Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (55 page)

The Crisis of Scotland

As we have seen, in 1603 King James VI of Scotland became James I of England and Ireland. He continued to rule each of his kingdoms separately, like a modern chairman of three boards. That is, the king governed each country from his court in London through their respective administrations and according to their respective constitutional arrangements and law. Obviously, his Celtic kingdoms were therefore governed at a distance (via courier to the administrations in Edinburgh and Dublin) – and a disadvantage. If the Irish had never really accepted these arrangements, the Scots, as an independent sovereign nation, were even less likely to feel that decisions made at Westminster reflected their best interests. It is true that James filled court offices near his person with his fellow countrymen, but as the reign wore on it became apparent that decisions affecting Scotland were made according to the advice of English ministers. At the beginning of the reign, James tried to forestall these problems by promoting unification. Upon accession, he began to style himself king of Great Britain, France, and Ireland; redesigned the coinage; ordered the use of a union flag (similar to that in use today) by all ships at sea; and proposed a Treaty of Union between the two nations as part of his general plan for peace at home and abroad. But, after heated debate, the English Parliament roundly rejected the treaty, ostensibly because of the incompatibility of the two legal systems. In fact, these debates exposed the ancient animosity between the two countries as English MPs pushed the envelope of parliamentary free speech. One, referring to Scotland’s troubled political history, declared that “[t]hey have not suffered above two Kings to die in their Beds, these two hundred Years,” while another opined that a union between England and Scotland would be like that between a judge and his prisoner.
²⁷
In short, the English saw the Scots as impoverished savages. For their part, the Scots continued to feel like second-class citizens in the new constitutional arrangements.

After the débâcle over the Union, neither James nor his son did much to alleviate that feeling. Each visited his northern kingdom rarely, James in 1617, Charles in 1633 and 1641. Still, James managed to keep the Scottish nobility in check, pacify the clan chiefs of the Highlands and borderlands, and even persuade the Kirk to recognize the authority, albeit limited, of a revived Scottish episcopacy. His ultimate goal was to neutralize the most radical Presbyterians and bring the Kirk into line with the Church of England. But he was smart enough to realize that this process could only happen incrementally, via friendly persuasion and subtle intrigue, not brute royal force. Once again, his son was not so shrewd. Charles expected obedience and conformity from his Scottish subjects as surely as he did from his English ones – even in that most troubled area of seventeenth- century life, religion. Here, if James pursued supremacy over his Scottish Church incrementally, Charles sought uniformity across his kingdoms all at once. After all, good subjects should worship as the king worshipped. In 1636, the Crown began to impose some of the High Church ceremony already being enforced in England. In 1637, just when he least needed trouble, without consulting the Scottish Privy Council, Parliament, or Presbyterian General Assembly, the king decreed that a version of the English Book of Common Prayer should be used in the churches of his northern kingdom.

Perhaps Charles thought he could get away with this because Scotland was poorer and less populous than England (about 1 million people in 1625 as opposed to nearly 5 million in England and Wales) and because Scottish society was, as we have seen, notoriously divided: into Highlanders and Lowlanders, urban dwellers and farmers, lairds and clergy. But on this issue he managed to unite nearly the whole country. Up to this point, Kirk services had no liturgy in the traditional sense, emphasizing the sermon and extempore prayer instead. So, as with English Puritans, the promotion of an Arminian-style High Church liturgy in Scotland smacked to Presbyterians of a movement back to Rome. At the debut of the new rite in St. Giles’s Cathedral, Edinburgh, on July 23, 1637, a group of maidservants shouted down the minister with cries of “[t]he mass is entered amongst us.” One woman hurled a stool at the bishop of Edinburgh, who escaped the ensuing riot with his life. This was not the sort of decorous ritual and meek submission that Charles and Laud had in mind. More seriously, in February 1638 representatives of nearly every important constituency in Scotland (excluding Catholics) signed the
National Covenant
to oppose the king’s religious policies, binding themselves to remain united to each other and to uphold true religion against Laudian innovation. In fact, the Covenant established a new constitution of Church and State, stating that only the Scottish Parliament and the Presbyterian General Assembly could make Scottish religious policy. Later that year, the Covenanters abolished the power of the Scottish bishops and declared episcopacy incompatible with the Kirk.

This, Charles could only regard as an act of rebellion. During the winter of 1638–9, he called on his English lords lieutenant and other local leaders to raise an army to march on Scotland in what would come to be called the First Bishops’ War. The Scots Covenanters replied by raising an army of their own. The Scottish army was religiously inspired, and contained veterans of continental wars, such as their commander, Alexander Leslie (ca. 1580–1661). The king’s forces were equal in numbers but hastily assembled, poorly trained, and starved for funds. But their biggest problem was morale. Charles was counting on the traditional English hatred of the Scots to inspire his forces; in fact, the country gentlemen and their tenant farmers who made up this army were reluctant to leave their native land to attack fellow Protestants in order to enforce royal policies they found oppressive. However much they may have hated the Scots, they hated Laud, “Thorough,” and the policies of the Personal Rule more. Indeed, some Puritan nobles and former MPs were beginning to pull for the Scots; the most committed went so far as to begin secret negotiations with them. In the end, Charles did not dare risk a battle with this uncertain force. Instead, he agreed to a truce, the inconclusive Treaty of Berwick, in June 1639.

By April 1640 the king was effectively bankrupt and facing a rebel army within his northern kingdom. He had little choice but to call a parliament. Naturally, when it met for the first time in 11 years, that body had no intention of voting money for another army before its grievances could be heard. After all, the king was likely to take the money, raise the army, defeat the Scots, and then turn it on his unruly English subjects. When Charles realized that this parliament was not going to cooperate, he dissolved it in disgust, giving rise to the nickname it has borne ever since: the Short Parliament.

During the summer of 1640, order, already under strain, began to disintegrate all over England. The tax strike spread, the City of London refused to advance the king money, apocalyptic preaching abounded, a mass petitioning campaign started, isolated rioting broke out, and the Scots began to march south. Charles called upon the Irish Parliament for assistance so that he could resume hostilities in what would be called the Second Bishops’ War. But that August the Covenanters defeated a thrown-together royal force under the king’s new chief military adviser, the earl of Strafford, at Newburn, Northumberland (see
map 11
, p. 253). This allowed the Scots to occupy the counties of Durham and Northumberland, an arrangement confirmed by the Treaty of Ripon in October. According to the treaty, the king had to pay the Scots forces
£
850 a day until a more permanent settlement could be reached. Worse, there was no royal army between them and London. Now Charles had no choice. He had to call Parliament and let it sit.

The Long Parliament

That summer, for the first time in English history, parliamentary elections were actually contested all over the country. Heretofore, the vast majority of MPs had been selected in friendly but closed-door meetings of like-minded local nobles and gentry doing the king’s will, or in public but amiable acclamations of recognized provincial leaders. Now, for the first time in many constituencies, there were real elections because there was a real choice between candidates who more or less favored royal policy and those who did not. The former might not have approved of all the king’s actions, but he was still king, God’s lieutenant on earth. They thought it necessary for the defense of the realm and incumbent upon their duty as good Christians to vote him the money for an army and trust that, out of the good will thus generated, he would listen to reason afterwards. Their opponents also recognized the king as king, but for the past 11 years they had been compiling a list of grievances against his government in Church and State. They intended to use Parliament’s power of the purse, the threat of Scottish invasion, and his need for an army (the problem of war and foreign policy) to force the king to change his domestic policies and, perhaps, even agree to limitations on his power. More specifically, they campaigned on a platform of safeguarding Parliament’s constitutional position (the problem of sovereignty), Englishmen’s property (the problem of finance), and the Church of England’s Protestantism (the problem of religion). Thus, all of the long-term tensions of the English polity came to a head in the localities (the problem of local control) during the election of that summer and autumn of 1640.

Overwhelmingly, the king’s critics won these contests. Seemingly the entire political nation, with the exception of a few die-hard loyalists and slavish courtiers, agreed on what was wrong with the country and, for the first time, it was royal policy. What would eventually come to be called the
Long Parliament
first met in November 1640. Unlike previous parliaments, it was not to be dominated by privy councilors and officeholders. Rather, a group of leaders emerged whose reputations had been forged in previous disagreements with King Charles: in the Lords, the earls of Bedford (1587–1641) and Essex and William, Viscount Saye and Sele (1582–1662); in the Commons, John Hampden, Denzil Holles, Oliver St. John (ca. 1598–1673), and, above all, John Pym (1584–1643). Indeed, one of their first acts was to cut off the king from more conservative advice by having Strafford arrested. Their long-term goal was to limit the power of the king to do what he had done in the 1630s and thereby thwart what they feared was a popish–absolutist plot. The result was a sweeping legislative program confronting each of the five areas of tension described in this chapter.

For example, one of their earliest bills addressed the sovereignty problem head on by stating that Parliament was not to be prorogued or dissolved but by its own consent. Charles’s agreement to this act ensured their permanency during the headlong race to reform. Along the same lines, they passed the Triennial Act, which required the king to summon Parliament at least once every three years. Second, they addressed the financial problem by prohibiting impositions, monopolies, Ship Money, distraint of knighthood, and the revival of the Forest Laws – that is, the whole fiscal program of the Personal Rule. As a corollary, they reaffirmed the illegality of taxation without parliamentary permission. Next, Parliament turned to the vexed matter of religion by eliminating the ecclesiastical courts and the apparatus of censorship which had so profoundly intruded upon the private lives of English men and women. Later, they would reverse many of Laud’s liturgical innovations. Parliament also abolished the prerogative legal tribunals by which the royal or episcopal will had been enforced: gone were the courts of Star Chamber, High Commission, Requests, and the Councils of Wales and the North. Finally, the House of Commons turned on Strafford, who was known to have urged the king to crush the Scots and to have pushed him toward other hardline measures. They impeached him on a charge of high treason, the first such parliamentary charges against a royal official of this rank since the Wars of the Roses. But the actual trial took place in the Lords. Strafford mounted an effective legal defense, arguing that doing the king’s bidding could be no treason, and his fellow peers were reluctant to convict him. So the Commons fell back on another old procedure to secure his death: a vote of attainder. (Later, in 1644, they would use the same expedient to condemn Laud.) Each of these measures reduced or interfered with the royal prerogative or changed the current constitution of Church or State. Thus, each had deep implications for the issue of sovereignty, as well as the more specific issues which they respectively addressed. Indeed, England, for a few brief months in 1641, might even be considered a constitutional monarchy.

Of course, none of these measures, including the attainder of Strafford, could become law without the royal assent. After some hesitation, Charles gave it in every case. He felt that he had no choice, because he still needed the cooperation of Parliament in order, first, to pay the Scottish army and, eventually, to pay for an English army to fight them! As for the Scots themselves, they would wait and see. At some point in the early 1640s their goal became not simply to defend Presbyterianism in Scotland; it was to strike a bargain, perhaps with the king, perhaps with the parliamentary leadership, to impose Presbyterianism on England. As for Parliament, there was, in fact, little prospect of it voting the king funding for an army, for there was no trust between its leaders and the man who sat on the throne. Many members feared that, once voted, a royal army might be turned upon them, used to imprison those leaders and repeal their legislation.