Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (15 page)

It would be reassuring if we could regard these questions as merely a self-indulgent toying with the what-ifs of history - those donnish ‘parlour-games’ so derided by E. H. Carr. Yet, in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s famous phrase, ‘history is not merely what happened : it is what happened in the context of what might have happened’.
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And to contemporaries - as Edward Rossingham reported in August 1639 - the possibility of a royal victory in 1639 was real and plausible, not a matter of vaporous ‘counterfactual’ speculation.
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As late as August 1640, the Comptroller of the King’s Household, Sir Thomas Jermyn, was confident that ‘we shall have a very good and successful end of these troubles’.
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Weighing the probabilities, Secretary Windebanke agreed: ‘I cannot much apprehend the rebels.’
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Let us begin by examining the circumstances of the war in 1639. Were the King and his closest advisers the prisoners of events? Or was the campaign against the Covenanters a war that Charles I could have won?

Charles’s decision to go to war in 1639 without summoning Parliament has been regarded as emblematic of a wider (and ultimately fatal) indifference on the part of his regime towards the sensibilities of England’s local governing elites.
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Not since Edward II in 1323 had an English king attempted to mount a major war-effort without the summons of the two Houses - admittedly, not a happy augury.
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Yet there were more recent, and more auspicious, precedents. Elizabeth I, who disliked parliaments only marginally less than Charles I, had organised an effective military force to expel the French from the Lowlands of Scotland in 1559-60 without recourse to the legislature. And in 1562 she had gone to war again, despatching an expeditionary force to Le Havre, without convoking the two Houses.
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Of course, Parliament was usually called upon in time of war; but it was not the
sine qua non
of an effective military campaign.

Nor was it just sycophantic courtiers who believed that the King could go to war in 1639 without needing parliamentary subsidies to buy his victory. Surveying the various resources at the King’s disposal in February 1639, Edward Montagu - the son of the Northamptonshire Puritan Lord Montagu of Boughton - thought that it was obvious: ‘the King will have no need of a Parliament’.
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Charles and his Council planned to wage war in 1639 in a manner which tested, and (they hoped) simultaneously consolidated, the traditional institutions which the King had sought to make the buttresses of the Personal Rule. The crown’s ancient fiscal prerogatives were revived and extended (including such feudal obligations as scutage and border service by the crown’s tenants in the northern marcher counties); and in the mobilisation of the localities, the county hierarchies of lords lieutenant (responsible for each county’s militia), their deputy lieutenants and the local magistracy (the justices of the peace) were all stretched to their limit. The results varied - from the exemplary to the farcical. But by the spring of 1639, without a parliament and relying exclusively on the administrative structures of the Personal Rule, England was in the throes of the largest mobilisation since the Spanish wars of the 1580s.

Charles’s strategy for the defeat of the Covenanters, as devised over the winter of 1638-9, was an integrated programme of military and naval action. There were four principal elements.
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The first was an amphibious force under the Marquess of Hamilton (the highly Anglicised Scottish magnate who was general of the King’s forces in Scotland), to be made up of 5,000 men in eight warships and thirty transports (the tangible results of the 1630s’ ship-money levies). Their task was to blockade Edinburgh and establish a bridgehead on the Scottish east coast.
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Second, an attack on the west coast of Scotland led by that deft political survivor, Randall MacDonnell, 2nd Earl of Antrim; his task was to divide the Covenanter forces and pin them down in the west. From Ireland, Lord Deputy Wentworth, Charles’s forceful and diligent viceroy, was to provide the third element of the assault: a landing on Scotland’s west coast, reinforcing Antrim’s proposed attack and placing 10,000 (mostly Catholic) Irish troops within striking distance of Edinburgh. The fourth, and principal, element in the offensive was the mobilisation of an English army. This was to advance towards the River Tweed (the natural frontier between England and Scotland), and be ready not only to repel Covenanter incursions across the English border, but also to cross the Tweed, if necessary, and take the war into the Covenanter heartlands. Whether or not Charles still intended to retake Edinburgh Castle - as he had first planned
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- the Ordnance Office’s preparations for the campaign were clearly such as to allow for the possibility of capturing Scottish strongholds by storm.
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Charles wished to be in a position to mount an offensive war.

Little went according to plan. All wars, Parliament-sponsored or not, tend to test the Exchequer to breaking point, and in this the war of 1639 was no exception.
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The amount actually allocated by the Exchequer in 1639 - some £200,000 - was relatively small, and almost certainly an under-assessment of the costs entailed.
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But the inadequacy of the Exchequer’s provision was partly offset by the often substantial sums raised by local gentry and expended on the trained bands. (By March 1639, the Yorkshire gentry alone claimed that they had expended £20,000 - none of which appears in the Exchequer’s central accounts.)
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Perhaps the strategy’s principal shortcoming was its failure to offer timely support to the anti-Covenanter resistance led by the Catholic Marquess of Huntly and his son, Lord Aboyne, in the north-east Highlands of Scotland - with the result that the King forfeited the opportunity to create the nucleus of a ‘royalist party’ in Scotland in 1639.
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Elsewhere, elements of Charles’s strategy foundered and had to be abandoned. Wentworth’s levies could not be mobilised in time. Antrim, too, failed to deliver his promised troops. Hamilton had grave reservations about the East Anglian recruits assigned to his command. And when the members of the peerage were summoned to York to endorse the campaign, Lords Saye and Brooke staged a damaging public protest against the non-parliamentary expedients which Charles was using to fight the war. On 22 May there was also, ominously, an eclipse of the sun.

But elsewhere, as the mobilisation progressed, there were grounds for hope. Yorkshire, which was expected to bear the brunt of any Scottish advance and where the gentry’s support was seen as being crucial to the campaign’s success, responded enthusiastically. Even that stern taskmaster, Wentworth - the President of the Council of the North - was impressed by the county’s diligence, and wrote to the Yorkshire deputy lieutenants (responsible for mustering the trained bands), commending their ‘loyalties and wisdom in [their] late cheerful and bounden offer ... in your promised readiness to attend [his Majesty’s] commands’.
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When the King arrived at York on 30 March 1639, to establish his court and oversee the preparations for the forthcoming campaign in person, he was greeted by spontaneous demonstrations of loyalty. There was ‘great resort to court of the nobility and gentry of the northern parts; and such as were colonels of the trained bands expressed much forwardness to serve his Majesty in that expedition, in defence of the nation’.
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By mid-April, Hamilton was pleased to find that his earlier pessimism had been unfounded, and that ‘generally the bodies of men [under his command] are extremely good, well clothed, and not so badly armed as I feared’.
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Stretched though it was, the Caroline regime did not break down. And by the end of May 1639 it had put into the field an army of between 16,000 and 20,000 men - comparable in size to the Civil War New Model Army (which rarely equalled its paper strength of 21,400), and more than three times the size of the English force which decisively defeated the Scots at Dunbar in 1650.
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When Charles’s forces marched out of York in ‘great pomp and state’ towards the border to begin the campaign, there was no hint that they considered any likely outcome other than victory for the King.
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In May, as his army assembled and began to train, morale improved, and the once ragged levies gradually acquired the aspect of a serious fighting force. ‘If we fight, it will be the bloodiest battle that ever was,’ boasted Colonel Fleetwood, ‘for we are resolved to fly in the very faces of [the rebels]; our spirits are good if our skill be according.’
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The King was offering no more than an objective assessment when he described the forces that had assembled by the beginning of June as ‘in notable good condition, pressing hard to see the face of their enemies’. Charles was bullish, ‘now resolved to treat no more where he ought to be obeyed’.
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Yet when the two armies came close to engaging, on 4 and 5 June 1639, the King’s response was one of doubt and indecision. The Earl of Holland, in command of a reconnaissance force of 3,000 infantry and 1,000 horse, had encountered the Scottish army at Kelso on the 4th, and decided to retreat before what he mistakenly believed to be a far larger Scottish force.
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And on 5 June, the Covenanter commander, Alexander Leslie, reinforced this misapprehension, arraying the Scottish army on the heights of Duns Law, on the northern bank of the Tweed, within sight of the King’s army, so as to create a misleading impression of their numbers.
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It was as close as the two armies came to engaging. Over-suspicious of dissent within his own ranks, and gulled by the Covenanters’ tactics into believing that they had fielded an army vastly outnumbering his own, the King decided that an invasion of Scotland was now impossible.
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Instead, he opted for negotiations, to buy time rather than risk an encounter against what he believed were overwhelming odds. On 6 June, the Covenanter leadership - which was no less anxious to avoid a fight - invited the King to treat, a proposal which was promptly accepted.
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This decision to open negotiations with the Covenanters in June 1639 was arguably the greatest single mistake of Charles’s life. The subsequent treaty, the Pacification of Berwick, allowed him to regain custody of his Scottish fortresses (including Edinburgh Castle), and met his demand for the dissolution of the Covenanters’ rebel government, the Tables;
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but, in return, he was obliged to concede the calling of a Scottish parliament and a General Assembly of the Scottish Kirk. The one was likely to impose stringent conditions on the exercise of Charles’s absentee rule over Scotland; the other to endorse the removal of bishops from the Scottish church. As neither prospect was acceptable to the King, all he had purchased by the treaty was time. To bring Scotland to heel, he would need to go to war again. More serious was the reaction to this military failure in England. To those who had taken part in the English mobilisation, their investment of time and money seemed to have been frittered away, as it now appeared, ‘unsuccessfully, fruitlessly, and needlessly’.
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A formidable force had been mustered, and victory thrown away without a shot being fired.

Yet the King’s decision to open negotiations was founded on an elementary miscalculation. The estimates of the size and strength of the Scottish army, on which Charles had based his decision, were grossly inflated. In fact, the King’s army at the beginning of June 1639 either equalled or outnumbered the Covenanters’ - perhaps by as many as 4,000 men.
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As Sir John Temple reported at the time, the English army was growing daily, and the horse (tactically the most important element of the force) now stood at 4,000.
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Even as Holland encountered Leslie’s forces at Kelso, Scottish morale was crumbling. ‘It is verily believed by those which were in the Scotch army [at Kelso]’, ran one English intelligence report, ‘that if we had come to blows, we [English] should have beaten them.’
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Moreover, the Scots were beset with acute problems with regard to victualling, weapons and shortages of ready cash.
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By the first days of June, Leslie’s army had begun to desert. It was only a matter of time before the true state of his forces was disclosed. Even the severest modern critic of the Caroline regime’s shortcomings in the campaign has argued that in June 1639 the King was on the brink of success. ‘Ironically, Charles had been much closer to victory than he ever imagined. Had he postponed negotiations for another week or two, the Scottish army would probably have disintegrated, as its money and food were exhausted.’
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At that point, with his own army intact, there would have been little standing between the King and Edinburgh. On 6 June the Covenanter leaders asked for peace; a fortnight later, and they would probably have been asking for surrender.

To Charles’s contemporaries, the implication was clear. Edward Rossingham, perhaps the best informed of the newsletter writers, reported the consensus in August 1639: ‘I have heard many men of good judgement say that if his Majesty would have taken his advantages to punish [the Scots’] insolencies, he might have marched to Edinburgh and bred such a confusion among them as that the common people must of necessity have deserted their [Covenanter] nobility.’
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For all the problems that the King encountered - from laggardly muster-masters, obstreperous noblemen like Lords Saye and Brooke, overstretched Ordnance Office clerks - it appeared to contemporaries that the war of 1639 was one which Charles I could have won.

Suppose the ‘men of good judgement’ were right in the summer of 1639, and that the King had engaged the Covenanter‘rebels’ and defeated them - or had secured the upper hand simply by waiting for the Scottish force to dissolve. What were the regime’s chances, in the event of a royal victory in 1639, for long-term survival into the 1640s and beyond? Several objections can be made to such a scenario. Even if Whig or Marxist teleology is discounted, it may still be retorted that examining the contingent circumstances of a given historical moment is a misleading gauge of a government’s long-term chances of success. A victory in 1639 - so the counter-argument might run - would not have provided a long-term guarantee of the regime’s survival, merely a temporary reprieve. Would not the regime have been toppled by its English critics at some point, even without the timely assistance of the Scots?