Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (31 page)

On 11 December the citizens of London presented a petition to parliament for ‘reformation in church government’. It declared that ‘the government of archbishops and lord bishops, deacons and archdeacons etc.… has proved prejudicial and very dangerous both to the church and commonwealth’; it urged that this ecclesiastical government should be destroyed ‘with all its dependencies, roots and branches’. Fifteen hundred supporters gathered in Westminster Yard, well-dressed, well-organized and good-tempered, and after delivering their petition they returned quietly to their homes. The ‘root and branch’ petition, as it came to be known, was passed by Pym to a committee where it remained for some months.

More immediate remedies were at hand. On 16 December the canons passed by convocation in the spring of the year, among them ‘the etcetera oath’, were voted by parliament to be illegal. It was now time to attack the archbishop himself. On 18 December Laud was impeached and taken into custody. He was accused of fostering doctrines that lent support to the king’s arbitrary measures, and of using the courts both to impose innovations in worship and to silence the true professors of religion. One member of parliament, Harbottle Grimstone, described him as ‘the root and ground of all our miseries and calamities’. Other bishops soon joined him in the Tower. The bishop of Ely, Matthew Wren, was to spend seventeen years in confinement. Parliament could be as vindictive and as authoritarian as the king, perhaps because both parties believed that they were fulfilling the divine will.

Someone had scribbled, on the door of St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster, an appeal to ‘remember the judges’. Their time was not long in coming. All those who had supported the king in their judgments were questioned or arrested. Many of the king’s courtiers now fled the approaching storm. Sir Francis Windebank, whom Pym had accused of concealing a Catholic conspiracy, was rowed at night across the Channel. Lord Keeper Finch fled the country for Holland on the day he was impeached.

The members of parliament now determined to consolidate their strength. On 24 December it was recommended that ‘the English lord commissioners’, which in effect meant the puritan lords who had launched the petition for parliament in the summer, should be responsible for the disbursement of money to the Scots. Five days later Pym advised that the customs officials, who were the king’s principal financial agents, should ‘forbear to pay anything’ to the exchequer until authorization was ‘settled by Parliament’; his proposal was carried without any division. The king now lacked the resources even to pay his own household expenses.

In this last week of December it was further agreed that parliament should meet at fixed times with or without the co-operation of the king. The ‘Triennial Act’ was passed to compel parliaments to meet every three years. The Venetian ambassador reported that ‘if this innovation is introduced, it will hand over the reins of government completely to Parliament, and nothing will be left to the king but mere show and a simulacrum of reality, stripped of credit and destitute of all authority’. It remained to be seen whether Charles would willingly relinquish his powers. The contest had only just begun.

20

Madness and fury

The new year, 1641, was for the godly a time of jubilation. It was the year in which, according to cant phrases of the time, a period of ‘great affliction’ was succeeded by an age of ‘seasonable mercies’. Some writers were dating their letters ‘
annus mirabilis’
or ‘
anno renovationis’
. It was a golden year in which God’s goodness and mercy to the nation were vouchsafed. A pamphleteer, John Bond, exulted in ‘England’s Rejoicing for the Parliament’s Return’ that ‘papists tremble … Arminians tumble … the priests of Baal lament their fortunes’. For those of a royalist persuasion, however, the year marked the culmination of all their woes that had begun at the battle of Newburn.

The king was in desperate straits with his authority and revenue threatened, and with his principal counsellors languishing in the Tower. Henrietta Maria was enraged at the situation of the royal household, and continued to argue for more determined measures against her husband’s opponents. She even wrote to the Vatican asking for a large loan, perhaps with the intention of raising troops.

Charles himself did not surrender to the calamity that faced him. His health was good, and he was not inclined to anxiety; he maintained a daily regimen of prayer and exercise; he enjoyed an excellent appetite. He believed implicitly that the enemies of the Lord’s anointed would of necessity fail, and that all traitors would eventually be brought to the bar of justice.

On 23 January Charles summoned both houses of parliament to the Banqueting House at Whitehall, and delivered a speech in which he complained about the obstructions placed in his path by men who ‘put no difference betwixt reformation and alteration of government’. Yet he seemed willing to compromise, and promised to return the laws of religious polity to the ‘purest times of Queen Elizabeth’s days’. He stated further that ‘whatsoever part of my revenue shall be found illegal, or heavy to my subjects, I shall be willing to lay it down’. He had in effect cancelled the exaction of ship-money, and curbed all other questionable ways of raising revenue.

The status of his most faithful servant was still in doubt. It was already whispered at court that Strafford must rely upon his own protestations of innocence and, if they should fail, upon the mercy of parliament. Charles was unwilling to fight for his quondam counsellor; he seems to have realized that only Strafford’s death could preface the reconciliation he desired with his people. At the end of the month the charges were drawn up against the earl; twenty-eight separate articles, covering the last fourteen years of his career, were outlined over two hundred sheets of paper.

At the beginning of February the Commons voted £300,000 to the Scots under the name of ‘brotherly assistance’; the two nations were not to be divided. They needed one another, for the moment, in their confrontation with the king. They also needed the ‘Triennial Bill’ that guaranteed the meeting of parliament on a regular basis. The bill was a grievous blow to the royal prerogative, and Charles had been most reluctant to give his assent; his power would be limited, and his authority compromised. Yet on 16 February he was persuaded to concede the issue, partly from advice that he would receive no money after any refusal. So he declared in the old Norman fashion that ‘
le roi le veut’
, ‘the king wishes it’. In private the king raged. In effect the Act made him reliant upon parliament and gave that assembly the permanent existence that it had never known before. The bells of London rang out. The earl of Leicester wrote in his commonplace book that now ‘the parliament which is a corporation never dies, nor ceases at the death of the king, that is, the death of the king is no determination of it, and it is not likely that they will be weary of their immortality’.

It had already been rumoured that a new privy council was about to emerge that would reflect the wishes of the Commons as well as of the king. The earl of Bedford was to become lord treasurer while his lieutenant in the Commons, John Pym, would be chancellor of the exchequer; the earl of Bristol would be made lord privy seal. On 19 February seven other members of the puritan Junto were nominated to be privy councillors, among them Viscount Saye and the earls of Essex and Bedford. Clarendon wrote in his
History
that they were ‘all persons at that time very gracious to the people or the Scots … had all been in some umbrage at court and most in visible disfavour’.

The king had declared himself indirectly to be a moderate, therefore, equally ready to forgive his erstwhile enemies and to trim or turn his policies in the light of complaints directed against them. Yet at the same time he had also managed to divide the opposition against him. Many in parliament did not share the religious enthusiasm of the Scottish covenanters and had no wish to see the English Church remodelled to satisfy their demands; others were already beginning to resent the amount of money being spent for the maintenance of the Scottish army in the north. If Charles could gain the support of such men, parliamentary assistance would be at hand in his fight against the Junto.

The compromise with the puritans of parliament did not in the end succeed. The king had insisted that, in order to take up the offices of state he had promised to them, they must agree to retain the bishops in the Lords and to save Strafford’s life. They in turn demanded to be granted the offices before doing anything at all. No grand reconciliation was possible.

On 24 February Strafford was brought from the Tower to the chamber of the House of Lords in order to answer the charges laid against him. It was noticed with surprise that the king had taken his place upon the throne, by which he indicated his support for the earl. When the king eventually departed, however, it was resolved that the proceedings would have to begin all over again. Strafford defended himself with eloquence and wit, throwing into serious doubt the result of any trial. Within days it was reported that the parliamentary leaders were unsure how to proceed with their case. It was easy to proclaim Strafford to be a traitor, but a more difficult matter to prove it in open court.

His trial opened on 22 March, when he was taken by barge from the Tower to Westminster Hall. He was dressed entirely in black, as a dramatic token of sorrow, and the hall itself became known to the participants as ‘the theatre’. This was the spectacle that might determine the fate of the nation, as the prisoner fought for his life and for the cause of the king. Negotiations of course continued behind the scene. The puritan grandees were ready to spare Strafford’s life, for example, if the king agreed to grant them the great offices of state.

On the first day the peers of the realm filed into their places on both sides of the hall; tiers of seats had been placed, on either side of the peers, for the Commons. A committee of the Lords had already decided that it was not proper for the king himself to be present; so an empty throne stood at the northern end of the improvised courtroom while the king and queen were in fact sitting in seats behind, like a box in a theatre. Strafford himself was to stand on a dais at the southern end, facing both houses of parliament. The visual impression, in fact devised by Inigo Jones, was of one man against all the representatives of the nation. The hall was packed with spectators who made much clamour and ‘clattering’; it was remarked by one observer, Robert Baillie, that there was ‘much public eating, not only of confections but of flesh and bread, bottles of beer and wine going thick from mouth to mouth without cups’.

When the twenty-eight articles of impeachment were read out to him, Strafford was seen to smile; he could already see the legal difficulties that beset his accusers. They were attempting to prove treason on the basis of an accumulation of several separate charges. A remark passed around at the time was: you know at first sight whether a man is short or tall, you do not need to measure the inches. With Strafford’s supposed treachery, you would need to count the inches carefully. At one point Strafford said that ‘opinions may make a heretic, but that they make a traitor I never heard till now’. The days passed, with witnesses and questions and arguments, in the course of which Strafford seemed to delight in outwitting the counsels for the prosecution; they in turn were considered to be bombastic and hectoring.

It soon became clear to the members of the Junto that their cause could be lost, and they began to suspect that a majority of the peers was in fact secretly or openly supporting the cause of Strafford. When on 10 April the Lords allowed an adjournment for the prisoner to consult his notes before making a closing speech, the Commons protested in fury. They rose in consternation. Some of them, according to the parliamentary notes of Simonds D’Ewes, called out, ‘Withdraw! Withdraw!’, which was misheard by others as ‘Draw! Draw!’; their hands went to the hilts of their swords in anticipation of battle. The confusion delighted Strafford to the extent that ‘he could not hide his joy’; the king, in his box behind the throne, was seen to laugh. The two houses of parliament were in dispute.

The members of the Commons returned to their chamber in the afternoon, and at this opportune moment certain notes taken at a previous meeting of the privy council were conveniently revealed. This was the council during which Strafford had told the king that ‘you have an army in Ireland you may employ here to reduce this kingdom’. The earl’s accusers interpreted this ‘kingdom’ to be England rather than Scotland. This of course was treason. The Commons readily agreed. A Bill of Attainder was drawn up, a medieval device whereby both houses of parliament could try and condemn an enemy of the kingdom without the formality of a trial. It was also a way of persuading the Lords to vote for Strafford’s death without the burden of legal proof.

On 19 April the king ordered all military officers immediately to return to their regiments. When a negotiator from Scotland had an audience with the king two days later, he reported that ‘his mind seems to be on some project here shortly to break out’. It was also rumoured that the French, exhorted by the queen, were about to invade. What the leaders of the Junto most feared was a dissolution of parliament, a device that would result in the immediate cancellation of both the trial and the proposed attainder. They called out their supporters, and a crowd of many thousands gathered at Westminster in the belief that dangerous measures were about to be introduced. On 19 April, too, the Commons passed the Bill of Attainder against the earl of Strafford. Those of the Commons who had not supported the decision were derided as ‘Straffordians or enemies to their country’; their names were listed and placed on posts and other visible locations in the city. The members of the godly party were not above intimidation and violation of parliamentary privilege.