The English Civil War: A People’s History

The helpless women and children, at the mercy of their enemies but cared for by God, were truly iconic for all Protestants in all three kingdoms. If anyone who could read was not afraid of Catholic plots in 1640, a diet of this kind of print ensured that they were terrified by 1642.

Part of the Commons’ efforts to save the kingdom from being engulfed by popery was the prosecution of Strafford, who had come to seem symbolic of the worst aspects of the personal rule. Loathing Strafford was a way of complaining about Charles. Traditionally, grievances about monarchs expressed themselves as dislike of the monarch’s councillors. More importantly, Strafford was the direct enemy of Pym and his supporters. He had tried to get the Commons to impeach them for their correspondence with the Scots Covenanters; now they turned the tables on him.

Pym had thought of Strafford’s trial as an obvious case of treason. But treason had to be a crime against the king. It was widely known that Charles had trusted Strafford completely and was still refusing to get rid of him or to back away from his policies. So Pym said that Strafford was guilty of treason not against the king, but against the constitution. Here again, Pym seems to have reversed accidentally into radicalism because of expediency. Strafford sensibly pointed out what a dangerous idea this was, but by then he was so hated that the London crowd simply wanted him dead, and was not over-particular about the means. The case began with Pym’s sizzling attack on Strafford’s activities in Ireland, another Pym theme. But things didn’t quite go to plan. At his trial, Strafford remained brave and calm, and even those who loathed him were moved to grudging admiration. His worst crime, which was to have said that an Irish army might be brought over to reduce Scotland and then England, was poorly evidenced – only Henry Vane the Elder could be got to say that he had heard Strafford actually say it, and the law required two witnesses. Nonetheless, Strafford’s indictment allowed the Commons to practise talking as if they and not the king embodied English sovereignty. It was to become an acceptable rather than an unthinkable idea.

Now it was another MP, godly Arthur Haselrig, who had a clever new notion, though not one congenial to Pym, who was hoping for a show-trial. Why not drop the cumbersome impeachment, which actually required tiresome amounts of proof? Why not simply introduce a Bill of Attainder? All this required was a Commons vote. At first Pym was against it, but came around to the idea once he saw that it was the only sure-fire way to bring Strafford to the scaffold. Strafford’s final speech in his own defence, made on 13 April, was a gallant attempt to rebut the charges in the name of the very traditions the king had violated: ‘I have ever admired the wisdom of our ancestry, who have so fixed the pillars of this monarchy that each of them keeps their measure and proportion with each other … the happiness of a Kingdom consists in this just poise of the king’s prerogative and the subject’s liberty and that things should never be well till these went hand in hand together.’

It was Pym who stood up to refute Strafford, and he said that ‘if the prerogative of the king overwhelm the liberty of the people, it will be turned into tyranny; if liberty undermine the prerogative, it will grow into anarchy’. This scarcely answered Strafford’s charge that laws could not be set aside. Prophetically, he argued that ‘You, your estates, your posterities lie all at the stake if such learned gentlemen as these, whose lungs are well acquainted with such proceedings, shall be started out against you: if your friends, your counsel were denied access to you, if your professed enemies admitted to witness against you, if every word, intention, circumstance of yours be alleged as treasonable, not because of a statute, but a consequence, a construction of law heaved up in a high rhetorical strain, and a number of supposed probabilities’.

Thanks to this powerful appeal, fifty-nine people voted against the Bill of Attainder at its third reading, and found their names on a list posted outside the Commons, headed, ‘These are the Straffordians, the betrayers of their country.’ Things were turning nasty.

The same mood prevailed in the streets, and newer and more radical voices emerged from the hubbub. Rude Henry Marten, certainly no Puritan, was among those who produced the Protestation, which was an imitation of the Kirk’s Covenant, and toughly vowed to crush all who threatened true religion, especially priests and Jesuits, ‘and other adherents of the See of Rome [that] have of late more boldly and frequently put in practice than formerly’. It did offer allegiance to the king as well, but like Pym, Marten had come to think the king was the problem in guaranteeing true religion. As early as 1641 Marten confessed to his friend Sir Edward Hyde that he did not believe that one man was wise enough to rule a whole nation. By 1642 he was identified as a key figure among those Sir Simonds D’Ewes referred to as the ‘fiery spirits’ who used language disparaging towards the royal dignity. Having proclaimed kingship to be forfeitable he was excluded from pardon for life or estate by Charles I in the same year. Later he was to go further. In support of the Puritan divine John Saltmarsh, the author of a pamphlet proposing the deposition of the king, Marten stated in the Commons on 16 August 1643 that ‘it were better one family be destroyed than many’. He was asked who he meant, and at once said he meant the royal family. For this the Commons sent him to the Tower; they were not yet ready to hear what he had to say.

In the meantime, a group of writers had vowed to free Strafford; borrowing a none-too-plausible plot from the stage, they planned to seize the Tower and help Strafford to make his getaway, while bringing the army south. The group included William Davenant, who had long claimed to be Shakespeare’s illegitimate son, and the elegant and intelligent Sir John Suckling. Also involved was George Goring, later a Royalist general of notoriously undisciplined troops and himself a wild card. Charles, who always loved a play, was privy to their counsels, but may also have urged Goring to leak it to the Parliamentarian leadership. He was attempting to convince them not to pursue Strafford to death, trying to frighten them off. It didn’t work. The Lords passed the attainder by a slim margin, with many bishops and all the Catholic peers missing. An armed mob accompanied those taking it to the king for signature.

And the next day, on Sunday 9 May 1641, after hesitating all evening, Charles signed his chief counsellor’s death warrant. He did it to save his wife, who would certainly have been next, and his frightened children. But he never forgave himself. Strafford was to face the executioner’s axe on 12 May 1641, before a huge and joyous crowd. ‘I do freely forgive all the world,’ he said on the scaffold, ‘I wish that every man would lay his hand on his heart and consider seriously whether the beginnings of the people’s happiness should be written in letters of blood.’ But London was glad to have it so, and as Strafford’s bloody head was lifted, bonfires flamed across the country, and at dusk candles were lit in windows to celebrate his fall.

It was in this atmosphere of tension and violence that on 7 November 1641 Pym began formally to connect ‘the corrupt part of our clergy that make things for their own ends and with a union between us and Rome’. This is close to what Milton wrote in a sudden outburst of passionately anti-Laudian fervour in Lycidas: the spineless clergy do not feed their hungry sheep, and so Rome, ‘the grim wolf with privy paw’ carries off more of them every day. But Pym meant more. For him, increasingly influenced by the Scots, bishops themselves were coming to seem central to the problem. And Parliament was the centre of the solution: ‘the parliament is as the soul of the commonwealth, that only is able to apprehend and understand the symptoms of all such diseases that threaten the body politic’. He spoke for two hours. He connected the religious menaces of popery with menaces to Parliament, to property. That afternoon, although this was not obvious to him or to anyone else, Pym created the Parliamentarian cause that was to be disputed so bloodily over the next nine years.

The Grand Remonstrance was Pym’s powerful statement of a political credo that demanded reform on a grand scale indeed. The elections to the Common Council a month later, in December, provided a very comfortable majority of Pym’s supporters, and from January 1642, the older and more conservative councillors were systematically replaced by those who served Pym. The Grand Remonstrance was not a Declaration of Independence, or a Declaration of the Rights of Man, much less a Marseillaise. It was still couched in the conservative rhetoric of days of yore, asking the king in fulsome terms of grovelling humility to redress grievances. But even that rhetoric had begun to fall away, and some at least of it was addressed to the people, not the king. It was first read on 8 November 1641, and finally passed in the middle of the night on the 22nd. In it Pym’s exceptionally vehement anti-popery and his concerns about the state came to seem one and the same issue. It contained long low moans about the Jesuited papists: ‘the multiplicity, sharpness and malignity of those evils under which we have now many years suffered … and which were fomented and cherished by … those malignant parties whose proceedings evidently appear to be mainly for their advantage and increase of popery’. They, it seemed, and not Strafford, were responsible for everything that had gone wrong in the past fifteen years. Like Hitler’s anti-Semitism, Pym’s anti-popery was both a genuine moral passion and also a card he played to try to bring the public into sympathy with his plans.

The phrase Grand Remonstrance is still used for any rebuke, though few today have much idea of what was in the original. The Remonstrance was a multipurpose affair. It was a discontented history of the personal rule of Charles I, minute and even fussy. Every grievance of the personal rule found a place. But its main concerns were large. Its announced goal was to restore ‘the ancient honour, greatness and security of this crown and nation’. It was to expose the ‘mischevious designs’ that had tried to drive a wedge between the king and his people, forcing them to argue about liberty and prerogative. It was also supposed to expose those who intended to drive Puritans out ‘with force’ or root them out by violence. It demanded that the king employ only ministers ‘as the Parliament may have cause to confide in, without which we cannot give his Majesty supplies for the support of his own estate’. It demanded that bishops be deprived of votes in the Lords, ‘who cherish formality and superstition’ in what came to seem an ‘ecclesiastical tyranny’. It complained of illicit revenue-raising through Ship Money and the Forced Loan. It objected to the imprisonment of members of the Commons. It protested very strenuously at the destruction of the king’s forests, a matter near Pym’s heart, and to the selling of Forest of Dean timber to ‘papists’, ‘which was the best storehouse of this kingdom for the maintenance of our shipping’. It also tried to reassure everyone that it was not a blueprint for religious radicalism. There would be, if anything, more discipline than before. Similarly, it closed with a ringing avowal, explaining that all its creators wanted was ‘that His Majesty may have cause to be in love with good counsel, and good men’.

The debate was the most passionate the House had ever seen. The final exchange, on 22 November 1641, was especially fierce, and here the shadowy outlines of Royalist and Parliamentarian became briefly visible. Many spoke against the Remonstrance. They disliked its peremptory procedure, the refusal of its creators to consult the Lords. Pym and his chums were becoming starkly visible as a powerful clique, and some members of the Commons were not eager to expel one clique in order to have another in its place. Those who disliked the Remonstrance complained that it dragged old skeletons from their graves. Pym retorted that the country’s plight was desperate. Popery was about to destroy everything. But some were beginning to wonder if there really were evil Jesuits lurking behind every tree. A moderate group containing future historian and Earl of Clarendon Edward Hyde and the brilliant young humanist Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, were among the doubters. They worried, too, that Pym and his faction were encouraging sectarians and godly fanatics. One dissenter was Sir Edward Dering, and his concerns show what was truly radical about the Grand Remonstrance, though not everyone noticed at the time. There was something big at stake here: ‘When I first heard of a remonstrance, I presently imagined that like faithful counsellors we should hold up a glass unto his majesty; I thought to represent unto the king the wicked counsels of pernicious councillors; the restless turbulency of practical papists … I did not dream that we should remonstrate downward, tell stories to the people, and talk of the King as a third person.’

For Dering, the Remonstrance was radical and entirely unacceptable not for what it said, but to whom it was said. Parliament was no longer addressing its grievances to the king, but to the people. Sovereignty and the definition of who guaranteed the people’s rights had shifted. Pym responded, though, with the glorious plainness which kept him in his place as leader: ‘It’s time to speak plain English,’ he said, ‘lest posterity shall say that England was lost and no man dared speak truth.’ The debate went on until after midnight, when there was – at long last – a division. Over three hundred MPs were still present. The Remonstrance was carried, on a majority of just eleven votes. This tiny margin helped convince the king that strong action against a little faction would settle things. He was wrong, as the Remonstrance itself showed. But it also showed that the nation’s representatives were beginning to divide. So too would the nation.

VI Stand Up, Shout Mars

Already, as the Commons debated, the city of London was reflecting the turbulence of its governors. Two years of disorder and riots – outbreaks in which those ordinary people who could not speak in Parliament or even in church demanded a voice. Hostile crowds attacked Lambeth Palace in May 1640, demonstrated in large numbers during Strafford’s trial in the following spring, and took to the streets in the winter of 1641–2. Conservatives were alarmed by the coincidence of these demonstrations with Pym’s assaults in the House of Commons, thinking that the radicals in Parliament were orchestrating the mobs. But Pym and the crowds were engaged in a kind of dance in which neither led, but each responded to a music of discords in Church and state. Huge numbers signed petitions – 15,000 signed the Root and Branch Petition, which urged the abolition of bishops, deans and chapters, tendered in December 1640; 20,000 Londoners signed a petition against Strafford, and 15,000 ‘poor labouring men’ signed a petition complaining about the faltering economy on 31 January 1642. Thirty thousand apprentices – nearly all of those in London – signed a petition presented in the violent demonstrations of Christmas 1641. However, this must be seen in context. London’s apprentices had always been inclined to riot. Fisticuffs and shouting were good entertainment for boys.

London was wild with rumour and story. The undercurrent of dread, that sometimes threatened to rise and swamp the city, was the fear of popery. ‘Prentices and clubs’ became the call. The London apprentices in May 1640 threatened to rise against the Queen Mother Marie de Medici and Archbishop Laud. They marched, with a drummer at their head. Placards materialized everywhere, calling the apprentices to rid the city of the curse of bishops. Everyone was on holiday for May Day, so when the crowd of apprentices reached St George’s Fields, Southwark, it was augmented by sailors and dockhands, idle through lack of trade. They decided to hunt for ‘Laud, the fox’, and 500 of them marched on Lambeth Palace. The apprentices, balked because Laud had escaped, went instead to break open prisons, and to attack the house of the Earl of Arundel. A rumour swept London that 50,000 Frenchmen were already hidden away in the city’s suburbs, ready to spring out and support the king, and overthrow true religion. On 21 May, the judges declared the disturbances were high treason, and John Archer, a glover of Southwark, was brutally tortured before his execution. The justices were hoping to make him an example, but the effect was the reverse of what they had in mind. This did not give the crowds much reassurance about the government’s intentions. Finally, the following year, the crowd’s hunger for a scapegoat had been rewarded by the spectacle of Strafford’s severed head, but this had not so much placated as excited them further.

Since the fall of Strafford, events stood on a knife edge, and were served by rumour, gossip, personal contacts. It is said to have been Henrietta herself who, Lady Macbeth-like, urged her husband to aggression. She is supposed to have told him, ‘Go, you coward, and pull those rogues out by the ears, or never see my face more.’ And Henrietta may have had reason to fear that Parliament was preparing to move against her, personally. It had removed Strafford; it had attacked Laud. Of its great enemies, only she was left. And Charles may have seen himself in nightmares reluctantly signing her death warrant too.

Charles became convinced that strong action against a tiny band was all that was needed to give him back his life, his court, his rule. He was a knight-errant. He was, it turned out, Don Quixote, living in a world that did not exist. Like other mildly stupid people, he gave no thought to what would happen if his plans went awry and the bold action failed. He only saw the dazzling sun of success.

On 4 January 1642, the king set off at about three o’clock for Westminster. He had decided to arrest his five worst enemies, those wretched fellows, Pym and his junto. He had identified the men he thought most dangerous – Pym; John Hampden, his old foe, who had spoken so stoutly for the Remonstrance; Denzil Holles, another Ship Money refuser; young Arthur Haselrig, who had suggested the plan to attaint Strafford, and (unexpectedly) William Strode. They were all men with a history of opposing him, but his shortlist of ringleaders omitted many key figures, including all Pym’s supporters in the Lords. Even if his expedition had been successful it would not have silenced all his critics.

Charles knew he could find his quarries in the Commons. Accounts differ as to whether the king advanced on Parliament with his guards, or on his own, but it seems unlikely that even Charles would have set out to face a defiant House with only Prince Rupert for company. Bulstrode Whitelocke says ‘the King came, guarded with his pensioners, and followed by about two hundred of his courtiers and soldiers of fortune, most of them armed with swords and pistols’. Whoever he took with him, he was too late. The birds had flown, as he himself later quipped. The phrase shows that he saw himself as a hunter, a role in which he felt at home.

For a moment he could not believe his failure. Charles looked desperately around the chamber for the men he wanted. He called their names, unable to give up hope that they were there. Then he asked the Speaker for his chair, with careful courtesy. It was like Charles to say ‘By your leave, Mr Speaker, I must borrow your chair’; the politeness and deference of his words emphasized rather than concealed the gross disregard of the Commons’ independence implied in his entry with armed guards. He knew how they might feel: ‘I must declare’, he said carefully, ‘that no king that ever was in England shall be more careful of your privileges’, but he went on, ‘yet you must know that in cases of Treason no person has a privilege’.

The House was not impressed. As Charles left, in defeat, the Commons roared ‘Privilege! Privilege!’ The cry was echoed by the London crowds next day.

Historians do not quite like the idea that it was Lucy Hay who warned the Five Members, but this is no mere fantasy invented by romantic lady novelists. There are contemporary voices who believed it to be true. Philip Warwick saw Charles’s plans frustrated by the countess personally: ‘Yet his coming to the Lower House, being betrayed by that busy stateswoman, the Countess of Carlisle, who has now changed her gallant from Strafford to Mr Pym, and was become such a she-saint, that she frequented their sermons, and took notes, he lost the opportunity of seizing their persons.’ Thomas Burton, for example, in his diary of Cromwell’s Parliament, quotes Haselrig himself as the source for Lucy’s intervention:

The King demanded five members, by his Attorney-General. He then came personally to the House, with five hundred men at his heels, and sat in your [the Speaker’s] chair. It pleased God to hide those members. I shall never forget the kindness of that great lady, the Lady Carlisle, that gave timely notice. Yet some of them were in the house, after the notice came. It was questioned if, for the safety of the house, they should be gone; but the debate was shortened, and it was thought fit for them, in discretion, to withdraw. Mr Hampden and myself being then in the House, withdrew. Away we went. The King immediately came in, and was in the house before we got to the water. The queen, on the King’s return, raged and gave him an unhandsome name, ‘poltroon’, for that he did not take others out, and certainly if he had, they would have been killed at the door.

Similarly, the poet John Dryden remarks that ‘Mr Waller used to say that he would raze any Line out of his Poems, which did not imply some Motive to virtue, but he was unhappy in the choice of subject of his admirable vein in poetry. The Countess of C. was the Helen of her country’ – as if the war had been fought over Lucy herself. Bishop Warburton called her ‘the Erinnys of that time’, and claimed that she was the source of information and intelligence ‘on his majesty’s intentions’.

It was not only Restoration writers who saw Lucy as the chief instrument of knowledge. Henry Neville, republican intellectual, portrayed her as Pym’s lover in 1647: ‘first charged in the fore-deck by Master [Denzil] Hollis, in the Poop by Master Pym, while she clapped my Lord of Holland under hatches’. Astrologer William Lilly, though he names another party as the direct source of Pym’s warning, provides information about leakages from the king’s secret councils via the queen’s circle: ‘All this Christmas, 1641, there was nothing but private whispering at court, and secret councils held by the Queen and her party, with whom the King sat in council very late many nights.’

Lucy was certainly still a visible member of the queen’s party, but events show that her heart by now lay elsewhere. Lucy liked and embraced change. While her sister, equally ambitious, married a staid aristocrat of whom her father thoroughly approved, Lucy had married a young man of fashion. Tiring of him, she fell in love with an authoritative statesman of pronounced political philosophy. Neither choice was remotely snobbish; if anything, Lucy seemed particularly attracted by men with more than a touch of the people in their makeup. When her statesman fell, Lucy seems to have fallen in turn for his intelligent foe, John Pym, another change for her. Here was a man who was like her previous lovers in intelligence and power, but who was capable of showing her quite another world, a world to which she was attracted by its very difference.

It is also quite possible that Lucy – just like the rest of Pym’s followers, and a strong minority of the nation – was outraged by Charles’s behaviour. No Catholic, she disliked the influence exerted by Laud on the Church. Her personal attraction to Strafford may have been strong, but she may not necessarily have sided with him on questions of absolutism, and his fall and the king’s willingness to sign his death warrant may have done something to put her off the absolute power of monarchy, as well as forcing her to realize that it was not in fact absolute. This may not have been a matter of direct personal vengeance either. Lucy had just seen a great self-made man struck down by the king. To a woman who had spent years trying to advance herself and her family in the eyes of a monarch, this cannot have been very reassuring. It might have reminded her of her father’s fate, or even of the entire history of the Percys, a family struggling to maintain a powerful aristocratic position without monarchic interference, which had seen several members executed for treason. Strafford’s death confirmed in Lucy Hay an ideology of monarchy limited by strong Protestantism and aristocratic counsel, an ideology she was to adhere to throughout the Civil War years. And odd as it may have seemed, Pym and the saints offered a more rational path to that goal than did any of those remaining about the king.