The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (30 page)

The Irish rebellion was a prime cause of the civil war in England. How, Pym and his colleagues asked, could the King be trusted with command of the army needed to suppress the Irish rebels? Might he not turn it first against his enemies in England, and use it, in Strafford’s words, to ‘subdue that kingdom’? Since they could not trust the King, it seemed to his opponents that they had no alternative but to deny him command of an army.

This was a revolutionary proposal; in the King’s view an invasion of his prerogative. It was reducing him to the status of a doge of Venice. How could he be a king if he did not command his armed forces? There were many who by now agreed with him, and thought, like Hyde, that the dominant party in the Commons was undermining all government and the rule of law. Pym, conscious that support for his radical policy was ebbing away, sought to rally it in November by bringing a document called the Grand Remonstrance before the Commons. Running to more than two hundred clauses, it recounted once again all the faults, crimes and unconstitutional acts of the King’s eleven years of personal rule; the intention was to remind waverers of the tyranny from which they had been delivered. But his document included one unprecedented demand: that the King should choose ministers subject to the approval of Parliament. If he failed to do so, then the Commons, disregarding him, would take it upon themselves to subdue the rebellion in Ireland. The debate was fierce, passionate, and went on till darkness had fallen. In the end the Remonstrance was carried on 22 November by only eleven votes, 159–148, clear evidence of how opinion was inclining towards the King. Charles, it seemed, had only to wait; to give Pym enough rope and he would hang himself. (This was how his son would act in a comparable crisis forty years later.) But Charles was an inept politician, unable to see the sense of playing a long game. He now acted precipitously and stupidly. On 4 January 1642 he invaded the Commons at the head of a troop of guards, in order to arrest Pym, Hampden and three other members. His rashness was explicable; there was talk of impeaching the Queen. Nevertheless, it was foolish; he had placed himself on the wrong side of the law. It was an action that success alone might have justified. But, forewarned, Pym and the others had already left Westminster and taken refuge among their supporters in the City. ‘I see the birds have flown,’ Charles said. A few days later he left London and the Queen sailed to the Netherlands to raise money and supplies for war. Charles would not enter his capital again till he was brought there for his trial in January 1649.

Charles would be held responsible for the civil war that broke out eight months later when he raised the royal standard at Nottingham and prepared to subdue his enemies by force. Yet the impression that he bore the brunt of war guilt was in part illusory. However ill judged his tactics had been, he was driven to that resort by the intolerable demands of his enemies.

They were not admittedly aiming at civil war, though from the King’s point of view they provoked it. In the words of the historian Conrad Russell, they ‘were following a strategy with precedents going back at least to Simon de Montfort [in the thirteenth century] in which the object was to impersonalise royal authority by putting it into the hands of a Council and great officers, to be nominated in Parliament and answerable to Parliament. As a Parliamentary declaration put it in May 1642, Charles was to be treated as if he were a minor, a captive or insane. Charles’s opponents, many of whom were experienced Privy Councillors, believed government was too important to be left to Kings’
¹²
– just as Henry Marten had intimated to Hyde.

Armies on both sides were raised from the county militias, the trained bands of the cities, and from volunteers. There were officers who had experience of the wars in Germany and the Netherlands. In a surprisingly short time both King and Parliament could put an army of more than ten thousand men in the field. Much of the war was local, without any grand strategy, even though the royalists’ principal aim was clear: to regain possession of the capital. The parliamentary side had certain advantages: they found it easier to raise money to pay and supply their troops, for not only the City of London but the machinery of government was theirs. Moreover, the navy, on which Charles had lavished money at the cost of unpopularity, stood by Parliament: the Protestant tradition of the Elizabethan sea dogs held good, and with it suspicion of the Catholic Queen and a foreign policy too friendly to Spain in the years of personal rule. Charles relied more on rich supporters, like the Earl of Newcastle and the Marquis of Worcester, for financial support.

In the early years of the war, the royalist cavalry were superior to their opponents. They were commanded by the King’s nephew, Prince Rupert, second son of Elizabeth of Bohemia. Though only in his early twenties, Rupert had studied war, and had some little experience of it. Tall, handsome, dashing, he was an inspiring figure and one who was feared by the parliamentary forces. He was the ‘Devil-Prince’, his white poodle Boy, who travelled everywhere with him, said to be his familiar spirit by means of whom he communicated with his satanic master. The war might have gone better for Charles had he entrusted its entire management to Rupert. But there were jealousies and divisions in the camp, and the vigour with which Rupert prosecuted the war alarmed those who hoped for a negotiated peace.

The royalists’ best chance of victory came and went in the early weeks of the war. The Battle of Edgehill in September 1642 is judged to have been inconclusive, for after Rupert’s cavalry had swept their opponents from the field, the parliamentary infantry held firm. Yet though there was no decisive victory for either side, Essex, commanding Parliament’s army, withdrew and left the road to London open. Rupert was all for an immediate attack on the capital, but more timid counsels prevailed, and the opportunity to end the war quickly was lost. The following year Rupert stormed Bristol, the second city in England, and again a concerted attack on London seemed possible. But the chance was frittered away. The royalists dissipated their efforts when they should have concentrated them. So in the north, the Earl of Newcastle besieged Hull, in the west the King besieged Gloucester, and Sir Ralph Hopton’s victorious Cornish army turned back to their homeland.

The King based himself at Oxford, not yet known as the ‘home of lost causes’. He lodged at Christ Church, and the district opposite its gates, St Aldates, was packed with courtiers, royal servants and soldiers. John Aubrey recalled: ‘I was wont to go to Christ-church to see King Charles I at supper. Where I once heard him say, “That as he was hawking in Scotland. He rode into the Quarry, and found a Covey of Partridge falling upon the hawk.” When I came to my chamber I told this story to my tutor. Said he, “That covey was London.”’
¹³

Charles’s dignity and self-control won him the admiration of those who came close to him in the war years, but he was not a good commander-in-chief. Instead of issuing orders he too often made suggestions, and even those were not always clear. ‘Though I may propose many things,’ he wrote to Newcastle, who was commanding the royalist forces in the north, ‘yet I shall not impose anything upon you; as, for example, I hear General King is come; now I desire you to make use of him in your army. I am sure you have not good commanders to spare, no more than arms, yet I confess there may be such reasons as make this desire of mine impossible’ – a letter that may have left Newcastle scratching his head.
¹⁴

His enemies might already call him ‘the Man of Blood’, but a letter to the mayor of Newbury after the first battle fought there in 1643 shows a tender, paternal side to Charles’s nature: ‘Our will and command is, that you forthwith send into the towns and villages adjacent, and bring thence all the sick and hurt soldiers of the Earl of Essex’s army; and though they be rebels, and deserve the punishment of traitors, yet out of our tender compassion upon them as being our subjects, our will and pleasure is, that you carefully provide for their recovery, as well as for those of our own army, and then send them to Oxford.’
¹⁵

The parties in England were evenly matched – more than a third of the members of the House of Commons, once all but unanimous in opposition to the King, had now attached themselves to the royalist side. Both sought an alliance that might tip the balance in their favour, and so looked to Scotland. Parliament had more to offer, for they seemed willing to satisfy the religious demands of the Covenanters as Charles was not. Like the King, the Covenanters believed in the need for uniformity of religion (which entailed the freedom to persecute those who were not of their mind), and so were convinced that the settlement they had secured as a result of their defiance of the King required that England too should adopt the Presbyterian form of Church government. Accordingly, in the treaty they signed with Parliament, which is known as the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), they bound their new allies, as they supposed, to impose Presbyterianism on England in exchange for military assistance now. The Covenanters’ demands were arrogant and unrealistic. While most of the parliamentary leaders favoured the Presbyterian form of Church government, there was no majority for this in England. There was not even a majority for it among those to whom they were now allied, for many in the army were Independents, not Presbyterians; that is, they accepted no overall system of Church government, but believed that each parish or congregation should order worship and practise the faith as it thought fit. This opinion was anathema to the Scots Kirk. Meanwhile, all that held Presbyterians and Independents together was suspicion of the King, antipathy to bishops, and fear and loathing of Roman Catholics.

The Covenanting army crossed the border. It was commanded now by David Leslie, another veteran of the Swedish army, a distant cousin of the Earl of Leven. Leven served on his cousin’s staff, thus breaking the promise he had made to Charles. The arrival of the Covenanters tilted the balance of power in the north. The Earl of Newcastle was besieged in York. Rupert, who had been campaigning in Lancashire, crossed the Pennines to relieve the city. Then, despite Newcastle’s reluctance, he sought battle in the hope of winning a decisive victory. Rupert believed this was in accordance with the instructions given him by the King, though Charles’s letter had been characteristically ambiguous. But Newcastle was right, Rupert wrong. The royalists were outnumbered and ill prepared for battle. Moreover, the parliamentary army attacked in the early evening when their enemy supposed there would be no fighting till the morning. This was the Battle of Marston Moor, on the evening of 2 July 1644, and was the first in which Oliver Cromwell’s newly trained cavalry, the Ironsides, proved their quality. The royalists suffered a shattering defeat. The north was lost. Newcastle, in despair, went into exile, but Rupert rallied his troops and resumed the war.

The advantage had now swung against Charles and would swing further the following year when, on 14 June, he suffered another heavy defeat at Naseby in Northamptonshire, and the war in England was effectively lost. But before then a remarkable campaign in Scotland offered a gleam of light. It seemed for a few weeks that Scotland might be won back for the King. This had appeared highly unlikely; the grip of the Covenanted Kirk was secure. But Charles had made the Marquis of Montrose his lieutenant-general. The appointment had been too long delayed. Indeed, in February 1643, before the Solemn League and Covenant had been signed, Montrose had tried to persuade the Queen, lately returned with supplies from Holland, that, as Henry Guthrie related, ‘although the king’s enemies in Scotland did not as yet profess so much, they certainly intended to carry an army into England, and to join with the king’s enemies there; and, for remedy, offered, that if the king would grant a commission, himself, and many more, would take the field and prevent it’. Unfortunately for the royal cause, the Queen, who disliked Montrose, preferred the advice of the ineffectual Hamilton, who undertook ‘that without raising arms for the king, he should make that party [the Covenanters] lie quiet, and not list an army for England’. Hamilton failed in this as in most things he attempted, and so it was only after great damage had been done by the Scots to the King’s cause in England that Montrose at last slipped into Scotland with only two companions and made for the Highlands to raise troops.
¹⁶

The ‘Year of Miracles’ that followed is almost peripheral to Charles’s story, for while it briefly revived his hope of victory, it served no purpose in the end. And yet its effect was to be enduring, for the loyalty to the Stuarts displayed in later generations by so many in the Highlands owed much to the memory of Montrose and the legend of his year of astonishing victories.

Montrose was that rarest of political beings: a man hot for moderation. He had been a Covenanter, and he never departed from the view that the National Covenant was justified; but it was not long before he concluded that the Covenant, which was intended to rectify the balance in the state, now itself threatened to disturb it. While Charles had previously exceeded his prerogative, the latter was now being infringed by the Parliament in England and the Kirk and its supporters in Scotland. Montrose’s position was therefore the same as Hyde’s.

When he crossed the border in August 1644, his enterprise seemed hopeless. He brought no troops; Charles had none to spare him. Somewhere in the west or central Highlands there was, he knew, a force of Ulster Macdonalds, Catholics and rare fighting men. They were commanded by one Alasdair, and were the remnant of a force promised by the Earl of Antrim. Alasdair is the hero of the year in Gaelic legend, and it may be that Montrose’s biographer, Wishart, his chaplain, does not give the Ulsterman all the credit he is due. Yet claims for Alasdair are exaggerated. In his career he showed boundless courage, but no evidence of strategic or even tactical grasp, except for his year under Montrose’s command.