A History of Britain, Volume 2 (14 page)

They were fatally deluded. The talk-filled, rumour-ridden, preachy, preternaturally suspicious, gossipy world of news was already giving the rough kiss of life to institutions that had been politically inert for generations. For the first time in living memory, elections for knights of the shire were being contested in the counties, sometimes hotly. The government did everything it could to influence the poll to produce members who would be as tractable as Wentworth's Irish parliament in Dublin, but where it faced money and local power from a determined opposition it almost invariably lost. In Dorset, for example, a great campaign was waged to elect Dudley Carleton, son of the English ambassador to the Dutch court at The Hague, in place of Denzil Holles, but it failed, and Holles was returned, more determined than ever to bring court and council to a reckoning before the representatives of the ‘country'. The regime fared no better in the boroughs. In Cornwall, where loyalty to the king was usually thought fierce, government support was the kiss of death to all eight candidates recommended by it. And the elections in 1640, for both the April and November parliaments, began to turn up men from a much broader social circle (and much more strongly partisan religious colouring) than the usual gentlemanly MP. In counties like Warwickshire and Oxfordshire the Puritan nobles – Brooke, and Saye and Sele – spent money and knocked heads together to secure the election of godly members, many of them famous local resisters of ship money. In December 1639 Brooke apparently even had the audacity to try to bring to Warwick Samuel Rutherford, the Covenanter preacher, whose
Lex rex
, published
just five years later, made it clear that he thought political authority was ‘a birthright of the people, borrowed from them; they may let it out for their own good and resume it when a man is drunk with it'.

By the 1630s Puritanism was not just a manner of worship. It was an entire sub-culture, which began in the cradle of the family hearth, embraced and enclosed men, women and children within its godly vision and conditioned the way they saw the political world. Crucially, for the future of Britain, that unity of vision cut across the old lines of social rank and deferential hierarchies. Puritan aristocrats like Brooke felt themselves to have far more in common with humble preachers and teachers than with their fellow nobles. These families raised their children on a common literature, sent them to the same kind of schools and to exemplary godly colleges like Emmanuel and Sidney Sussex in Cambridge, and ensured that they made godly marriages, perpetuating the cohesion of their tight little world and sealing it off, they hoped, from infection by worldly pragmatism and temptation. And, most important, they did business together, not exclusively to be sure, but often decisively, and those businesses could sometimes germinate something other than just money. In fact, they could lose money and still be profoundly fruitful for the common enterprises of the children of God. Throughout the 1630s, for example, virtually all those who would shape the destinies of political Puritanism in parliament – John Pym, John Hampden, his lawyer Oliver St John, Sir Arthur Haselrig, Lord Brooke, Viscount Saye and Sele, the earls of Bedford and Essex and, ubiquitously, Robert Rich, the colossally important and powerful Earl of Warwick – were all involved in ventures to create settlements in the Caribbean and New England. The Providence Island Company in the Caribbean, which was eventually destroyed by the Spanish (thus confirming the Puritan view of the world as a crusade between Christ and Antichrist), was the most intensively organized of their ventures. But the two lords/nobles also created the Saye-Brooke settlement on Long Island Sound, and most of them (especially Warwick) were in regular correspondence with the most promising colony of all, planted on Massachusetts Bay and including at least a dozen of the Dorchester godly in its complement of emigrants in March 1630. It had been John White who had preached the farewell sermon at Plymouth's ‘New Hospital'. The deliberation on the government of those settlements in New England was, for the founding fathers back home, akin to a seminar on political theory, a learned speculation on the possibility of the shared Christian life. Across the Atlantic, in a cleaner, godlier world, schools and colleges would thrive, a true Zion would plant its seed. And those days and years of long-distance stewardship could only have
encouraged them to think in like manner of making in England itself, should God so will it, a new Jerusalem.

These men were very much a minority, but being of the Elect they expected to be a minority: the redemption caucus. They gloried in their slightness of numbers as if they were the self-purifying troop of Gideon's army. (The analogy was often invoked.) Modern history is full of such intensely motivated minorities with a self-conscious martyr complex and a talent for collective self-promotion. With the right independent historical conditions, where their adversarial regimes have been weakened, such little legions of the righteous can move mountains. And that was precisely what happened in the astounding unravelling of the Stuart monarchy between 1640 and 1642.

Right from the opening of the ‘Short Parliament', from 13 April to 5 May 1640, it was apparent that those who saw themselves appointed by God to deliver the country from the Antichrist had managed to persuade a much larger and more moderate phalanx of members, both in the Lords and in the Commons, that their view of the endangered liberties of the subject was historically accurate. The diaries and correspondence of peers and gentry, by no means all of them hot Presbyterians, are full of commonplace remarks to the effect that thorns had to be removed from the feet of the kingdom before it could walk; that ulcerous veins needed cleansing before the body (politic) could be healed. Edward Hyde, later the die-hard royalist Clarendon, along with his friend and patron, Viscount Falkland of Great Tew, and the legal scholar John Selden, were at this time, like so many of their fellows, convinced of the imperative necessity of reform and of a government that could rest securely on the confidence of parliament And although the notion of the outright abolition of the episcopacy, following the Covenanters, was still a shockingly radical proposal in England, there was a surprising degree of agreement that they needed taking down a peg from their Laudian loftiness. Bishops like John Williams of Lincoln, who, in the tradition of George Abbot, Laud's predecessor at Canterbury, had always seen Rome rather than Geneva as the enemy, who claimed to be the true custodians of the Tudor Reformation and had been prosecuted and imprisoned for their outspokenness, were now very much listened to.

The likelihood, then, that parliament would tamely hand over to the king the money he needed to resume the Scottish war and crush the impertinent and rebellious Covenanters was precisely nil. Charles grandly offered to forgo ship money (no hardship since by 1639 it had proved virtually impossible to collect) if parliament voted him twelve subsidies (later reduced to four). This was immediately treated as a bad joke. Relatively
moderate members of the Commons, like Sir Harbottle Grimston, a great friend of the Verneys, insisted on the redress of grievances (not least the status of the courts of Star Chamber and High Commission), before any thought of a money bill could be entertained. On 17 April John Pym embarked on a lengthy frontal attack on the infamies he said had been perpetrated by the administration during the eleven years of personal rule, concentrating especially on the affronts done to religion by the Laudian ‘innovations'. It was Pym, more than any other of the Commons' tribunes, who would contribute to the sense, both in April and in November 1640, when another parliament was called, that something like a national emergency was at hand, with the allied forces of popery and despotism planning an assault on the liberties of the English subject. And increasingly, inside the House and on the streets of London, where men like Nehemiah Wallington were all ears, John Pym was believed.

Fuming with frustration, the king dissolved parliament barely three weeks after it had been called. This was a tactical blunder of monumental proportions, since nothing is quite so inflammatory as the abrupt interruption of raised expectations. Both Wentworth (whose idea the parliament had been) and Edward Hyde immediately understood the decision as the political disaster it undoubtedly was: a priceless opportunity to settle problems within the traditional framework of king-in-parliament carelessly thrown away. But Charles had heard all the ranting and raving in 1629, and it had gone away when parliament did. He still blindly assumed that his real problem was Edinburgh, not Westminster, and that unless he destroyed the Covenanters – and swiftly, too – the contagion of their Calvinism and their apparently contractual notions of monarchy would spread like the plague south to England. He was, in fact, quite right (Pym was in treasonable correspondence with the Covenanter leaders, as were also Saye and Sele). But he chose the worst of all possible options: to fight the Scots without any idea of whether his army (which had looked so shaky the year before) was in any condition to follow him. At the back of Charles's mind, of course, was Wentworth's contingency plan to use the Irish to do the job for him, and in the course of the summer campaign against the Scots he appointed Wentworth Commander-in-Chief, having already raised him, in January 1640, to the earldom of Strafford, an honour that turned out to be a poisoned chalice. To discount the effect that Strafford's Irish strategy would have on the anti-Catholic propaganda fast spreading through London, presupposed a truly breathtaking obtuseness on the king's part. He had not listened to the sensible people in Scotland in 1638, and he was not listening to the sensible people now. The only person he was listening to, other than himself, was his Catholic queen.

What immediately followed in the summer of 1640 was a breakdown of deference of frightening magnitude. With no pay and none in the offing, the soldiers who were mustered in the Midlands and north imposed themselves on their billets in a bad temper and with growling bellies. In a number of towns, such as Hereford, the citizens rose in indignation and ran them out of town. Looking for someone to blame for their real distress, the rank-and-file soldiers turned on their own officers, especially any of them tainted as Catholics or Irish. Ugly scenes became commonplace. In Wellington, Somerset, a lieutenant suspected of being a Catholic was cut to pieces and the dead body robbed. In Faringdon, Oxfordshire, another officer was beaten senseless by soldiers from Dorset (including a number from Dorchester), and when he was found to be receiving medical attention was pulled through the streets and beaten again, this time fatally. What was left of the mangled corpse was set in the stocks for posthumous abuse. As for their religious dependability as an anti-Calvinist army, the soldiery showed exactly what they thought of that by smashing communion table rails, altars and stained-glass windows and ripping surplices off clergy when they found them. Young Edmund Verney wrote to his father that he had to go to church three times in a day to assure his men that he was no papist, ‘But once that day I a little nodded at church and had it been a minute longer truely I doe thinke I had been pulled by the nose, for the souldyers pointed extreamely at me.' To any foreign observer it must have seemed for all the world that the English troopers were the allies, not the enemies, of the Covenanters. ‘Whereas before our soldiers would go against Scotland,' noted Nehemiah Wallington, ‘now not any that I know of in this land would go.'

The disorder was rapidly spiralling out of control. The trained bands opened the gaols where men who had refused to pay the ‘coat and conduct' money for their supply had been incarcerated. Other sections of society, equally alienated by the government, took the opportunity to make their point violently against those who enclosed common land or had chased them out of the forests. None of these aggrieved populations was logically connected, but it didn't matter – they were all hunting for someone to blame – and together they persuaded the men responsible for keeping law and order intact, the justices of the peace and the constables, that royal government as it had been constituted over the past eleven years was a broken reed.

In the circumstances it was hardly surprising that the war was a humiliating fiasco for the English. The commander of the Covenanters, General Leslie, knew exactly what he was doing, crossing the Tweed into England on 20 August and aiming for Newcastle to cut off the coal supply
to the metropolitan heart of England. Leslie had now given the lie to the Scots' claims of fighting a defensive war, a nicety swept aside in the reality of the conflict. At Newburn, where the English army attempted to make a stand on the banks of the Tyne, Leslie's army, commanding the higher northern bank, raked the English with fire, sending the survivors reeling back to York, while the Scots occupied Newcastle and then Durham. The day after the ignominious defeat at Newburn, a group of inner-core parliamentarians – Oliver St John, Pym, Saye and Sele, Warwick and Brooke – and the earls of Essex and Bedford met at Bedford House in London to draft a petition, in the name of the twelve peers, calling for a new parliament. Manuscript copies were widely circulated around the city and provinces. Charles attempted to find some other way, any other way, to finance another campaign without calling a parliament, but a meeting of nobles made him understand that the war was lost and, since the Scots were demanding an indemnity as the price for evacuating England and releasing the coal supply, only a parliament could possibly supply those funds. On 24 September 1640, pre-empting another grand meeting of the lords, which would certainly have reiterated the demand for a parliament, the king conceded. It would meet on 3 November and would remain in session, in one form and another, until it had ended the life of Charles I and the monarchy along with it.

For Nehemiah Wallington the autumn of 1640 was the time of rosemary. Bunches of the grey-green herb, together with conquerors' garlands of bay, showered down on the heads of Burton, Prynne, Bastwick and Bishop Williams, who had been liberated – Bastwick from Scilly, the rest from the Tower – and paraded triumphantly through the packed streets of London. Rosemary was for remembrance, and how this parliament remembered! Almost immediately it continued the note struck in April by establishing forty committees of investigation into those responsible for illegal and arbitrary acts: ship money, the prerogative courts of Star Chamber and the Church's High Commission. But there were two designated villains on whom parliament concentrated its prosecutorial wrath: Strafford and Laud. Attacking the king by proxy, through his chosen counsellors, was of course a time-honoured way of making the Crown reverse course while still preserving intact the dignity and independence of its sovereignty. In both houses of parliament in 1640 there was a substantial majority for impeaching both men as well as the next rank of councillors, such as Lord Keeper Finch, and courtiers, such as Bishop Wren of Ely, as a way of marking the irreversible end of the Laudian Church and the years of personal rule. But beyond that, there was a serious division about what the impeachment, especially of Strafford, was supposed to
accomplish. For men like Viscount Falkland and Edward Hyde the impeachment was essentially therapeutic and restorative. By concentrating the odium for unpopular government, the king had been given a chance to embrace a reformed version of his government, one that would rule together with a responsible parliament and through councillors who enjoyed the confidence of parliament. Their reform programme was corrective: the elimination of what they considered to be either imprudent and alien innovations (the Laudian Church regime and extra-parliamentary taxation) or obsolete institutions that had been shamelessly abused for power and gain (the prerogative courts, the forest regime and the knighthood fines). Clear them away, and you gave the monarchy a fresh start.