misgivings about what he considered to be a low, barbarian Catholic force, ‘with as many “Os” and “Macs” as would startle a whole council board', claiming to do the work of the king. Should the gamble not pay off, he had an all too clear vision of how the idea of a semi-private Catholic army deployed against the godly Covenanters would play in England!

From the beginning then, even Wentworth could see that the two arms of the king's strategy – a parliament and a native, predominantly Catholic-Irish army – might turn out to be in glaring contradiction to each other. But the king was not thinking logically. In fact, he was not thinking at all, just dreaming dreams of vindication and victory: the Grand Harmonization of Britannia virtually within reach.

Step one was the calling of a parliament in April 1640. Encouraged by Wentworth and Laud, Charles was confident that the interrupted but unresolved crisis with Scotland would ensure an assembly that, as in Ireland, would discuss only the matters proposed by the king and, after such discussion, produce adequate supplies for his armies. He also seems to have felt that his eleven years of personal rule had actually made this docility more, rather than less, likely, since the country had been exposed to the wisdom, energy, benevolence and disinterested justice of his sovereignty. And since he believed that the Covenanters had been in touch with the king of France, all he would have to do would be to flourish evidence of this revival of the notorious ‘auld alliance' and the country would rise to the defence of the realm. Shades of the Plantagenets and the Bruces (albeit with the odd outcome of the Stuarts fighting against, rather than for, the independence of Scotland)!

It must have come as an unpleasant shock, then, when this new parliament, far from putting old, imagined grievances aside, immediately resurrected them. Virtually the first order of the day was their summoning of the records of the proceedings against Sir John Eliot, whose death in the Tower of London had not been forgotten but had been religiously
remembered as a martyrdom suffered for the people's liberty. However extreme, this was precisely the way in which the fate of Eliot and a whole pantheon of victims of Laud's Court of High Commission and of Star Chamber appeared in the newsletters and ‘separates' that were distributed around the provinces. For the newsmongers Eliot made wonderful copy, and there was a steady supply of victims and heroes to join him, men whose stories were celebrated in the newsletters as chapters in a scripture of godly liberty. Some of them like the obdurate, steely lawyer, William Prynne, had done everything they could to court persecution. Prynne's
Histrio-Mastix
had been a scathing attack on the court and in particular on the masques in which the king and queen liked to appear as dancers. More dangerously, in the course of the polemic Prynne had asserted a doctrine of resistance (shared by both ultra-Catholic and Calvinist theorists) by which a prince plainly resolved to violate God's laws might be set aside. For his sedition Prynne was sentenced in 1634 to have his ears sliced off, pay a fine of £5000 and spend the rest of his life in the Tower of London. In London and in strongly Puritan communities like Dorchester the irascible, unstoppable Prynne became an immediate saint, his epistle broadcast through the network of the godly from Ulster to Scotland. In 1637 the government blunderingly reinforced and perpetuated his popularity by dragging Prynne out of the Tower to stand in the pillory along with Dr Henry Burton – the Puritan rector of St Matthew, Friday Street, London – who had preached sermons on a popish plot and the evils of the Church, and John Bastwick, another active sympathizer, who likewise refused to remain silent. Both the new malefactors had their ears cut off – no deterrent to Burton who defiantly continued to preach while profusely bleeding, or so the Puritan Apocrypha had it.

Nehemiah Wallington, a devout wood-turner living in the parish of St Andrew's Hubbard, Eastcheap, believed every word of the gospel according to Prynne and began a 2000-page account of the sins and events of his times, including an encomium to the earless martyrs, Burton and Bastwick. In Wallington's tight little universe nothing could possibly happen without some sort of providential meaning. A boating accident was God's punishment for the profanation of the Sabbath; a storm that broke the stained-glass windows of a church His judgement on gaudy idolatry. Prynne, Burton and Bastwick had obviously been called to preach against the uncleanness of the times, and their torments were a sign that great days of reckoning were nigh. In this fevered world miracles, portents and signs abounded. A conversation set down in Wallington's book suggests just how intensely he and his fellow Puritan artisans felt the coming of the battle between the children of God and the legions of
Antichrist. No sooner had one of these heretics finished denouncing the three as ‘base schismatical jacks' who deserved hanging for troubling the kingdom, than he suddenly fell into a terrible sweat with blood pouring from his ears. Wallington's sense that Prynne, Burton and Bastwick were fighting the good fight,
his
fight, was brought home all too directly when he was named, along with the three others, in a charge of seditious libel and ordered to answer for it before the court of Star Chamber in 1639. But his own ears survived the ordeal, and he lived to join the triumphal celebrations in the streets of London that greeted the liberation of Bastwick, ordered by parliament at the end of 1640.

The gallery of resistance heroes took in all social types and conditions, from dissident minor clergy like Peter Smart, who had lost his position as prebend at Durham Cathedral and had been fined £500 for attacking Bishop Neile's innovations in ceremony, to the Buckinghamshire gentleman and MP John Hampden (the guardian of Eliot's children) who had refused to pay the 20 shilling ship-money assessment on one of his estates and had gone to court to test its legality. Although the King's Bench had found against Hampden in 1638, it had done so by only seven votes to five, and both the impassioned arguments of his lawyer, Oliver St John, and the dissenting judgement of Judge George Croke added to what was rapidly becoming a canon of virtue: men who exemplified the counsel given in one of John White's sermons at Holy Trinity, Dorchester, that ‘obedience to the will of God discharges a man from performing the will of the ruler'.

Unlike Prynne or White, John Hampden was not some abrasive and unworldly hothead but a well-respected county figure whose strength and clarity of opinion about the illegality of non-parliamentary taxes made essentially moderate gentlemen from the same county, like the Verneys, think very seriously about the constitutional price to be paid for obedience to the king. The Buckinghamshire members elected to parliament in 1640 no longer looked like a bunch of backwoods provincial knights and burgesses concerned first and foremost with parish-pump affairs and loyally willing to do the king's business. From militant Puritans, like Bulstrode Whitelocke, to Hampden himself and the Verneys, there was at the group's core a highly literate and politically articulate group, intensely tuned to national politics – indeed, who made no distinction at all between the affairs of the county and those of the nation. There were, of course, shades of opinion between them. While he felt the times did call for reform, Sir Edmund was less impatient for it than his son, Ralph, who would make a chronicle of the doings of the Long Parliament and who evidently felt that one of the great moments in the country's history
was at hand. But father and son were not (yet) estranged. Hampden's case may have changed nothing on the law books in respect of the legality of non-parliamentary taxes, but it had changed a lot of minds. The very conditions of the personal rule had ensured that the king and his councillors would keep themselves ignorant of the many ways in which a genuine public opinion in England was in the process of being formed. And like so much of the radicalization of English politics, the catalyst travelled south in the form of broadsheets printed in Scotland by the busily righteous Covenanter press. Occasionally, there are documentary glimpses of just how quickly a politicized reading public was forming. At Radwinter in Essex an unknown man marched up to the curate in a Laudian church and threw a Puritan pamphlet on his desk, saying, ‘There is reading work for you, read that.' In Stepney in 1640 another minister found a man reading the printed proceedings of parliament in his churchyard. But until it was much too late, in the winter of 1641–2, the royal government thought no more of these ‘ephemera' than of the vulgar gossip of the impotent common people.