Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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thoroughly disliked and distrusted him. His debts were not the only reason

for his return. He had a longstanding claim to the peninsula of Kintyre in

western Scotland, which the Campbells had taken from his Macdonald

cousins many years ago, and which James I had assigned to the seventh Earl

of Argyll in 1607, along with the island of Jura. He saw in Charles’s present

needs a chance to reverse that grant, so in May and June 1638 he offered to

raise his clansmen on both sides of the Irish Sea for the king’s service. His

friend Hamilton commended the scheme to Charles, who allegedly promised

Antrim whatever of his former lands in Kintyre he could recover from the

Campbells. Lorne got wind of the deal, which not unnaturally helped to drive

him into the arms of the Covenanters. It brought the king nothing.

Since early in June the central authority of the Covenanters had been fur-

ther formalized. Representatives of the lairds, burgesses, and ministers served

on the ﬁfth Table according to a system of rotation, ostensibly to secure wide

involvement and spread the workload. But in practice a small caucus wielded

most of the initiative when it came to policy-making. Rothes was probably

the most powerful ﬁgure, though Loudoun and Montrose were very prom-

inent too, and the inﬂuence of Johnston of Wariston as clerk to the ﬁfth Table

is incalculable. Wariston had contacts in England and Ireland, and received

good intelligence of the king’s military preparations. He had a particularly

fruitful meeting on 10 June with Sir John Clotworthy, a puritan Anglo-

Irishman with a large estate in Ulster, who was en route for England and

promised to keep him well posted. Wariston also busied himself with propa-

ganda designed to enlist friends for the Covenant in England. He was the

main author of A Short Relation . . . for Information and Advertisement to

our Brethren in the Kirk of England, whose burden was that the Reformation

was in danger in both kingdoms. The Scottish Prayer Book (it warned) por-

tended further popish innovations in England, for the English prelates who

lay behind it were acting in concert with the catholics.

Hamilton returned to Scotland in mid-August with fresh instructions

which were designed merely to hold off a conﬂagration until the king was

ready to invade. He was to summon a General Assembly, but to ensure if pos-

sible that the bishops should sit and vote in it, and that one of them should be

its moderator. He was ﬁrst, however, to present a list of demands that the

Covenanters must meet before he sanctioned its election, the stiffest being

that they should dissolve all their meetings (including presumably the Tables)

and stop pressing for signatures to the Covenant. Charles was still hoping to

delay the assembly until he could deploy enough armed force to avert it. But

Hamilton found the Covenanters adamant in rejecting his demands, and

108 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

The last two paragraphs are heavily indebted to Jane H. Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restor-

ation in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randal MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim,

1609–1683 (Cambridge, 1993), chs. 1–3.

ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 108

interestingly the strongest resistance to them came from the lairds’ Table. The

most they would agree to, and that reluctantly, was to postpone elections

until Hamilton had had time to consult the king again. They gave him until

20 September.

Before leaving Scotland he privately met Traquair, Roxburgh, and another

councillor, the Earl of Southesk, and signed with them a set of articles of

advice to the king. They urged him to abandon the Prayer Book and canons

unequivocally, annul the High Commission, and suspend the Articles of

Perth, pending a Scottish parliament. But their constructive proposal was for

an alternative covenant, which became known as the King’s Covenant, and

was quite cleverly designed to take the wind out of the Covenanters’ sails.

Like the National Covenant, it reafﬁrmed the Negative Confession of 1581,

but instead of the rebellious band devised by Wariston it repeated a relative-

ly loyal one of 1590, whereby subscribers bound themselves to support the

king in suppressing papists and promoting true religion and obedience to

the crown. Charles hated the Negative Confession and was loath to give up

the Prayer Book, but he realized by now that he could not go to war with the

Covenanters before 1639. This was partly because in his determination to

keep Scottish policy in his own hands he had not put the state of Scotland

before the English privy council until 1 July. So eventually he agreed to all the

Scotsmen’s advice, empowering Hamilton not only to revoke the prayer book

and canons and to summon an assembly and parliament, but even to promise

his assent to the repeal of the Articles of Perth. It is most unlikely that he

meant to honour these concessions permanently, but he saw it as his prime

need to stave off open rebellion until he could confront it with sufﬁcient

military force.

The King’s Covenant had sufﬁcient success to disconcert the Covenanters,

until the Glasgow Assembly consigned it to history. It collected about 28,000

signatures, 12,000 of them in the region of Aberdeen. But the Covenanters

themselves were not idle while Hamilton was in England. As soon as he had

departed, Wariston and two others drew up directions for the holding of elec-

tions to a General Assembly between 21 and 25 September, regardless of

whether or not he formally summoned one. They also decided vital questions

about its composition without giving Hamilton or the king any say in the

matter, and after a twenty-year intermission there were large questions to be

settled. Three main interests were in conﬂict. The strict Presbyterians, includ-

ing the majority of ministers, wanted the assembly to be constituted as

Andrew Melville had conceived it and to consist exclusively of representa-

tives of church courts. The lay Covenanters, however, dependent though they

were on the support of the ministers and the religious fervour that their

preaching kept on the boil, had a particular need in the political situation of

1638 for the large presence of nobles and lairds that General Assemblies had

Storm over Scotland 109

ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 109

always included in the past. Third and very much last was the interest of the

king, which if he had to face an assembly at all was to maintain his father’s

methods of rendering it amenable. James had not only brought bishops into

it in increasing numbers; he had appointed king’s commissioners as full mem-

bers on his sole authority, and added various nobles and lairds as their ‘assist-

ers’ or assessors, all with voting rights.

The Covenanters had no intention of admitting any bishops at all, except

as plaintiffs to submit to the assembly’s judgement on their offences, and they

claimed that the Jacobean assemblies of 1606–18 had been unlawful. They

took as the basis for the forthcoming one an act of 1597 which had sought to

eliminate royal intruders and to compose the General Assembly exclusively of

members elected by the presbyteries, but they modiﬁed its manner of imple-

mentation so as to secure a strong presence of nobles, lairds, and burgesses in

the guise of lay elders. This caused consternation among strict Presbyterian

ministers, and threatened to cause serious dissension between lay and clerical

Covenanters, for though it had been intended that presbyteries should

include some elders when they were originally established they had come to

consist only of clergy. The objection was overcome, because the need for

strong lay representation in the context of 1638 was obvious, but the dispute

portended a rift which was to open wide ten years later. Under covert prompt-

ing from the central leadership, powerful local Covenanters exerted a lot of

crude pressure, often bullying reluctant ministers into returning useful nobles

and lairds as ruling elders, even when their previous activity in church affairs

had been slight indeed. Most burgh commissioners seem to have been elected

by their town councils from the local oligarchy, and they included many pre-

sent or future magistrates and past or future members of parliament; but the

kirk session to which each belonged was asked for its consent to their elec-

tion, so a semblance of ecclesiastical representation was preserved. In the

event these nominal elders were only a part of the lay presence in the assem-

bly, for in October the Tables ordered that all nobles who had signed the

Covenant should attend, and that four to six gentlemen from each presbytery

should accompany its elected representatives, to sit with them and advise

them as assessors, though not to vote. Each burgh commissioner too was to

have up to six assessors, and even gentlemen who were not chosen as asses-

sors but wished to attend were permitted to do so. In these ways the assembly

was ﬂooded with supernumeraries, well after the formal elections had been

completed. The laymen all came armed.

The Tables, in their covert directions to their trusted friends in the locali-

ties, not only told them whom they wanted elected but instructed them to col-

lect all the damaging information against the bishops that they could rake up,

whether personal or ecclesiastical. They meant to arraign them before the

assembly, and then move to abolishing episcopacy outright. The fate of the

110 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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bishops became more and more the central issue during the weeks between

Hamilton’s return to Edinburgh in mid-September and the opening of the

assembly on 21 November. He appointed Glasgow as its venue, since it was

the one major town besides Aberdeen where the Covenant had met consider-

able opposition, and lay within his own territorial power-base. The same

proclamation announced that a parliament would follow in May 1639 in

Edinburgh; it also set forth the king’s new concessions and ordered his sub-

jects to sign the King’s Covenant. When it was read in Edinburgh, according

to Wariston, the common people shouted ‘God save the king! But away with

bishops, these traitors to God and man, or any other covenant but our

own’.

Wariston engaged in some ugly correspondence with friends who

were planning so to terrorize the bishops that they would not dare to show

themselves in public. The King’s Covenant worried the Tables, but it

rebounded upon Hamilton, whose idea it had been, when Sir Thomas Hope

of Craighall, still the King’s Advocate but no friend to the king now, declared

that episcopacy was contrary to the Negative Confession and urged all

Covenanters to sign, since by so doing they could proceed to abolish bishops

in the king’s name. Not many did so, but the effectiveness of the King’s

Covenant was seriously undermined.

The formal membership of the assembly consisted of about 150 ministers

and 100 ruling elders (including 15 nobles, 36 lairds, and 39 burgesses), but

its appearance as it sat in Glasgow cathedral, with all the additional nobles

and gentry who sat as assessors or supernumeraries, resembled that of a

plenary meeting of the Tables. Hamilton was empowered to dissolve it if neces-

sary as soon as it opened, but he struggled for six days to defend the king’s

interest, and though he failed on most points of substance he certainly did his

best. He contested its composition and exposed serious irregularities in the

elections, but he secured no changes. He tried to get candidates acceptable to

the king elected to the key ofﬁces of moderator and clerk, but the Covenanting

leaders had decided beforehand that Henderson and Wariston, the authors of

the National Covenant, should be chosen, and so they were. Henderson

asked, and was granted, that he might have assessors to assist and advise him,

and the ﬁfteen who were elected acted with him as a steering committee for

the full assembly, almost as the Lords of the Articles had done for the emas-

culated parliament. James had used assessors similarly to manage the muz-

zled General Assemblies of his reign in England, but when Hamilton tried to

secure similar powers for assessors of his own they were denied the power to

vote. He failed to get a declination and protestation by the bishops heard

Storm over Scotland 111

Diary of Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston, ed. G. M. Paul, D. H. Fleming, and J. D.

Ogilvie (3 vols., Edinburgh, 1911–40), I, 392.

Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, pp. 111–14.

ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 111

until after the assembly’s composition had been determined, and when it was

ﬁnally read it was received with derision.

By the end of the session on 27 November he had run out of procedural

devices to delay the broaching of business that he knew would be carried

against him, and that he could not possibly countenance. The assembly was now

formally constituted, and poised to proceed to judgement upon the bishops,

against whom heavy charges had been prepared. He decided to dissolve it the

next day, and in reporting this to the king he wrote as though he feared for his

life. On the 28th, when Henderson called on the assembly to vote on its

competence to judge the bishops, Hamilton broke in, maintaining that it

could discuss only what the king had summoned it to discuss. Revealing his

knowledge of the Tables’ secret directions for the ﬁxing of the elections, and

complaining of the way the assembly had treated himself as the king’s com-

missioner, he declared that he could not give his consent to anything that was

done in it. Isolated as he was, and forced to quarrel publicly with powerful

and popular men, some of whom had been his friends, his stand required

courage, but it was unavailing. After a prolonged and bitter alteration with

Rothes and Loudoun, and after denouncing the whole way in which the

Covenanters had usurped the king’s power, he ﬁnally pronounced the words

of dissolution: ‘I in his majesty’s name discharge this court to sit any longer’.

He attempted to leave, intending that the assembly should terminate with his

departure, but the cathedral door had been locked and the key hidden, so he

had to wait until it was broken open. As soon as he was gone the assembly

voted that it should remain in session, and that the bishops were subject to its

judgement.

With great difﬁculty, Hamilton got the rump of the council to issue a

proclamation conﬁrming the dissolution and ordering all the assembly’s

members to leave Glasgow. It was of course ignored. He could rely on very

few of the councillors now. The most serious defection was that of Lorne,

who had just succeeded to the earldom of Argyll; he was one of Hamilton’s

assessors, but did not follow him when he walked out, as the others did. Argyll

basked in the warmth of the assembly’s response to his continuing presence,

even though he was not formally a member and had not yet signed the

Covenant. He was even more popular when he announced that like Craighall

he had signed the King’s Covenant on the assumption that the Negative Con-

fession precluded episcopacy. Seven more privy councillors made declarations

to the same effect during the next few days. Argyll had not yet given up all

hope of serving the king, but his role in the Glasgow Assembly marked a vital

stage in his progress to the leadership of the Covenanting movement.

The assembly sat on for a full three weeks after Hamilton pronounced it

112 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, pp. 121–3.

ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 112

dissolved, and the Covenanters had cause to feel vindicated in insisting on a

strong representation of all four estates. A purely clerical body would prob-

ably not have proceeded so boldly, and even if it had it would not have carried

so much of the nation with it as the Glagow Assembly did. It not only con-

demned the Prayer Book as unlawfully introduced and full of popish errors,

and deposed all the bishops; it abolished episcopacy outright, annulled the

canons and the Articles of Perth, and forbade kirkmen to hold any civil ofﬁces

or powers. It declared the government of the Kirk to be by kirk sessions, pres-

byteries, synods, and general assemblies, condemned the six assemblies held

between 1606 and 1618 under royal dominance as unlawful and null, and

asserted the Kirk’s right to annual assemblies in future; it appointed that the

next one should meet in Edinburgh on 17 July 1639. It ordered that the

Covenant should be signed and sworn anew, together with a supplementary

‘Glasgow Declaration’ which made it clear that its subscribers bound them-

selves to abjure episcopacy and the Articles of Perth. These momentous things

done, it dissolved itself on 20 December.

With these acts the Covenanting movement took the ﬁnal step from oppos-

ition to rebellion. The participation of so many nobles, lairds, and burgesses

ensured that the forthcoming parliament would endorse the assembly’s deci-

sions. Yet however strongly secular aims were intermixed in the motivation

of many lay Covenanters, the proceedings at Glasgow focused the call to arms

on religious issues that drew on deep springs in the national consciousness.

The response to that call was ﬁred by the concept of a chosen people

covenanted with God, which was preached with intense fervour throughout

Lowland Scotland. Yet the Glasgow acts divided as well as united. They went

further than many who had opposed the Caroline innovations desired; they

supplanted the broad Kirk of King James’s days, which had possibly satisﬁed

a higher proportion of protestant Scots (Argyll among them) than any other

ecclesiastical regime before or since, with something altogether narrower and

less tolerant. Many ministers wondered whether they were exchanging sub-

jection to the dictates of an absentee king for subordination to oppressively

present nobles and lairds. Although the nationwide subscription to the

Covenant in 1638–9 involved more Scotsmen in a political act than ever

before in the country’s history, the nation was by no means fully united by it.

The autumn and winter’s events suggest how easily the crisis might have been

averted by more sensitive and ﬂexible handling on the king’s part, and raise

the question whether war might yet have been averted.

Hamilton, just before his vain attempt to dissolve the assembly, wrote to

warn Charles that Argyll must be watched, ‘for it fears me that he will prove

the dangerousest man in this state’.

Yet he kept in cordial touch with Argyll

Storm over Scotland 113

Quoted in Macinnes, Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, p. 190.

ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:27 AM Page 113

behind the scenes, despite the latter’s now open support for the Covenanters.

He has been accused of treachery for it, but his conduct will bear a kinder

interpretation, even though his personal interests as a Scottish magnate were

involved. Whereas Argyll’s ﬁrm grip on the vast Campbell territories and

their inhabitants made him easily the most powerful noble in Scotland,

Hamilton’s long absence had weakened his power to call on his own depend-

ants and tenantry, large though his estates were. His strong-minded mother,

who despite her lately deceased catholic husband was wholeheartedly on the

Covenanting side, had successfully courted their loyalty, and when on his ﬁrst

arrival back in Scotland Hamilton had summoned them, few had attended.

Since then he had been forced to play a deeply unpopular role, and to be seen

as Argyll’s friend could help him to regain his personal and territorial inﬂu-

ence. Yet the two men shared a larger interest in keeping the conﬂict within

bounds; after all, their failure to do so was to cost them both their heads in the

end, and in different ways each man’s death was a result of his convictions.

If Charles could have brought himself to listen to Hamilton rather than

Laud, and if Argyll had gone on using his powerful inﬂuence to moderate the

Covenanters’ mood of deﬁance, something might yet have been saved. It was

a slender chance, and it would have called for concessions such as Charles

was not prepared to contemplate, but it was the only one. Argyll did not cease

to attend the privy council until March 1639, or sign the National Covenant

until April. Hamilton had two strong reasons other than personal ones for

regarding an English attempt to conquer Scotland with deep apprehension,

and he was to be justiﬁed in both of them. First, as he had told Rothes, if it

came to war he expected never to see peace in his country again; and second-

ly he doubted whether the king would ﬁnd sufﬁcient support in England to

carry it through successfully. In advising Charles, back in June 1638, that he

could have his way in Scotland only by armed force, he had warned him that

by resorting to it he might hazard all his three crowns. ‘The conquering total-

ly of this kingdom will be a difﬁcult work’, he wrote, and he feared that Eng-

land would not be as forward in it as she ought; ‘there are so many malicious

spirits among them that no sooner will your back be turned, but they will be

ready to do to you as we have done here, which I will never call by another

name than rebellion. England wants not its own discontents, and I fear much

help they cannot give’.

It was honest and prescient advice, but it went

unheeded. Charles would not entertain the possibility that the English people,

so superior in wealth and numbers, would not support him in his just quarrel.

He was obsessed now with punishing the Scots; they had dared to pit their

notion of authority against his, and his must prevail.

114 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Quoted in Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, p. 56; see p. 60 for Hamilton’s words to

Rothes.

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five

The Bishops’ Wars

As Charles prepared for war during the early months of 1639 he was con-

fronted with three discouraging contrasts. One was between the grand sweep

of his plan of campaign and his likely capacity to execute it. Another lay

between the effectiveness with which the Scots mobilized their military

resources and the dragging, bumbling efforts of the English. And behind both

lay the third, which was between the passionate commitment of the Covenan-

ters to their cause and the lukewarmness of most Englishmen—and the down-

right hostility of some—towards the king’s.

He originally planned that the war should be won on Scottish soil with the

support of his loyal Scottish subjects, whose number he heavily overesti-

mated. The bulk of his English army was to stand defensively on the borders,

while his ﬂeet patrolled the Firth of Forth and strangled Scotland’s trade.

Hamilton was to land about 5,000 men in Aberdeenshire and join forces with

Huntly, who by March had a similar number of men under arms there. The

two marquises were to sweep southward together, enlisting as they marched

the host of loyal Scotsmen whom Charles fondly imagined to be chaﬁng

under the Covenanters’ yoke. In Ulster, Antrim had undertaken to raise 5,000

foot and 200 horse, though so far he had had no formal commission. Late in

February, Charles abruptly ordered him to have this force ready to invade

western Scotland by the beginning of April. Wentworth was thoroughly hos-

tile to this enterprise, and nothing came of it. He had little but contempt for

these ‘naked and inexperienced Irishmen’,

who lacked trained ofﬁcers and

looked to his government for arms and equipment which he was most reluc-

tant to furnish, needing them as he did for his own army. He also sensed that

Antrim was less interested in collaborating in a grand strategy against the

Covenanters than in making himself formidable in Ulster and recovering his

clan territory in Kintyre.

Antrim’s contribution, however, was never intended to be more than

peripheral to the main effort of Huntly and Hamilton in Scotland. There,

unfortunately for Charles, the Covenanters struck ﬁrst. During March the

Quoted in Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, p. 83.

ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 115

royal castles of Edinburgh and Dumbarton fell to them without a blow, and

at Dalkeith Traquair was forced on the 24th to surrender not only a precious

store of arms and powder but the crown, sceptre, and other regalia of the Scot-

tish kingdom. The day after, before he can have heard of that humiliation,

Huntly had intelligence that Montrose and David Leslie were marching

towards him with a force slightly larger than his own. On the advice of his

council of war he sent his troops home rather than risk a battle, and he was

forced to accompany Montrose back to Edinburgh as a virtual prisoner.

Aberdeen submitted to a Covenanting garrison, and most of the supposedly

loyal magnates’ castles fell like ninepins.

So even when Charles rode into York on 30 March to place himself at the

head of his army, his intended strategy was already in tatters. Since there was

now no question of Hamilton attempting an opposed landing in Aberdeen-

shire, Charles sent him to the Firth of Forth instead, with just three raw regi-

ments. But Hamilton found Leith fortiﬁed against him and the whole of Fife

and the Lothians up in arms; his own mother appeared in public, pistol in

hand, and threatened to shoot him if he set foot ashore. Frustrated, he disem-

barked his men on two small islands in the Firth and set about shaping them

into soldiers. Charles turned to Antrim again, ordering Wentworth to stop

refusing him arms and ships, and then on 11 April to give him and his army a

commission under the Great Seal of Ireland. This last was promptly counter-

manded from London by Windebank, who sensibly suggested that the expe-

dition should be put off until the spring of the next year. Antrim welcomed

the postponement (as well he might), and was directed, for the present, mere-

ly to make a show of threatening invasion.

By May, therefore, the only way of carrying the war to the Covenanters

was for the English army to invade Scotland. For this it was quite unprepared,

and Charles had not expected so to use it. So far there had been a strong elem-

ent of theatre in his military preparations, which had been planned more to

frighten the Scots into submission than to ﬁght them in the ﬁeld. For infantry

he relied largely on the trained bands, supplemented by pressed men (i.e. con-

scripts). For cavalry, he summoned all the nobility of England to attend him

at York on 1 April, with such horse and foot as they could personally raise.

There was more of pageantry than of serious military purpose in this chival-

ric gathering under the royal banner, though over 800 horsemen attended it.

He had planned to raise an army of 24,000, three-quarters of it consisting of

trained militiamen and the levies of the nobility and gentry. He actually raised

between 15,000 and 20,000, but at least a third and perhaps a half were

pressed men. Impressment, in living memory, was something that had main-

ly befallen the dregs of society—vagrants, prisoners, petty criminals, and

other masterless men. It carried a heavy taint, and serious danger too, for not

too many pressed men had come home. It is no wonder then that parish

116 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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constables were unwilling to conscript respectable fellow villagers or

townsmen, and that very many who did have the king’s shilling thrust upon

them either bribed the captain or ‘conductor’ who had charge of them to let

them off or deserted at the ﬁrst opportunity.

The trained bands should have furnished better material. The deputy lieu-

tenants, on whom the main responsibility rested, made a considerable effort

to furnish their counties’ quotas, but at heart they were generally inclined to

put those counties’ interests before the king’s. It would doubtless have been

different if there had been a deeply felt national cause at stake, as there had

been when the Armada threatened England half a century ago, and as there

was now for the Scots. As things were, there was a lot of resentment when the

king took a county’s stock of arms for use outside its bounds, or introduced

professional ofﬁcers with no local roots to help make good the general lack of

military experience among the trained bands’ own captains. The spirit of

localism was at least as strong among the men themselves, who regarded

themselves very much as defenders of their own shire, and wanted a very good

reason before they would march beyond its borders. Being freemen, mostly of

some small substance, very many of them took advantage of a right which the

council in its weakness granted them to furnish a substitute to serve in their

place. The substitutes were of course untrained, and probably unarmed too,

since a militiaman’s weapon was often his own property and he would not

part with it. So what with substitutes and pressed men, the bulk of the king’s

infantry were raw levies with little heart in his cause.

Financial provision for his army was precarious, and the troops were kept

more or less in pay mainly by the personal contributions of his councillors

and courtiers. The payment of Ship Money was for the ﬁrst time falling far

below the quotas set, and the council had to spend an inordinate amount of

its time in attempting to enforce it. It was being resisted on a new scale partly

because Hampden’s test case had been decided so narrowly in the crown’s

favour, and partly because it was being exacted at the same time as coat-and-

conduct money, and two levies of questionable legality were more than many

people were prepared to pay, or could afford to. Coat-and-conduct money

was a rate imposed on the whole county to furnish each soldier with a good

coat and maintain him on the march, at 8d. a day, until he crossed the county

boundary or arrived at the royal standard. And while there was just enough

money to keep the men paid, there was nothing like enough to arm them

properly. Such of the trained bands’ arms as reached the king’s camp were in

many cases rusted through or obsolete, and there were never enough pikes

and muskets to go round the thousands of pressed men.

The senior commanders of this raw and reluctant army were hardly likely

to stir it to great deeds. Charles chose as its general Thomas Howard, Earl of

Arundel, partly because he had been Earl Marshal of England since 1621,

The Bishops’ Wars 117

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