Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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partly because he had large estates and many tenants in northern England,

but chieﬂy because he knew and trusted him so well. Arundel was (after the

king) the greatest connoisseur and collector in the country, but he was also

the head of its greatest catholic family, and though he had converted to the

Church of England he was widely believed, however inaccurately, to be still a

crypto-papist. In a time when most people aged earlier than they do today, he

was ﬁfty-four years old and he had no military experience whatsoever. His

appointment typiﬁes Charles’s hierarchical, quasi-theatrical approach to his

confrontation with the Scots. It meant that a great deal of responsibility

rested on the shoulders of Arundel’s second-in-command, the Earl of Essex,

who was appointed Lieutenant-General and General of the Horse—the two

commands commonly went together. Essex was one of the few English nobles

who had had any serious military experience in the continental wars, and

though he had won no glory as commander of the ill-fated expedition against

Cadiz in 1625 he might at least be presumed to have learnt from its mistakes.

No one had more respect from the serious soldiers in the royal army. But

Charles, after appointing him, detached the command of the horse from the

lieutenant-generalship and bestowed it, on the pleas of the queen, upon her

favourite the Earl of Holland, whose experience of action was conﬁned to a

brief spell as a gentleman volunteer at the siege of Juliers in 1610. Arundel

was outraged, and Wentworth regarded Holland with deserved contempt.

There was bad blood too between Arundel and the Master of the Ordnance,

the Earl of Newport, and that was not the end of the animosities among the

courtiers who were masquerading as soldiers in the army of 1639.

Whether the Scottish army could have sustained a serious campaign in that

year is an open question, but the contrast between the two forces began at the

top. The Covenanters’ general was Alexander Leslie, who was older than

Arundel but had been toughened by thirty years’ distinguished service under

the great Gustavus Adolphus, who had honoured him highly and ﬁnally made

him a ﬁeld marshal. The irony is that when Leslie retired from the Swedish

army in 1638 his ﬁrst intention was to serve Charles I, who before the Scot-

tish rebellion had been hoping to send a force into Germany to aid the Elec-

tor Palatine. Once home in his native Scotland, however, Leslie was won to

the Covenanters’ cause and soon became their invaluable military adviser. It

was not only his professionalism in raising, organizing, training, and discip-

lining troops that gave them the advantage; this ‘old, little, crooked soldier’

commanded the willing obedience of the Covenanting nobles with as sure a

knack as he ﬁred the military spirit of his subordinates. His manner

of giving directions to both was ‘very homely and simple’,

but (as Robert

Baillie tells us) he knew the difference between commanding mercenaries and

118 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Robert Baillie, quoted in Gardiner, History of England, IX, 32.

ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 118

volunteers, and his combination of military expertise with natural authority

was something that would not be found in English armies until the rise of

Fairfax and Cromwell.

He had an uphill task, for Scotland had a quarter of England’s manpower

at the most, and had had even less direct experience of war in the last thirty

years. Very few home-dwelling Scotsmen had had even the rudimentary mili-

tary training of the English militia, except in the Highland clans, and outside

Campbell territory very few clansmen were friends to the Covenant. Yet Scot-

land’s very poverty gave her a reservoir of potential military strength in the

thousands of young men who left home to serve in the armies of Sweden or

Denmark. When recruitment was at its height between 1625 and 1632,

around 25,000 went off to ﬁght for pay and the protestant cause—roughly

one in ten of all adult Scottish males—and many more were to follow. They

included ofﬁcers as well as men, and a fair number rose from the ranks. Late

in 1638 the Tables issued a general summons to all Scottish protestant ofﬁcers

in foreign service to return home, and men of all ranks responded. So

although most colonels of regiments and captains of companies were

nobles or lairds, the Tables could stipulate that the lieutenant-colonel and

major in every regiment and the ensign and two sergeants in every company

should be veterans of the continental wars. This leavening of seasoned

professionals gave Leslie’s army an incalculable advantage, and was probably

the chief factor in deterring Charles from launching his own forces against

it in 1639.

Nevertheless the raising, equipping, and ﬁnancing of such an army put an

acute strain on Scotland, and its preparedness in that summer should not be

exaggerated. Compared with the localism that bedevilled the English war

effort, however, the Tables’ strong central authority was a great beneﬁt, and

the rates that they levied were generally more cheerfully paid than Ship

Money or coat-and-conduct money south of the border; if not, they had no

hesitation in employing force. The organization that geared the country for

war was an interesting mixture of the civil, the ecclesiastical, and the feudal,

laced with a strong tincture of Swedish practice, thanks to the inﬂuence of

Leslie and other veterans. Each county had its powerful committee for war,

consisting of a commissioner and other representatives from every presbytery

within its bounds, and each maintained two commissioners (or one in the case

of the smaller shires) in Edinburgh. The county committees were responsible

for raising the quotas of men speciﬁed by the central authority and for

quartering the regiments stationed in their territory, but the actual selection

of recruits lay with the ministers and elders in the rural parishes and with the

burgh councils in the towns. Pressed men, however, bulked less large in the

Scottish army than in the English, for the fervent preaching of the clergy

brought in many volunteers, and the nobles and lairds who took the initiative

The Bishops’ Wars 119

ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 119

in raising regiments and companies brought in many of their own kinsmen,

tenants, and servants.

Late in May the king established his camp at Birks, three miles from

Berwick, and the Covenanting army stood on the defensive some distance

north of the border. Estimates of its strength vary, but it may have totalled

only half the 20,000 that Gardiner once reckoned, and it was probably out-

numbered very considerably by the English forces. But its morale was so far

superior as to more than make up the difference in numbers, for its members

believed they were ﬁghting for their faith and for their country. Many min-

isters attended them in the camp and in the ﬁeld, and the call from the pulpit

that had enlisted many of them was refreshed by frequent sermons. On the

English side, some priests ministered clandestinely to the ﬁfty-odd catholic

ofﬁcers under Arundel’s command, but otherwise chaplains were few, and

they did not impress. We get a glimpse of them riding before the troops at

their ease and pufﬁng at their pipes of tobacco, but we hear nothing of their

preaching. Even if they had tried, they would have had to preach very hard to

persuade the average English soldier to put up gladly with the lack of shelter

and the shortage of decent victuals and drinkable water (let alone beer) in the

camp at Birks. He might share his countrymen’s traditional dislike of Scots-

men, but he had no quarrel with their religion, and no particular sympathy

with what the king was trying to do to it.

Here is where Charles was very vulnerable, for whereas those Scots who

professed loyalty to him had been largely neutralized, there were already

many inﬂuential Englishmen who felt a positive sympathy with the Scottish

cause. The Countess of Westmorland warned Windebank in May that the

Scots ‘know our divisions, and the strength of their own combination, and

that they have a party amongst us, and we have none amongst them’.

There

was very little open disaffection towards the king in England, but when he

had required the nobles assembled at York to swear an oath to ﬁght for him

to the utmost of their power and hazard of their lives, Viscount Saye and Sele

and Lord Brooke had ﬂatly refused, and were brieﬂy imprisoned. They were

probably the two peers who, according to intelligence from Sir John Clot-

worthy in the summer of 1638, had been seriously thinking even then of set-

tling in Scotland. Clotworthy thought that forty or ﬁfty leading gentry were

inclined the same way. Brooke was discovered in treasonable correspondence

with the Scots in 1639, but Charles thought it not politic to prosecute him.

The Scots were now addressing printed propaganda to a wider English audi-

ence. An example is An Information to all good Christians within the

Kingdom of England, written partly by Wariston and published in February

1639. It roundly blamed the English prelates for seeking to subvert true

120 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Quoted in Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 81.

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religion in Scotland, and warned English readers that this was but a step in a

design to bring both kingdoms back to Rome. It hoped that an English par-

liament would shortly vindicate the Scots and recognize that both peoples

had a common cause. Its play on the fear of a popish plot touched a raw nerve,

as will shortly be seen. It worried the privy council enough to set going a

search of suspect houses, and copies were found in about forty of them.

In his uncertainty about the capacity of his forces to engage Leslie across

the border, Charles asked Wentworth in May for a thousand men from his

Irish army. The Lord Deputy replied that with all the Scots in Ulster taking

sides with Covenanters, with all Connaught still to be settled and with the

native Irish burning Englishmen’s houses in Munster, he would be courting

disaster if he split his forces. He offered to concentrate them at Carrickfergus,

so as to make the Scots think he intended to invade, but his advice to Charles

was to postpone his attack for a year and meanwhile to spin out time with

negotiations.

An unhappy military manoeuvre on 4 June helped to convince the king that

Wentworth was right. Intelligence had come in the evening before that Leslie

had advanced a force to Kelso, only just within the border, contrary to a royal

injunction not to come within ten miles of it. Holland was dispatched with

about 1,000 horse and 3,000 foot to reconnoitre, and if possible drive them

out. His cavalry left his infantry far behind, and came unsupported upon a

force of Scottish foot that he reckoned at between 6,000 and 10,000, though

Leslie had probably positioned it so that it looked much larger than it was.

Holland sent a trumpeter to ask the Scots what they were doing so close to the

border; Leslie retorted by asking what the English cavalry were up to on the

wrong side of it, and suggested that they should withdraw immediately;

which is what Holland did. His humiliating retreat was a blow to the morale

of the English forces and gave the Covenanters a political advantage. They

advanced their main army to Duns Law on the 5th, and from that position of

strength, less than a dozen miles from the king’s camp, they sent to him to

propose a negotiation. They were uncertain whether their still raw and out-

numbered army could sustain a serious campaign; they were still ﬁghting

Scottish royalists in the north-east, and they seized what they saw as an

opportunity to secure the essentials of what they had taken up arms for with-

out the hazard of a battle.

Charles was strongly urged to treat by the nobles in his camp, and he yielded.

His reasons were probably as much political as military. Having learnt, or

partly learnt, how limited was the support he could expect from Scottish

royalists, he needed time to think and plan afresh. He was beginning to learn

how many English, besides the overtly pro-Scottish minority, looked coldly

on his quarrel. The Earl of Bristol told him publicly in the camp at Birks that

most of the lords there, including the privy councillors present, were resolved

The Bishops’ Wars 121

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to petition for a parliament. That was almost the last thing he wanted, but a

military reverse would probably force it upon him, and make it unmanage-

able. So a treaty it would have to be—though not in his mind as a means to

the deﬁnitive settlement that the Scots sought but as a stalling operation, to

give him time to exploit such political opportunities as it might offer or, if that

failed, to renew war with better prospects.

Commissioners from both sides met on 11 June, and signed the Paciﬁcation

of Berwick a week later. Charles personally participated in the negotiation;

indeed he and Hamilton did most of the talking on the English side, and he

showed considerable debating skill. He certainly deceived the Scots as to his

intentions, but how far this was deliberate is uncertain. It may be, as Conrad

Russell has argued,

that he and the Covenanters came to the table with such

totally different assumptions about the relation between royal and ecclesias-

tical authority that they found it difﬁcult to speak a mutually intelligible polit-

ical language. Moreover both sides wanted so badly to avoid ﬁghting, at least

for the present, that they were prepared to blur the central issues. The Scots

agreed to disband their forces, free royalist prisoners, and restore the king’s

castles and property; Charles undertook to withdraw his army and convene a

General Assembly in Edinburgh in August, closely followed by a Scottish par-

liament. But on the crucial question of episcopacy the Paciﬁcation said noth-

ing directly. It laid down that in future all ecclesiastical matters would be

settled by assemblies of the Kirk and all civil ones by parliament, but as to

whether Charles was prepared to accept the assembly’s inevitable verdict on

episcopacy, and to assent to parliament’s ratiﬁcation of it, the two parties left

Berwick with very different impressions. The Scots took it that he was so pre-

pared. So did Hamilton; otherwise he was not willing to act as his commis-

sioner in either the assembly or the parliament. But Charles is reported to

have promised verbally that he would agree to whatever an assembly lawful-

ly constituted should determine, and in his mind an assembly without bishops

could not be so described, nor could a parliament. Yet he left the Scottish

commissioners believing that in promising a free assembly he was conceding

one that was free to determine both its own composition and the future (or

non-future) of Scottish bishops. It seems unlikely that he was quite unaware

of arousing expectations that he had no intention of fulﬁlling.

The commissioners had a poor reception when they returned to Edinburgh,

and the Tables circulated a letter which openly expressed their disappoint-

ment that so little had been gained. They particularly regretted that the king

had not been brought to accept the Glasgow Assembly’s acts. They also felt

that Edinburgh Castle had been surrendered too easily, especially as Hamil-

ton was already provisioning and fortifying it. Their fears were conﬁrmed on

122 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Fall of the British Monarchies, pp. 64–7.

ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 122

1 July when the Scottish council issued a proclamation on the king’s orders,

summoning to Edinburgh all archbishops, bishops, commissioners, and

others who had a right to sit in General Assemblies. They published a paper

denying that the bishop had any such right, while the people of Edinburgh

vented their indignation by stoning Traquair’s coach and roughly handling

him and other prominent royalists.

Charles originally intended to attend the assembly and the parliament in

person, and it was ostensibly to discuss his journey that he summoned four-

teen leading Covenanters to Berwick. Many suspected, however, that he

meant to make them prisoners, and they may have been right. Why so many,

they asked each other? Only six came, but one of them was Montrose. He had

just secured the key objective of Aberdeen for the Covenanters. The city had

changed hands three times in a matter of weeks, but on 19 June he routed its

latest royalist occupiers at the Brig o’Dee and made sure of it. But he was hav-

ing doubts now about the Covenanters’ objectives, and he and Charles made

a strong impression on each other. This was probably when he pledged his

future service to the king. After a week’s talks, Charles sent the six back to

Edinburgh with instructions to return with the other eight. But only two

came, the uncompromising Loudoun and the more paciﬁc Lindsay. Charles

gave up any idea of going to Edinburgh and sent Traquair as his commission-

er. Hamilton was unwilling to act, feeling that Charles had not taken him

completely into his conﬁdence, and knowing that he had lost that of the

Covenanters almost entirely. He knew he could not handle the assembly

without making concessions that were odious to the king, and he told him

so frankly. Charles did not trust Traquair, but that did not greatly matter, for

he had decided by now that he would have to go to war again, and if he even-

tually had to renounce the proceedings of the assembly and the parliament, as

now seemed certain, it would be easier to repudiate promises made by his

commissioner than any that might have been wrung from him in person.

On 27 July he sent Wentworth a brief note in his own hand, calling him

home to England. ‘Come when you will’, he wrote, ‘ye shall be welcome to

your assured friend, Charles R.’

Wentworth’s policy towards Scotland was

nothing if not robust: it should be reduced to obedience by conquest, and gov-

erned as a province.

A week later Charles was back in Whitehall, having left Traquair detailed

instructions for his conduct in the general assembly. They show that he was

now prepared if necessary to concede the abolition of bishops, though with

reservations that neither the assembly nor parliament were likely to accept,

and with an obvious intent to leave the way open for restoring them when cir-

cumstances improved. He instructed the bishops not to attend, but assured

The Bishops’ Wars 123

Quoted in Wedgwood, Thomas Wentworth, p. 259.

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Archbishop Spottiswoode that he meant to remedy in time what he was

forced at present to yield. The assembly duly met in St Giles’s on 12 August,

and after a few days passed a single act which conﬁrmed the condemnation of

episcopacy as unlawful ‘in this Kirk’, the abrogation of the Prayer Book,

canons, High Commission and Articles of Perth, the exclusion of kirkmen

from civil ofﬁces, and the Kirk’s right to annual assemblies—everything in

fact that the Glasgow Assembly had enacted, though Traquair did succeed, as

instructed, in excluding any speciﬁc reference to that body. But by assenting

on the king’s behalf to the act as it stood he went beyond his brief, and he did

so again when he and the council, at the assembly’s request, passed an act

requiring all subjects to subscribe the National Covenant and the Glasgow

Declaration. It was no use his trying to qualify these derelictions by entering

glosses in the council’s register; the king was understandably furious

with him.

The assembly was dissolved on 30 August, and parliament met the next

day. Whether the king or his commissioner had any control over its proceed-

ings depended on how the Lords of the Articles were chosen, for there had been

no challenge yet to their dominant initiative. In the last two parliaments the

bishops had played the crucial role in their selection,* but no bishops sat in this

one. Nor could the crown rely on its other mainstay, the senior ofﬁcers of

state, who had hitherto sat ex ofﬁcio with the articles and in parliament. Such

was the Covenanters’ control over elections that only three ofﬁcers of state

were returned, though one more sat as a noble in his own right. Faced with

this difﬁcult situation, Traquair handled it with some skill. He persuaded the

nobles to retire with him from the full session to discuss the selection of the

lords of the articles, and then argued that in the bishops’ absence the eight

noblemen should be chosen by the king. Four or ﬁve hours of intense debate

ensued, in which some including Montrose supported Traquair, while Argyll

and others argued that each estate should elect its own articles, which would

have destroyed the crown’s chief control over legislation at a stroke. As a

compromise, the assembled nobles chose their own eight representatives, but

allowed Traquair formally to appoint them on the king’s behalf. Those

eight then selected the eight shire commissioners and eight burgesses, to the

vociferous indignation of both estates when parliament reassembled in full

session.

All might not have been lost yet for Charles, for the eight elected nobles

included not only Argyll and Rothes, his chief opponents, but Huntly, Mon-

trose, and Southesk, his present or future supporters. But the lairds and

burgesses whom they chose to sit with them were all Covenanters, and thanks

largely to them the Lords of the Articles voted by a majority of two for an act

124 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

* See above, pp. 27, 90.

ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 124

whereby in future each of the three estates, now redeﬁned as nobles, shire

commissioners, and burgesses, should elect its own representatives on this

crucial committee. Traquair declined to commit the royal assent to this meas-

ure, but parliament’s casting off of its fetters was merely deferred. These

Lords of the Articles sat for an unprecedented seven weeks, and most of the

momentous constitutional changes wrought by parliament in the following

year originated from acts that they drafted. Parliament would have enacted

them immediately if Traquair had let it, but he postponed its reassembly in

full session no fewer than eight times. Finally he received orders from the king

to prorogue it until 2 June 1640, by which time it was hoped in London that

the Covenanters would have been subdued by force. The parliament denied

the king’s power to prorogue it without its own consent, in a protestation

drafted by Wariston which broke new constitutional ground. It did not, how-

ever, sit on deﬁantly, as many expected, but appointed representatives of each

estate to await the king’s reply. The resultant committee was in effect a con-

tinuance of the Tables under another name, and was empowered to do what-

ever was necessary until the full parliament resumed. On 19 November, a few

days after it took over, the king’s birthday was saluted by a ﬁring of the can-

non in Edinburgh Castle, where 130 workmen had been toiling since July to

make it defensible. The shock of the gunﬁre brought down part of the walls,

an omen that cannot have been lost on the citizens of the capital.

Earlier in the autumn, Charles had been humiliated by an episode in the

Channel which had a most damaging impact on English public opinion,

inﬂamed as it already was by the aid that he was giving to the Spaniards

against the Dutch, in the vain hope that it would persuade Spain to restore the

Palatinate to Frederick. Five more shiploads of Spanish troops had recently

disembarked at Plymouth, to march through southern England and take the

shortest sea passage to the theatre of war in the Netherlands. Early in Sep-

tember a ﬂeet of over seventy ships, both Spanish men-o’-war and hired Eng-

lish transports, sailed up the Channel with 10,000 soldiers on board. A much

smaller Dutch ﬂeet under Admiral Tromp attacked it in the Straits of Dover,

and after a sharp ﬁght the Spaniards took refuge in the Downs. There Tromp

blockaded them for over a month, while the Ship Money ﬂeet under Sir John

Pennington watched from a distance. Charles sold powder to the Spaniards at

an exorbitant rate and haggled with the Spanish ambassador over the price of

his continued protection, but he also made contingency arrangements for bil-

leting the troops on English soil if their ships should be driven ashore. There-

by he fanned an already widespread rumour that the Spanish soldiers’ real

mission was to ﬁght for him against his own rebellious subjects. On 11 Octo-

ber Tromp, now heavily reinforced, attacked the Spanish vessels with gunﬁre

and ﬁreships, within sight of joyous crowds of English spectators. Over twenty

ships were driven ashore, others were burnt or captured, and only a dozen

The Bishops’ Wars 125

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or so got away. Pennington had orders to prevent any ﬁghting, but his men

might have mutinied if he had tried to protect the Spaniards, and he had the

excuse of a fog and a contrary wind; only the catholic faction at court blamed

him for keeping out of it. Tromp, before sailing off in triumph, ﬁred a salute

of nineteen guns in acknowledgement of English sovereignty over these terri-

torial waters, but that did nothing to assuage the king’s indignation or save

his loss of face.

This unhappy affair heightened the suspicion that there was a popish plot

afoot in England. This had been intensifying over the past two years or so,

and was to colour the whole political debate when parliament eventually

met.

Its factual basis was slender, but it was linked to the current fashion of

alluding to the political rivalries at court and in the council in terms of a

French faction ranged against a Spanish one. This too was over-simple, for

the so-called French party were not so much pro-French as anti-Spanish.

Since Richelieu represented the strongest force ranged against the Habsburgs

of both Spain and Austria in the Thirty Years War, they looked to France as

potentially England’s best ally. They included most of the ﬁrmest protestants

on the political scene, including the Earls of Bedford, Warwick, and Northum-

berland, Viscount Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and Secretary Sir John Coke,

and they were in eclipse from 1637 onward. The so-called Spanish party were

a mixed group, and those with the most political weight among them

favoured a neutrality biased towards Spain rather than active commitment to

the Spanish side. They included Laud, Wentworth, Cottington, Windebank,

and Arundel. There was nothing ‘popish’ about Wentworth, but Laud’s atti-

tude to Rome was widely misunderstood, Cottington and Windebank were

accounted crypto-papists, and most of Arundel’s family, including his wife,

were avowed catholics. More positively pro-Spanish, to the point of urging a

full alliance, were a group of catholic courtiers, including Manchester’s son

Wat Montagu, Sir Toby Matthew, Endymion Porter (who refrained from

professing his faith only so as to retain his court ofﬁce), and George Gage.

They were mostly close to the queen, whose sympathies were with the anti-

Richelieu, pro-Spanish dévots in France. The virtuoso Sir Kenelm Digby was

another catholic who enjoyed great favour at court.

It was not only the number of the court catholics but their open evasion of

the laws that fed the fears of a popish plot. The queen and her entourage were

privileged, of course. Her splendid new chapel at Somerset House, designed

by Inigo Jones and over a hundred feet long, was opened late in 1636. It was

thronged on Sundays and holy days, when one mass swiftly followed another,

and between masses more than a hundred candles surrounded the reserved

126 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

This and the next four paragraphs are heavily indebted to Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I

and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, NC, 1983).

ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 126

sacrament on the high altar. Henrietta Maria’s rash proselytizing, which her

uxorious husband was too slow to check, received fresh encouragement after

the pope’s envoy to her, the Scotsman George Con, took up residence in

1636. Charles took to him, saw him almost daily, and freely discussed foreign

affairs with him; there were intimate dinners between the royal couple, Con,

and the queen’s confessor Father Robert Philip. Con’s aim was to convert the

king, and though we know that he stood no chance it was not so obvious to

contemporaries, especially since the papacy stood ready to ease Charles’s

ﬁnancial straits if he went over. Con also attempted to convert Charles Louis,

the Elector Palatine, and his younger brother Prince Rupert. Through his

intercessions many an English and Irish catholic won relief from the penal

laws, which around the court and the capital became almost a dead letter. On

feast days up to nine masses were said in his chapel, largely for the beneﬁt of

English catholics, who also worshipped freely in the chapels of the ambas-

sadors of the catholic powers, as well as in the queen’s. Laud hated all this,

and in December 1637 he persuaded the king to issue a proclamation against

catholic proselytizing and the participation of English subjects in privileged

catholic worship, but the queen got it toned down, and its effect was only

temporary. Catholicism remained chic in court circles in the late 1630s, and

what was becoming a stream of fashionable conversions continued.

Con did his best to weld the court catholics into something like a party.

There were currently nearly forty Jesuits on mission in London; Charles had

hitherto disliked their ultramontanism and wanted them withdrawn, but

Con’s warm relations with them brought them more into the court circle. In

the spring of 1638 he secured the appointment of their close associate Sir John

Winter, a nephew of the catholic Earl of Worcester, as the queen’s secretary.

He was on the friendliest terms with Arundel and his catholic countess,

indeed Arundel sometimes drove to meetings with the king in Con’s coach,

emblazoned with the papal arms. Con’s aim was not only to gain converts

and protect his English, Irish, and Scottish co-religionaries, but to strengthen

the Spanish interest in English government circles and weaken that of France.

The court catholics were never as weighty or as homogeneous a group as he

would have wished, but their political inﬂuence has until recently been under-

rated, just as that of Laud and Wentworth has been exaggerated, at least until

Wentworth returned from Ireland. It strongly encouraged Charles to enter-

tain a whole series of proposals, between the middle of 1638 and the outbreak

of the Civil War, for bringing in seasoned troops from the Spanish Nether-

lands to ﬁght for him, in return for English naval support in the Channel and

recruiting rights in Ireland. In January 1639, for instance, Father George

Gage, the queen’s cupbearer and dean of the secular catholic priests in

England, carried a commission to his brother Henry, who commanded a regi-

ment in the service of Spain, to negotiate with the governor of the Spanish

The Bishops’ Wars 127

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