Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (21 page)

‘If he goes on,’ May said, ‘I hope that I may myself go out.’

‘Begone! Begone!’

But May stayed to listen to Eliot’s oratory. ‘Witness [the journey] to Cadiz! Witness the next! Witness that to Rhé! Witness the last! And I pray to God we shall never have more such witnesses!… Witness all! What losses we have sustained! How we are impaired in munition, in ships, in men!’ At the close of his impassioned peroration he demanded a statement of grievances, or ‘remonstrance’, to be addressed to the king.

It seems that he was about to name Buckingham as the source of all regal problems, but he was stopped from doing so by the Speaker. The king then sent a message, absolutely forbidding the members further to discuss matters of state on pain of instant dismissal. In the face of this command, touching the liberties of parliament, one member after another rose to speak; others sat on the benches and wept. Joseph Mead, the contemporary writer of newsletters, reported that ‘there appeared such a spectacle of passions as the like had seldom been seen in such an assembly, some weeping, some expostulating, some prophesying of the fatal ruin of our kingdom … I have been told by a Parliament man that there were above an hundred weeping eyes; many who offered to speak being interrupted and silenced by their own passions.’ It was a sensitive and tearful age, in which political and religious controversy were not to be distinguished from personal passion. Eventually Sir Edward Coke rose to ask, ‘Why may we not name those that are the cause of all our evils? The duke of Buckingham – that
man
is
the grievance of grievances
.’ At that remark the Commons erupted in acclamations. It was said that, when one good hound recovers the scent, the rest come in with a full cry.

On 7 June Charles, now aware of the danger to his favourite and acutely conscious that his financial needs must be satisfied, took his seat upon the throne in the Lords. In front of the peers, and the members of the Commons who crowded to the bar, he ordered that his previous inconclusive answer to the ‘petition of right’ should be removed and that new words take its place. ‘
Soit droit fait comme il est désiré
.’ This was the usual formula of assent that conferred legality on parliamentary measures: ‘Let right be done as is desired.’ He then added that ‘now I have performed my part. If this parliament have not a happy conclusion, the sin is yours. I am free from it.’ The result was delight in parliament itself, and celebration in the streets beyond; the bells were rung and the bonfires were kindled.

Yet the general satisfaction did not prevent parliament from pressing still further against the king. The remonstrance against Buckingham was presented to Charles on 17 June, to which he responded with a few words. He would consider their grievances ‘as they should deserve’. Buckingham himself was not disturbed by the charges against him and is reported to have said that ‘it makes no matter what the Commons or parliament do, for without my leave and authority they shall not be able to touch the hair of a dog’.

The Commons, not happy with the royal reception of their remonstrance, then went into committee on the question of the king’s finances. The king ordained that the parliament should end in the next week. Whereupon a second remonstrance was prepared declaring that the king’s collection of customs duties and other taxes without parliamentary assent was ‘a breach of the fundamental liberties of this kingdom’. Before the debate could commence the king prorogued the assembly.

So ended the parliamentary session. It has sometimes been seen as one of the most significant in the history of that institution. The members had reminded the king that he was not permitted to violate the liberties of his subjects, and they had obtained from him the recognition of those rights they believed to be most important. Yet the celebrations on the street were perhaps premature. Three days after the conclusion of the proceedings, the king ordered a recall of the second answer he had given ‘to be made waste paper’. He also ordered the reprinting of his first unsatisfactory answer, together with a series of qualifications to his second answer. In his closing speech to parliament, he had said that ‘my meaning … was not to grant any new privileges but to re-edify your old’, which could mean anything or nothing.

He prevaricated in his usual fashion, therefore, and as a result diminished the respect in which he was held. It was difficult to believe now in his good faith. One contemporary diarist, John Rous, noted that ‘our king’s proceedings have caused men’s minds to be incensed, to rave and project [scheme]’. It could of course be claimed, on his behalf, that he was merely protecting the power and authority of the sovereign. It is worth noting that the young Oliver Cromwell, member for the town of Huntingdon, was also part of this parliament.

On the evening of 13 June, thirteen days before the prorogation, Buckingham’s physician and astrologer was noticed leaving the Fortune Theatre in the northern suburbs of the city; his name was Doctor Lambe. A crowd of apprentices recognized him and began to cry out, ‘The duke’s devil! The duke’s devil!’; they pursued him towards a cookhouse in Moorgate Street where he paid a group of sailors to guard him. By the time he left the cookhouse the mob had grown in size; he told them that he ‘would make them dance naked’, no doubt at the end of a rope. Still the people followed him, but at Old Jewry his guard beat them off. The crowd was now intent upon violence and, forcing him towards the Windmill Tavern in Lothbury, they beat him senseless with sticks and stones. One of his eyes was kicked out as he lay upon the cobbles. He was taken to a compter or small prison in Poultry where he died on the following morning.

A couplet was soon being repeated everywhere:

Let Charles and George [Buckingham] do what they can

Yet George shall die like Dr Lambe.

When the rhyme was discovered among a scrivener’s papers he confessed that he had heard it from one Daniel Watkins, who had in turn heard it recited by an illiterate baker’s boy. A Suffolk cleric recalled that ‘about September 3 I had related to me this foolish and dangerous rhyme, fruit of an after-wit’. So poems and ballads, commonly known as ‘libels’, circulated throughout the kingdom; they were often left on stairs or nailed to doors or pinned to gates. Some were even put in the open hands of conveniently placed statues. When the attorney general prosecuted a group of minstrels for singing scurrilous ballads about Buckingham, he referred to these ‘libels’ as ‘the epidemical disease of these days’. They are evidence of the political consciousness of the nation and of the ‘lower sort’, otherwise largely unheard. Even the baker’s boy had opinions about the king and ‘George’.

The temperature of the nation was also being raised by the publication of printed ‘courants’ or ‘corantos’ in ever-increasing quantity; these were regular newsletters or news pamphlets that were circulated in taverns and in marketplaces together with the ‘libels’ that accompanied any great movement in the affairs of state. While many were printed, others were written by hand. The written varieties were considered more reliable, perhaps because they seemed to be more immediate or perhaps because of the authority of the correspondent. One of the writers of these papers called himself ‘your faithful Novellante’ or newsmonger; this is of course the derivation of the ‘novel’.

In a similar movement of information any great stir in the county towns also reached the capital. The newsletters often deliberately helped to provoke controversy or division, so that, for example, the growing polarization between ‘court’ and ‘country’ – between ‘courtiers’ and ‘patriots’ – can only have been assisted by their partisan accounts. Ben Jonson’s masque,
News from the New World
, portrayed a writer of newsletters declaring that ‘I have friends of all ranks and of all religions, for which I keep an answering catalogue of dispatch wherein I have my Puritan news, my Protestant news and my Pontifical news’.

Manuscript copies of the proceedings and debates of parliament of 1628, known as ‘separates’, were also issued at this time in perhaps the first example of parliamentary reporting. The great speeches of Sir John Eliot and others were thus available to the public, reinforcing the conclusion that parliament had indeed come to represent the will and voice of the people. It is perhaps significant that these papers were often to be found in the libraries of the gentry.

After parliament had been prorogued, the king gave orders that all the gunpowder in London should be taken under royal control. The impression of overweening authority, close to arbitrariness, was further strengthened by the investiture of William Laud as the bishop of London in the following month. His exaltation of the king’s authority, and his demand for exact conformity, did not endear him to the ‘patriots’ of the kingdom who were eager to curb the royal prerogative.

The king also elevated Sir Thomas Wentworth to the peerage. Wentworth had previously taken the part of parliament but, after the publication of the ‘petition of right’, he came to accept the king’s position on matters of sovereign control; he had arrived at the conclusion that the Commons were not fit to manage the affairs of the nation. He was condemned for abandoning his principles but he believed that parliament, not he himself, had changed. He was soon to say in a speech that ‘the authority of a king is the keystone which closes up the arch of order and government’. With men such as Laud and Wentworth around him, what might the sovereign not dare to undertake? The atmosphere of the city was uneasy. It was reported that the citizens were filled with alarm, and were taking up arms for their own defence. It was rumoured that the duke and the king were ready to confront their enemies. No one knew what might happen next.

14

I am the man

The plight of La Rochelle, still besieged by the forces of Louis XIII after the forced withdrawal of the English army, was extreme. Its inhabitants were reduced to eating grass and boiled cow-hides. It was reported that they cut off the buttocks of the dead, lying in the churchyard, for sustenance. The honour of the king, and of Buckingham, determined that they must once more come to the aid of the city. So in the spring and summer of 1628 a fleet was fitted out at Plymouth. The normal delays ensued. ‘I find nothing’, Buckingham wrote, ‘of more difficulty and uncertainty than the preparations here for this service of Rochelle.’ He was so despised at home that he had been asked to wear protection in order to ward off any attempt at assassination. He replied that ‘a shirt of mail would be but a silly defence against any popular fury. As for a single man’s assault, I take myself to be in no danger. There are no Roman spirits left.’

On the morning of 23 August, the duke was staying at the house of Captain Mason on Portsmouth High Street; Mason was a naval administrator as well as an officer. Buckingham was at breakfast with his colleagues and some representatives from La Rochelle; after the meal was over, he came down into the hall of the house. He stopped to converse with one of his officers when a man, who had been standing in the passage, stepped forward and plunged a knife into his chest with the words ‘God have mercy upon thy soul!’ Buckingham staggered back but, crying out ‘Villain!’ managed to draw the knife from the wound. He tried to pursue his assailant but fell against a table before dropping to the floor.

A great outcry went up among those assembled. The foreigners were suspected, and men cried out, ‘A Frenchman! A Frenchman!’ Others shouted, ‘Where is the villain? Where is the butcher?’

‘I am the man. Here I am.’ John Felton, with his sword in his hand, came forward. He might have been killed where he stood, but some of Buckingham’s officers surrounded him. The wife and sister-in-law of the dead man rushed to the corpse. ‘Ah, poor ladies,’ Dudley Carleton informed the queen, ‘such was their screechings, tears and distractions that I never in my life heard the like before, and hope never to hear the like again.’

The news reached the king while he was at prayer in the royal chapel. When it was whispered in his ear his face betrayed little emotion and he stayed in his place until the service was over. Then he hurried to his private apartments, closed the doors and wept. It was reported that the king used to refer to him as ‘my martyr’. Charles believed, in other words, that his favourite had been murdered for carrying out his orders.

Under examination it was revealed that John Felton had served in the disastrous expedition to Rhé, and that Buckingham had denied him promotion. The insult was compounded by the fact that Felton’s wages had not arrived. When he asked the duke how he was supposed to live, Buckingham is supposed to have replied that he could hang himself if he had not the means to survive. Felton returned to London, where he brooded on his misfortunes; he read the latest pamphlets, which accused Buckingham of poisoning the former king and of being the source of all the grievances of the realm. Four days before the assassination he purchased a tenpenny knife at a cutler’s shop on Tower Hill; he then visited a church in Fleet Street and asked the cleric for prayers as ‘a man much discontented in mind’. He made his way to Portsmouth, largely on foot, where he performed the deed. He had sewn certain messages in the crown of his hat, among them one in which he announced himself to be an executioner rather than an assassin: ‘He is unworthy of the name of a gentleman or a soldier, in my opinion, that is afraid to sacrifice his life for the honour of God, his king, and country.’ He had been the righteous killer of a reprobate who had brought Charles and England into jeopardy.

In that opinion, he was almost universally sustained by the response of the people. The joy at Buckingham’s death was widespread and prolonged. Celebratory healths to Felton were drunk in the taverns of London, and congratulatory verses passed from hand to hand. When he was taken through Kingston on his way to the Tower, an old woman cried out, ‘God bless thee, little David.’ When he arrived at the Tower itself, a large crowd had gathered to greet him, calling, ‘The Lord comfort thee! The Lord be merciful to thee!’ Charles was much offended by these manifestations of popular sentiment, and he wrapped himself more deeply in the mantle of cold authority.