The Great Turning Points of British History (16 page)

Charles’ desire for a more traditional and visually reverent Church encountered opposition, though English people worried more about the purely political side of his policies as he tried to enforce ‘absolutist’ rule, dispensing with Parliament from 1629. His drive to extend his personal authority and dispense with what he saw as a penny-pinching and sometimes insolent Parliament went well in the 1630s. He used traditional means of raising money coupled with prerogative courts such as the High Commission, the supreme power in the Church under the crown, and the hated Star Chamber (a civil and criminal court) to curb religious and political opposition and force through questionable taxes. Discontent at his perceived tyranny was widespread in England at the end of 1637, yet he was riding high – as symbolized by Van Dyck’s portrait of him in 1636. In spring 1638 Charles won an important test case, ‘Hampden’s Case’, about the legality of one of his exactions, ‘ship money’, and looked set to continue pursuing his vision of divine right absolutist monarchy.

It was Scotland that brought his ambitions crashing down. The religious reaction there was both stronger and swifter than in England because the Scottish Reformation had followed a more radical trajectory. English Protestantism was a relatively mild creed, albeit with a more militant, ‘Puritan’ wing that aimed to push forward its vision of a godly kingdom on earth. Scottish Calvinists were made of sterner stuff, basing their Reformation on a strict version of Protestantism and a ‘Presbyterian’ form of church government that involved chosen laymen as well as the parish clergy in decision making.

Scots disliked and did all they could to subvert and bypass the Episcopalian church order imposed across Britain by James I. Charles’ government in Scotland was less popular than it had been in 1633 – but not irrevocably so – when he had the Scottish bishops and Laud draw up a Book of Common Prayer for Scotland in 1637. Anti-Calvinist, its attempted introduction acted as a catalyst to the organization of petitions against what was seen as arbitrary rule, as well as a series of riots, the most famous in July 1637 at St Giles Kirk, Edinburgh.

Charles at first saw the opposition as a little local difficulty, but in February 1638 a group of nobles, magistrates and clergy signed a National Covenant in Edinburgh. On the face of it, this simply bound together like-minded Presbyterians protecting their religion – written by and for people who wished to unite in a special relationship with God. But it went further. Striking at the heart of Charles’ government, it asserted the primacy of the law, the Presbyterian Church and true reformed faith (Calvinism) over royal prerogative, episcopacy and crypto-Catholicism.

During summer 1638 the marquis of Hamilton acted as Charles’ commissioner or viceroy in Scotland and in the autumn both the Scottish Parliament and the first General Assembly of the Church of Scotland since 1617 were called. Hamilton hoped these representative bodies could be used to legitimate a measured introduction of liturgical reform and thus restore royal authority. In fact, they were dominated by Presbyterian clergy and pro-Covenant nobles and together they swept away the royal supremacy over Church, bishops, the Court of High Commission and the Prayer Book.

Too late, Charles was swayed by Thomas Wentworth, lord deputy of Ireland since 1632, who urged a strong line to bring the Scots to heel. Acutely aware of the seething discontent of the Irish, Wentworth believed (prophetically) that concessions in one of the three kingdoms would only provoke similar demands elsewhere. Charles raised an army to bring the Scots back to obedience, but its effect in the so-called Bishops’ Wars of 1639–40 in Scotland was to destabilize further all the countries over which he ruled. Eventual defeat by the Scots alarmed the English Parliament, which blamed Charles for the unrest and tried to curb his powers of taxation and military command.

Failure in Scotland gave encouragement to opponents of absolutism and popery in England, first in withdrawing the grudging consensus in local government and taxation that had allowed the decentralized early Stuart state to function. Lacking a standing army or anything except the most rudimentary bureaucracy, Charles could only watch the obedience of his subjects drain away. The Scottish debacle also emboldened opponents of Charles’ policies when he was obliged to call Parliament after eleven years of ‘personal rule’. Amid mounting disquiet, the king was forced to flee London when rebellion broke out in Ireland in 1641. Military fortunes ebbed and flowed until the decisive defeat of the Royalists at Naseby in 1645. Charles, duplicitous as ever, tried to do a deal with the Scottish nobility, but that alliance too was defeated in 1648. Throughout the decade from 1638 the fortunes of all parts of Britain and Ireland were inextricably entwined.

Yet even at the end of 1638 cracks were beginning to appear in the Covenanting theocracy. In parts of Scotland, such as the north-east that would in the eighteenth century provide many supporters for the Jacobite cause, Episcopalianism was strong. The Covenanting movement meanwhile contained a fundamental tension between Presbyterians, whose main interest was in protecting their Calvinist Reformation, and the broader political drive to create a more limited monarchy. The later decision to try to confirm the Scottish Revolution by entering into the Solemn League and Covenant with English Parliamentarians in 1643 led to the fateful Scottish invasion of England. This openly divided the Covenanters and gave Charles the chance to try to divide and rule his Scottish enemies. However, the alliance remained unified long enough to defeat Charles, only to fragment irrevocably in 1647–8.

In short, the Scottish Revolution of 1638 both reflected and further encouraged a rising tide of sullen disobedience and active opposition that culminated in England with the calling of Parliament in 1640 and in Ireland with the rebellion of 1641 onwards. Charles realized too late both the strength of feeling against his political and religious policies and that the concessions he had made to the Scots struck at the basis of his authority. At the end of 1638 he had capitulated to a Scottish Revolution that nevertheless continued ruthlessly and relentlessly, by intrigue and force of arms, to dismantle the political and religious establishment his father had created in Scotland. ‘Too weak to be absolute, too ambitious to be anything else’, Charles’ arrogant and inept religious policies squandered an inheritance of political stability and plunged not only his dynasty, but the monarchy itself, into crisis.

The English Civil Wars and interregnum that filled the years up to 1660 are unthinkable without the events in Scotland in 1638 that began what are known broadly as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The Scots began Charles’ downfall and their Covenanting ideas set the tone for armed resistance throughout Britain in the following decade. It was a true watershed in
British
history. Above all, 1638 highlights the way that events in one part of Britain influenced the development of others and indeed of the whole United Kingdom. It exemplifies the need for a British rather than purely an English history of the ‘north Atlantic archipelago’ in the early modern period.

1603
Union of the crowns
. Elizabeth I never married, and without an heir her crown passed to the man whose mother, Mary Queen of Scots, she had allowed to be executed in 1587. King of Scots at just 13 months old after Mary was deposed by her own nobility in 1567, James VI inherited a much richer kingdom than his own and quickly moved to London, where he was crowned James I of England with ‘silent joye, noe great shouting’.

1608
Plantation of Ulster
. Following the shock of a rebellion by Sir Cahir O’Doherty of Inishowen, previously a loyal ally, James I adopted a radical scheme for systematically colonizing Ulster with English and Scottish Protestants, in the belief it would subdue unrest and win over the ‘rude and barbarous Irish’ to ‘civility’. 100,000 Scots and 20,000 English settled in Ulster over the century, sowing the seeds of discontent among the indigenous population that are still evident in sectarian tensions today.

1609
Statutes of Iona
. This was James’ parallel response to his other problem area, the Gaelic-speaking, Catholic-leaning, clan society of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. A coherent and ideologically driven attempt to alter the nature of the region, it represents an early form of ethnic cleansing of people who allegedly manifested ‘grite crueltie and inhumane barbaritie’. The statutes struck at the heart of clan society, which was not principally about kinship, but about feasting and fighting.

1623
Last English subsistence crisis
. While Scotland still had famines in the 1690s and beyond, and Ireland tragically until the 1840s, the last time large numbers of people died of hunger in England was at the end of James I’s reign – and that mainly in the north-west. Thereafter England became the most agriculturally productive country in Europe and the one with the highest average standard of living, creating the preconditions for the eighteenth-century ‘consumer revolution’.

1641
Rebellion in Ireland
. Dispossessed and oppressed by the Plantation Protestants, native Irish Catholics rose in bloody rebellion, stirring up the fears of popish plots and threats of invasion that had haunted English people since the days of the Spanish Armada (1588) and Gunpowder Plot (1605). Extensive and prolonged, the rising permeated British politics during the 1640s and was not finally suppressed until Cromwell’s arrival in Ireland in 1649.

1645–6
Peak of English witchcraft executions
. While most English witchcraft accusations were very personal, Matthew Hopkins, Puritan, lawyer and self-proclaimed witch-finder general, single-handedly created the most intensive hunt for witches in English history: over a hundred women were executed. Witchcraft accusations show a mental world saturated by the supernatural.

1649
Execution of Charles I
. Being a monarch had always been a dangerous occupation and plenty of previous English kings had died in battle or by assassination, but none had been judicially murdered by his own people. The death sent a shudder through the elites of early modern Europe. It also introduced a bold experiment in both social engineering and republican government that was reversed (but never forgotten) in 1660.

In 1662, the peoples of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland were coming to terms with the effects of twenty years of civil war and political and religious violence. In the course of the 1640s and 1650s, parish churches had been purged of all ‘monuments of idolatry and superstition’, Christmas and Easter were banned, the Prayer Book was proscribed, bishops, Church courts and trappings of hierarchy were swept away. A variety of religious sects sprang up with more (Baptist) or less (Quaker) state encouragement. In 1649 Charles I was put on trial and beheaded for treason against his people, and monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished. A godly army set up and then pulled down various constitutional experiments, the most long lasting of which made the Lord General Oliver Cromwell the lord protector.

The most contentious of Cromwell’s achievements was the military subjugation of Ireland and Scotland. In Ireland, the Commonwealth governments took almost half the land from Catholics born in Ireland, and gave it to Protestants from England. The population shrank by one-third. The proportion of British adult males who died as a result of the fighting was higher than in the First World War.

The revolutionaries made many enemies and few friends. By 1660, there was an overwhelming desire for Restoration – for a return to hereditary monarchy, to bishops and Cranmer’s prayers, to Christmas pies, maypoles, sport on Sunday afternoons. But the Revolution cast a long shadow. There were enough supporters of the Puritan way – freedom of conscience, the imposition of strict moral codes, plain dealing and plain dress – for the celebration of old and new freer ways to cause political polarization. All kinds of enthusiasm were discredited. A new spirit of dispassionate, sceptical enquiry challenged the claims of all churches and churchmen. So Church and king were restored, but had to face their critics.

The alliance was fatally wounded by the fact that none of the three monarchs in this half-century was a supporter of the established Church. Charles II hid his private beliefs so deeply behind a protective chameleon coating (he was all things to all men) that historians are still not sure whether he was a secret Catholic or an early Deist. James II and VII was a Catholic with an extreme case of ‘convertitis’, and William III would do whatever was necessary to ensure that English politicians would underwrite his crusade against Louis XIV. And so the central instabilities of the Restoration, so evident in 1662, created crisis after crisis in 1672, 1679, 1688 and 1701.

It took Louis XIV of France, threatening to impose popery and arbitrary government on the country, to persuade the political elite to convert the country into a fiscal-military state capable of dominating Europe and claiming a lion’s share of the world’s commerce. That threat was an indirect result of the instabilities of the 1662 settlement, but without those, the trajectory of later seventeenth-century politics would have been very different.

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The year 1662 was a warm, bright year: the warmest winter and spring of the whole half-century and one of the warmest overall – only dwarfed by the scorching summer of 1686. The scars of civil war, the buildings burned and wrecked by war, were being repaired and replaced. Carpenters and masons were reconverting churches from whitewashed auditoria into sacramental spaces; theatres were being built at an unprecedented rate. Samuel Pepys was able to see a new show most weeks, including
The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The French Dancing Master
and the first recorded Punch and Judy show. The king was to be seen at many of these plays with his pregnant mistress, a casual insult to the reformation of manners at the heart of Interregnum high-mindedness.