The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (29 page)

To what extent the riot in St Giles was spontaneous is a matter of opinion. One minister, Henry Guthrie, who disapproved of the new prayer book, though himself an Episcopalian, was sure it had been well prepared. ‘This tumult,’ he wrote in his memoirs,

was taken to be but a rash emergent, without any prediliberation; whereas the truth is, it was the result of a consultation at Edinburgh in April, at which time Mr Alexander Henderson came thither from his brethren in Fife, and Mr Thomas Dickson from those in the west country; and those two, having communicated to my lord Balmerino and Sir Thomas Hope the minds of those they came from, and gotten their approbation, did afterwards meet at the house of Nicholas Balfour in the Cowgate, with Nicholas, Eupham Henderson, Bethia and Elspa Craig, and several other matrons, and recommended to them, that they and their adherents might give the first affront to the book, assuring them that men should afterwards take the business out of their hands.
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Yet even if the revolt was stirred up by ministers of the Kirk acting as agents provocateurs, it expressed a national mood. Lowland Scotland was defiant. Only the Highlands, where many clans still held to the Catholic faith, and Aberdeenshire, where Episcopalianism and a tradition of classical scholarship were strong, stood apart, The following February a huge crowd, composed of nobles, lairds, burgesses and the common folk, assembled in the kirkyard of Greyfriars Church in Edinburgh to sign the National Covenant. This document, drawn up by Alexander Henderson and an Edinburgh lawyer, Archibald Johnston of Warriston, runs to great length and it is unlikely that many of the signatories had read it all, or had understood its arguments when it was read out to them, but embedded in its long recitation of history and grievances were two statements on which all might agree. One declared the ‘incompatibiltie betwixt Episcopal government and prebyteriall power’; the other called for the ‘re-establishment of a free parliament and free Assembly of the Kirk’.

It was specifically stated that the Covenant was not a signal to rebellion, for its signatories were not yet ready for that; its argument depended instead on the age-old sophism that the King had been led astray by his advisers. So Scots of all classes swore to maintain both royal authority and true religion; and let this glaring incompatibility go by.

Charles saw it differently. To his mind this was rebellion, naked rebellion, and when the free General Assembly, meeting in Glasgow towards the end of the year, abolished the office of bishop, rejected James’s Five Articles of Perth and the prayer book of 1637, the reality of rebellion could scarcely be denied, all the more so because the Assembly had defied the attempt of the King’s commissioner, the Marquis of Hamilton, to bring its proceedings to an end, by the simple ploy of hiding the key of the door so that he could not leave. ‘Next Hell I hate this place,’ he wrote to Charles, with deep feeling and good reason.
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A wiser king would have been ready to yield to this expression of national opinion, or to seek a compromise. After Charles was dead, the Reverend James Kirkton, himself a Covenanter, wrote: ‘People generally think his greatest unhappiness [misfortune] was, he mistook wilfullness for constancy, granting unprofitably to his people today that which would have abundantly satisfied them yesterday, and the next day that which would have satisfied this day, but all out of time.’ A fair and judicious assessment.
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So now, even while allowing Hamilton, whose own loyalty was uncertain, for he was as wayward in character as he was lacking in intelligence, to temporise and seek to appease the Covenanters, Charles was preparing to make war on Scotland, trusting that the traditional antipathy of the English to their northern neighbours would be strong enough to secure victory. In truth, the two short Bishops’ Wars that followed in 1639 and 1640 saw little fighting. The royal army was ill equipped and worse trained; the Scots had the advantage of a number of officers, including their general, Alexander Leslie, who had fought in the German wars; many, Leslie himself among them, had served in the Swedish army of the Protestant hero Gustavus Adolphus. More importantly, Charles’s critics in England were of a mind with the Scots, and entered into negotiations with them. The alliance thus formed between the nascent opposition in England and the Scots was to prove the means of bringing the years of Charles’s personal rule to an end. To finance his war, Charles needed additional revenue, and to obtain this he found himself compelled to summon a parliament. It proved unsatisfactory, refusing supply without redress of grievances. He dissolved it, and summoned another, which proved no better. This ‘Long Parliament’, as it came to be called, embarked on a programme of radical, indeed revolutionary, reform of both Church and state. Charles recalled his most capable minister, Strafford, from Ireland; Strafford, as an old parliamentary hand, was confident of his ability to manage the Commons. But he was now in the Upper House, and his years in Ireland meant that he was out of touch with political feeling in England and unable to bring his stabilising influence to bear.

Meanwhile the Commons, led by John Pym, proceeded to destroy the basis of the prerogative state that had made possible the eleven years of personal rule. They abolished the conciliar courts – Star Chamber and High Commission – which, as offshoots of the Privy Council, had been employed by the Tudors as effective instruments of government, bypassing the common law of England. (Torture, for instance, was illegal according to common law, but practised, especially in the case of political prisoners, by the conciliar courts.) All extra-parliamentary taxation was declared illegal. Parliament now asserted its right – for which there was no precedent – to sit until it should be pleased to dissolve itself. It passed a root and branch bill to abolish bishops, and Laud himself was arrested, impeached and confined to the Tower. All this was made possible by the presence of the Scots army still under arms in the north of England, until Charles should pay the costs of its occupation, as promised in the Treaty of Berwick. But the King could pay nothing till the English parliament granted him the necessary money, and this it continued to refuse.

The Commons then turned on Strafford and impeached him.
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In February 1641 he was brought to trial in Westminster Hall. Charles and his queen attended the trial to demonstrate their support for the minister, and Strafford defended himself with skill and spirit, while London was in an uproar. The censorship enforced by Laud and the Court of High Commission had broken down, resulting in a flurry of abusive and inflammatory pamphlets. How far the popular agitation was spontaneous, how far orchestrated by Pym and his adherents, is impossible to determine. The issue of the trial remained for three weeks in doubt. Many in the House of Lords, who were the judges, were sympathetic to Strafford, and it seemed that the case had not been made credibly by the Commons. Then Pym produced what were alleged to be notes taken at a Council meeting in May the previous year. What he had was in truth not the original notes but a copy made by the son of the King’s secretary, Sir Henry Vane. According to the notes, Strafford had reminded the King that ‘You have an army in Ireland, which you may use to reduce this kingdom.’
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Since at the time Charles was at war with the Scots, it is probable that the words referred to Scotland, not England. But the meaning was sufficiently ambiguous for Pym’s purpose. Even so, acquittal seemed more likely than condemnation. The process of impeachment was therefore abandoned, and a bill of attainder, that old Tudor device that dispensed with the necessity of proof, was brought before the Commons, declaring Strafford guilty of treason. It was passed, and Strafford’s fate now lay in the King’s hands, for the bill could not become law without the royal assent. An attempt to free Charles from his dilemma was made by the Earl of Bedford, who suggested that banishment would be a sufficient punishment, but this was thwarted by the Earl of Essex, who declared, ‘Stone-dead hath no fellow.’ Essex, Frances Howard’s first husband, and humiliated by the divorce that King James had approved, had no love for the Stuarts, no wish to ease the King’s position.

Charles fought hard for his most loyal and capable minister. He went to the House of Lords and summoned the Commons to hear him plead that Strafford be found guilty only of a misdemeanour. He also denied having had any intention of employing the Irish army against England. But it was in vain. His intervention raised the temperature rather than cooling it. Then the so-called ‘Army Plot’,
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an attempt by Catholic officers from the army in the north to rescue Strafford from the Tower, failed, and by failing discredited Charles further, emphasising his untrustworthiness, in his opponents’ view.

What remained of the government was now in a state of panic. All his Council, with the honourable exception of William Juxon, Bishop of London, recommended that Charles yield and give his assent to the bill of attainder. Strafford himself nobly advised him to sacrifice his servant rather than his kingdom. Still Charles hesitated. He had promised Strafford that he would protect him against his enemies, and he was loath to break that promise. Only when a mob was raised to howl round the Palace of Whitehall and threaten the lives of the Queen and her children did he give way and sign the bill. It was to his mind the single dishonourable act of his life, and he regretted it till he himself followed Strafford to the block.

Yet even in this dark hour the King’s position was improving. The Scots army had at last been paid and was about to return home. Charles had surrendered to the Covenanters’ demands; he might hope that he had done enough to regain their loyalty. Moreover, the opposition in England was breaking up. Moderate Church of England men who had resented the illegalities, as they saw them, of the years of personal rule were now satisfied that their grievances had been removed. They had no desire for revolution, no desire to see their Church stripped of authority and licence given to schismatics whose preaching threatened the social order, and no desire to see the Crown further weakened.

Earlier in the year, one of these moderate men, Sir Edward Hyde, who had entered Parliament as a critic of the King, was shocked to learn the way the wind was now blowing. Leaving the Commons, where he had been complaining of the ‘indecency and rudeness’ of the member for Huntingdon, Oliver Cromwell, he fell into conversation with his friend and fellow barrister Henry Marten, who advised him against listening to approaches being made to him by the court. Hyde replied: ‘I have no relation to the Court. I am concerned only to maintain the Government and to preserve the Law.’ He explained his reasons, at some length, for he was a wordy man. In reply Marten said: ‘I do not think one man wise enough to govern us all.’
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Hyde was taken aback. ‘It was the first word,’ he related in his
History of the Rebellion
, ‘he had ever heard any man speak to that purpose.’ With such extreme views being aired, Charles had only to wait and act prudently to see the tide turn in his favour, and his party grow. This, indeed, was the advice he had already received from the master-statesman of the age, the first minister of France, Cardinal Richelieu.

Bizarrely, during the trial of Strafford, the first of the royal children was married. This was Mary, the Princess Royal. She was only nine, and her husband, Prince William of Orange, was fifteen. The wedding took place in the Palace of Whitehall a week after the Commons passed the bill of attainder. At that point Charles still hoped to save his minister. Nevertheless, it is strange to think of celebrations in the palace while Strafford lay under sentence of death, and London was seething with discontent.

After the marriage ceremony, the young Prince was introduced by the King to his girl-wife’s bed, where he kissed her three times, lay beside her for three-quarters of an hour in the presence of the Queen and her ladies, then kissed her again when he was told it was time to leave. A fortnight later his young brothers-in-law, Charles and James, escorted him to Gravesend, where he took ship for the Netherlands, assuring them that if his wife didn’t follow soon, he would return to fetch her. The marriage itself had been popular; the Dutch prince was a good Protestant.

In the late summer of 1641, Charles went to Scotland. At Newcastle, where the Covenanting army was disbanding, he established good relations with its general, Alexander Leslie, that veteran of the Swedish war in Germany. He created him Earl of Leven, and the new Earl promised not to take up arms against him again. The King was well received in Edinburgh too. He attended a Presbyterian service in St Giles and made no complaint, and presided over a meeting of the Scottish parliament. Yet appearances were deceptive. Charles believed that the concessions he had made had been forced on him, and might therefore be rescinded without loss of honour when he was strong enough to do so. The leading Covenanting noble, Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, was equally determined to hold the King to his word, and to prevent him from building up a royalist party in Scotland. The chief among the moderates, James Graham, Earl of Montrose, was in prison. Montrose had signed the National Covenant and led a Covenanting army against royalists in Aberdeenshire, but unlike Argyll, he had no wish to see the Crown weakened further. Meanwhile Argyll won over the Marquis of Hamilton, who had been Charles’s foremost adviser on Scottish affairs. Hamilton was a fine figure of a man, but lacking in both intelligence and consistency of purpose.

In October, while the King was still in Edinburgh, rebellion broke out in Ireland, the native Catholic Irish rising against their oppressors. The news was brought to Charles as he was playing golf on the links at Leith. With characteristic self-control he finished the round before hastening back to London. He arrived there to find the city in a ferment of anti-Catholic feeling. Dublin, it was said, had been taken by the rebels, every Protestant farmer would be dispossessed, every Protestant would have his throat cut, and twenty thousand had already been murdered. The rumours were exaggerated, but they fanned fears of a Catholic plot in England and, with this fear, hatred of the Catholic Queen.