Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (54 page)

These policies had two unforeseen results. First, they revived anticlericalism. Landowners saw the attempt to resume impropriate tithes as an attack on their property rights. Puritans felt that their Church was turning against them and the Reformation which had given it birth. Overall, neither the changes in the fabric of English churches, nor the increasingly overbearing presence of “pontifical lordly prelates,”
²⁵
nor the persecutions of Puritans sat well with the English people. The most famous expression of this discomfort came in 1637 when William Prynne (1600–69), John Bastwick (1595?–1654), and Henry Burton (1578–1647/8) were condemned in Star Chamber for writings critical of the bishops and the queen. Their punishment was not as brutal as Bloody Mary had imposed: they were to have their ears cropped. But on the day, a great crowd cheered them to the place of punishment; subsequently, in a show of support, many spectators dipped their handkerchiefs into the “martyrs’” blood. As this implies, the second unforeseen result of Laud’s policies was that people began to draw parallels with the last Catholic reign. Staunch Protestants – and not only Puritans – thought that Arminianism looked a great deal like Catholicism. In their eyes, these persecutions, combined with the king’s autocratic political and financial tendencies and his constant desire for more troops looked like a plot to subvert the constitution and bring England back to Rome. Their most compelling piece of evidence for this charge lay much closer to the king: his Catholic wife.

Arguably, Buckingham’s most momentous legacy had been that, after failing to engineer a Spanish marriage, he had negotiated a French one. In 1625 Charles wed the daughter of Henry IV, Henrietta Maria. In Buckingham’s defense, it must be said that the marriage made a great deal of diplomatic sense. England, at war with Spain, needed powerful friends; though, as we have seen, the duke managed to squander that advantage soon after by declaring war on France as well. Moreover, the marriage was, after an initial period of coolness, a very happy one which produced six children. But it was never popular. From the first, Charles’s subjects disliked what they could only see as a “popish” marriage and feared that Henrietta Maria would poison his mind against Protestantism. Worse, as a princess of France and queen of England, she was entitled to maintain a court which included Catholic servants. Worse still, the marriage treaty stipulated that she be able to worship according to her faith. This meant a Catholic chapel staffed by Catholic clergy at the heart of the English court. Worst of all, what about the religious training of the children? This was a very good question, for in granting a dispensation to marry the “heretic” king of England, the pope had secretly advised the new queen that she was obligated to rear her children as Roman Catholics. Consequently, she regarded herself as the means by which both the king and his kingdom would eventually be returned to the One True Faith.

Today, in our tolerant and ecumenical age, it is difficult to conjure up much understanding of the religious anxieties of Charles’s subjects. But if one compares the English fear of international Catholicism with the mid-twentieth-century American panic over international communism, then the picture becomes a little clearer. It was as if, during the most dangerous period in the Cold War, the first lady of the United States, Mamie Eisenhower or Jacqueline Kennedy, were a publicly acknowledged card-carrying member of the Communist Party. In fact, Protestant England’s situation was much worse. Not only did the king’s spouse have his ear, not only had she filled his court with her fellow sympathizers; she was paving the way for a future Catholic takeover by ensuring that the hereditary succession would bring her presumably Catholic children to the throne. Charles’s tolerance for the growing number of “Papists” at court, combined with his avid persecution of Puritans – who may have been extreme, but were at least Protestants – led to the darker charge that he was a secret Catholic himself.

In fact, the charge was false. King Charles was a Church of England Protestant, as was his archbishop of Canterbury. The former insisted that his children should be raised as Protestants; the latter refused the pope’s offer of a cardinal’s hat. If the king was married to a Catholic, it was because that match made the most sense given the international diplomatic situation. If he was soft on Catholics it was because he saw them as a relatively small, loyal, and, ultimately, harmless minority. If he was hard on Puritans it was because he saw the implications of their thought to be revolutionary and dangerous. These reasons all made sense – to the king and his court circle. Unfortunately, that circle was smaller and more narrow than his father’s had been. Moreover, neither Charles nor his courtiers made any significant attempt to justify themselves to his subjects beyond Whitehall through a propaganda campaign. As a result, the weighty straw of religion was added to the pile of long-term issues breaking the back of consensus upon which the English polity depended.

This became clear in the Parliament of 1628–9. Once again, the king needed money to fight his wars. Once again, his plea came in the middle of a depression, this time in the cloth trade. With Buckingham removed, at least one major issue of contention between king and Commons had been eliminated. However, after furious debate, the lower house voted to assist merchants who refused to pay the impositions; and to condemn the Arminian clergy. At this point, the king decided that enough was enough. On March 2, the speaker of the House of Commons, Sir John Finch (1584-1660), announced an adjournment, which many interpreted as the first step toward dissolution. In response, one of the most outspoken members, Sir John Eliot (1592–1632), rose to offer a series of resolutions. The speaker attempted to cut him off by rising from his chair, which would end debate. At this point, two of Eliot’s colleagues rushed the chair and forced the speaker back into it, one of them, Denzil Holles (1598–1680), exclaiming: “Zounds, you shall sit as long as the House pleases!” As the king’s sergeant-at-arms pounded on the door with his mace, the house passed three resolutions: that any subject paying the impositions, that anyone counseling their collection, and that anyone intending innovation in religion was “a capital enemy to the kingdom and commonwealth.” This language, stark as it was, hid an even grimmer reality: the monarch himself had initiated all of the measures that Parliament had just condemned. Obviously, the relationship between king and Parliament, as well as the financial, military, and religious situations, had reached a crisis point. Their resolution would come well beyond the walls of Parliament or even of London, in the localities of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

The Personal Rule and the Problem of Local Authority

It should come as little surprise that after the dramatic events of 1629, King Charles chose to not call Parliament back for 11 years. There is some question as to whether this was, at first, a conscious resolution to rule without Parliament or one which grew over time as the king found that he could get away with it. Certainly, he must have concluded that the noble lords and honorable gentlemen were more of a hindrance than a help. They had proved not only uncooperative but challenging to his authority as sovereign and obstructive to the management of his financial situation, the war, and his “reform” of England’s complicated religious situation. There was no reason for the king to wish to hear from them again. Nor was there, in his mind, any obligation to do so. Before examining Parliament’s point of view, it is necessary to probe more deeply the king’s attempt to return the English constitution to its pristine, pre-parliamentary state, an enterprise that lasted 11 years and that has come to be known as the “Personal Rule.”
²⁶

The chief difficulty facing Charles in attempting to rule without Parliament was the very reason he had been forced to call it in the first place: he needed money. He needed money to run his court, to pay for his art collection, and, above all, to fight his wars with France and Spain. How could the king possibly meet his financial obligations without parliamentary taxation? As Salisbury had reminded his father, there were only two choices: cut expenses or raise revenue. Remarkably, Charles did both. First, he authorized his lord treasurer, Richard, Lord Weston (1577–1635; from 1633 earl of Portland), to launch a thorough reform of court and government, to match Laud’s reform of the Church and the activities of Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford (1593–1641), in Ireland (see below) – in fact, the policy came to be known as “Thorough.” It called for the elimination of useless offices (sinecures) and of fees in favor of established salaries. The Privy Council established standing committees for Ireland, the militia, and trade. The performance of masques and the purchase of artwork were both curtailed. More importantly, the king sued for peace with both France and Spain. This allowed him to disband his land forces, which were far more expensive than his paintings.

One might assume that the king’s frugality and pursuit of peace would be popular with the political elite. But some former MPs were angry that the Protestant crusade against Spain and France had been called off; others worried that a frugal monarch with a more efficient administration would use it to encroach further on his subjects’ liberties. They found grounds for these fears in Charles’s measures to raise revenue. First, in violation of Parliament’s resolution of 1629, he raised the Customs rates unilaterally once again – more impositions. Next, following an Elizabethan precedent, he sold monopolies and farmed out other government services to anyone who could offer quick cash. More positively from a Puritan point of view, his government collected recusancy fines more assiduously. Finally, he had his officials search statute and precedent books for any old law recorded therein which might enable him to squeeze a few more shillings out of his subjects. Thus, the government revived old fees and fines associated with refusing a summons to be knighted, enclosure, hunting and building in royal forests, and the inheritance of widows and wards. In each case, violation of the law or use of a royal “service” resulted in a fee to the Crown. Most notoriously of all, in order to pay for the navy (which Charles kept in a state of readiness as a bargaining tool with France and Spain), he extended an old tax called
Ship Money
from payment by few coastal towns and maritime counties to the whole nation.

These policies just about solved the king’s immediate financial problems. Assisted by a boom in foreign trade which increased Customs yields, Weston managed to raise the revenue to between
£
900,000 and
£
1 million. As a result, the royal debt became manageable by 1638. Unfortunately, but perhaps predictably, if the king felt that Parliament had violated the constitution by interfering in his right to govern, many aristocrats now began to conclude that the Personal Rule violated the constitution by infringing on the notion that an Englishman’s property was his own and that no king had the right to confiscate it without the subject’s (i.e., parliamentary) permission. In 1636, a wealthy landowner named John Hampden (1595–1643) instigated a test case at law by refusing to pay his Ship Money assessment (all of
£
1) on the grounds that it was a non-parliamentary tax. The king argued that he had a right to suspend the law, and so collect the tax, during a state of emergency (the so-called
suspending power
). Hampden countered that there was no current state of emergency to justify its collection. The king responded by taking him to court. In the end, Charles won the Ship Money case, but just barely: although the panel of 12 judges was hand-picked by the Crown, five decided for Hampden. Moreover, one of the judges deciding for the majority foolishly claimed that the king could command all of his subjects’ property if he wished. No landowner could support that. While Hampden lost his legal case and paid the tax, he had won a moral victory. By the end of the 1630s his example, combined with an agricultural depression, was encouraging others to withhold their payments of royal taxes and forced loans. Ship Money assessments returned 96 percent of the amount demanded in 1636, but only 89 percent in 1637, 39 percent in 1638, and just 20 percent in 1639.

The tax strike signified bigger problems for the Stuart regime than a mere lack of money. At this point, it should be remembered that Charles did not, like his French counterpart Louis XIII (1601–43; reigned 1610–43), have a vast, efficient, and well-paid bureaucracy to run his government, collect his taxes, or keep the peace generally in the localities. Instead, he relied on the loyalty and good will of unpaid aristocrats and gentry, who served as his lords lieutenant, JPs, and sheriffs. In the 1630s, that sense of mutual interest began to break down. Increasingly, the landed elite began to resent the growing interference of the Privy Council and bishops in local life; and they began to refuse not only to pay taxes themselves but to collect them from their friends and neighbors. Order was beginning to break down in the shires of England.

By 1640, the king was in a precarious position. While he had cut expenditure significantly, the growing tax strike meant that his court and administration were living on the tightest of budgets. Any increase in expenditure, any crisis, would cause the king to fall into spiraling debt and – probably – to have to call a Parliament. Worse, if he should face such a crisis, he would have to deal with the accumulated resentment of his subjects, the victims of “Thorough,” who had seen the Church and government increase their presence in their lives and in their pockets. After years of personal rule, the king precipitated such a crisis by mishandling a combination of old problems – money, war, and religion – which originated among his own people, the Scots.