Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
refused one, but it advanced the sum on the peers’ security, now that a
parliament was promised.
Charles tried to insist that the treaty with the Scots should concede nothing
more than the Pacification of Berwick, but Bristol found a formula that
would save the king’s face and yet give himself and his fellow commissioners
a chance of success. The latter met their Scottish counterparts at Ripon, and
came to terms with them in mid-October. The Scottish army was to remain in
occupation of the six northern English counties, and England was to pay
£850 a day for its maintenance. The terms of the long-term settlement were
to await the meeting of the English parliament. The Great Council broke up
on 28 October 1640, having secured little more than a truce. The course of
both England’s and Scotland’s political future was to depend on the parlia-
ment about to meet, and the expectations that the king and most of his
subjects had of it were tragically at odds.
148 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640
ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 148
part i: further reading
There is a wealth of good books which place the period covered by this book in a
longer setting, but Derek Hirst, England in Conflict 1603–1660 (1999) is outstand-
ing, not least for its bibliographical essay. Also recommendable are Roger Lockyer,
The Early Stuarts: A Political History of England 1603–1642 (1989), Barry Coward,
The Stuart Age (2nd ed. 1994), and on a slighter scale Mark Kishlansky, Monarchy
Transformed: Britain 1603–1714 (1996). The European context is probingly and
sometimes controversially discussed by Jonathan Scott in England’s Troubles (Cam-
bridge, 2000). Conrad Russell emphasizes the British dimension and the problems
posed by a multiple kingdom in The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990),
themes taken up in his major work on The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642
(Oxford, 1991). Some of the most helpful writing on the background to the troubles
in both England and Scotland is to be found in collections of essays, notably Alan
G. R. Smith (ed.), The Reign of James VI and I (1973), Howard Tomlinson (ed.),
Before the English Civil War (1983), Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds.), Conflict in
Early Stuart England, and Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War
(1973).
The key work on English government under Charles I is G. E. Aylmer, The King’s
Servants (1961), while on a much smaller scale the same author’s The Personal Rule
of Charles I (1989) and Brian Quintrell, Charles I 1625–1640 (1993) both offer good
brief introductions. L. J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge,
1989) is admirable on the early years of the reign, while Esther S. Cope, Politics with-
out Parliaments 1629–1640 (1987), though less original, has some insights. Much
fuller, and based on profound research, is Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I
(New Haven and London, 1992), and though most critics have found it over-
favourable to the king and his government the thoughtfulness and independence of its
arguments command respect. On the king’s favourite, Roger Lockyer, Buckingham
(1981) is excellent. On the later years of the personal rule, C. V. Wedgwood’s beauti-
fully written The King’s Peace 1637–1641 (1955) has won an enduring place as a
work of art, but has sometimes been underrated as a work of scholarship. On seven-
teenth-century parliaments and electoral practices, Derek Hirst, The Representative
of the People? (Cambridge, 1975) and Mark Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection:
Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), offer some-
what conflicting accounts, but Hirst’s work stands up to most of Kishlansky’s criti-
cisms. On English local government the best survey is Anthony Fletcher, Reform in the
Provinces (New Haven and London, 1986).
On English society and its institutions, see Keith Wrighton, English Society
1580–1680 (1982), and two books by David Underdown: Revel, Riot and Rebellion
(Oxford, 1985), whose emphasis is on popular culture and politics, and the broader
and briefer A Freeborn People (Oxford, 1996). Most helpful on its subject is Felicity
Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales 1500–1700 (Basingstoke,
ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 149
1994), while on the nobility Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641
(Oxford, 1967) retains its authority.
The background to our period in Scottish history is very well established by Jenny
Wormald, in Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470–1625 (1981), supple-
mented on the social side by Part I of T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People
1560–1830 (1969; paperback 1972). Charles I’s reign is well served by Maurice Lee,
Jr., The Road to Revolution: Scotland under Charles I, 1625–37 (Urbana and Chi-
cago, 1985) and David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution 1637–44: The Triumph of
the Covenanters (Newton Abbot, 1973), while Peter Donald searchingly examines the
king’s role in An Uncounselled King: Charles I and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–1641
(Cambridge, 1990). John Morrill (ed.), The Scottish National Covenant in its British
Context (Edinburgh, 1991) is an excellent collection, in which Margaret Steele and
Morrill himself argue that religious issues were primary in the Covenant and Allan I.
Macinnes gives greater weight to its political and constitutional objectives. Macinnes
argues his case more fully in his Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Move-
ment (Edinburgh, 1991). See also W. Makey, The Church of the Covenant (Edin-
burgh, 1979) and G. Donaldson, The Making of the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637
(Edinburgh, 1954). Many relevant documents are printed by W. C. Dickinson and G.
Donaldson (eds.) in A Source Book of Scottish History, Vol. III: 1567 to 1707 (1954).
Events in Ireland will figure more prominently in later parts of this book, but devel-
opments from 1600 onward to the eve of the 1641 rising are splendidly covered in five
long chapters by Aidan Clarke in volume III of A New History of Ireland, ed. T. W.
Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne (Oxford, 1976).
There is a rich literature on the religious issues underlying the troubles in England.
Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society
1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982) is outstanding on the longer background, and his pamph-
let on English Puritanism (1983) is more than a mere introduction. Of great value too
are the essays edited by Kenneth Fincham in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642
(1993), while Nicholas Tyacke’s rightly influential Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of Eng-
lish Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987) stands up in the main to the criticism
of Peter White in Predestination, Policy and Polemic (Cambridge, 1992). Julian
Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church (Oxford, 1992) powerfully reinforces
the view that the Church of England underwent a very significant change under
Charles I, and emphasizes the king’s own part in the process. Despite all that has been
written since, H. R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud (1940; 2nd ed. 1962) remains a
classic biography. Though not on the same plane, and despite its questionable title,
William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1938; paperback 1957) remains
worth reading, and J. T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry (1984) is illuminating on lay pur-
itanism. On Roman Catholicism see John Bossy, The English Catholic Community
1570–1850 (1976), and on the activities of catholics and crypto-catholics at court,
Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, NC, 1983).
On the crisis sparked off by the Scottish Prayer Book, Russell’s Fall of the British
Monarchies comes into its own with its counterpointing of developments in England
and Scotland, as do the works on the Covenant already cited. C. V. Wedgwood,
Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford 1593–1641: A Revaluation (1961)
150 Part I: Further Reading
ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 150
supersedes her earlier Strafford. Mark Charles Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars: Charles I’s
Campaigns against Scotland, 1638–1640 (Cambridge, 1994) gives the fullest and best
account of its subject, though it is much stronger on the English than on the Scottish
side. Jane H. Ohlmeyer very thoroughly covers Antrim’s activities in Civil War and
Restoration in Three Stuart Kingdoms (Cambridge, 1993).
Behind all the studies cited here lies the monumental pioneering work of Samuel
Rawson Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak
of the Civil War (10 vols., 1883–4). Its first two volumes were originally published in
1863, and it still remains immensely worth reading. At the time of writing it is
available in a recent paperback reprint.
Part I: Further Reading 151
ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 151
ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 152
part ii
War in Three Kingdoms
1640–1646
V
ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 153
ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 154
w
six
w
Climacteric I:
‘a Posture of Defence’
In the autumn of 1640 all three Stuart kingdoms were heading towards crisis.
Ireland would come to the point of confrontation a little later than Scotland
and England, but the waters of rebellion were already being stirred. All three
countries, though they did not know it, were on course for a decade or more
of intermittent war, which would bring varying degrees of subjection to Scot-
land and Ireland and a period of startling political convulsion to England.
The coming twenty years indeed are apt to seem so anarchic in their com-
plexity, so bewildering in their pace of change, that it may help to preface
them with a rough chart of the shoals ahead.
During their course there were four fairly short crucial phases, in which
political crisis was particularly intense and decisions particularly momen-
tous. They varied in length between about nine and twenty months; the first,
which occupies this chapter and the next, was the longest. The years in
between them were far from uneventful, but what happened during those
intervals can be seen as mainly the following through of the course set by the
preceding crisis-period or the building up of the tensions that generated the
next one. Educated people of the time, if they had perceived such patterns,
might have been disposed to describe these bursts of crucial change
metaphorically as climacterics, for the word was widely used to denote not
only the menopause but other supposed turning-points in the cycle of human
life. Climacterics were reckoned to occur at intervals of seven years, and the
four key phases of the 1640s and 1650s were not dissimilarly spaced.
The first ran from the meeting of the Long Parliament to the outbreak of the
first Civil War. The second was triggered by the New Model Army’s defiance
of the Long Parliament in 1647, embraced the Second Civil War, and culmin-
ated in the execution of the king and the establishment of the Common-
wealth. The third and shortest extended from Cromwell’s final quarrel with
the Rump Parliament to the establishment of his Protectorate, all within the
year 1653. The last began with the army’s violent confrontation of his son
Richard in 1659, and ended with the restoration of Charles II.
ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 155
All our climacterics have one remarkable feature in common: the men who
set them moving did not initially intend or foresee their actual outcomes. In
each case the authors of political change enjoyed a brief illusion of success,
but what they established failed to withstand the internal stresses or external
buffetings to which it was subjected. When the Long Parliament first met,
none of its members or supporters desired or seriously anticipated a pro-
longed civil war, yet that is what came to pass. The army that abducted the
king in 1647, far from seeking his deposition or death, wanted to restore him
on more favourable terms than his parliamentary captors were offering, yet
eighteen months later it was mainly instrumental in bringing him to the scaf-
fold. When Cromwell expelled the Rump it was not his aim to become head
of state and he had a sincere aversion to military dictatorship, yet he became
Lord Protector before the year was out. After his death, the last thing that
those who overthrew his son wanted was to bring back the Stuart monarchy,
yet back it came just a year later. To a striking degree, the story to be told in
this book is a story of unforeseen consequences.
What then were the hopes and expectations of the main actors on the polit-
ical stage, and of the broader political nations of England, Scotland, and Ire-
land, when the Long Parliament met on 3 November 1640? Least realistic
was the king, for he seriously hoped that the parliament would furnish him
with the means to renew the war against the Scots, unless they abandoned
their opposition to the prayer book and episcopacy. He saw them only as
rebels and invaders and he could scarcely believe that his English subjects
would not rally and drive them out. He could not or would not grasp that one
reason why his calling of a parliament was so popular was that nearly all Eng-
lishmen hoped and expected that it would seal a peace with the Scots. It
seemed the obvious outcome, since none of the twelve peers appointed to
negotiate with them favoured the war. Strafford, almost alone of Charles’s
councillors, encouraged him in carrying it on, though he was realist enough
to doubt whether the English would fight. He offered again to bring over an
army that he was raising in Ireland, if shipping could be found, but he was
surely over-sanguine if he thought it could be a match for the Covenanters.
Most of the privy council would have had the king extricate himself from the
war with as little loss of face as possible, but they accepted that he would have
to give up Ship Money and make such other concessions as were necessary to
‘the uniting of your Majesty and your subjects together, the want whereof
[they] conceive is the source of all the present troubles’.
1
Such a reconciliation between king and people could not have been easy, in
face of the accumulated grievances of the past eleven years, but there was a
156 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646
1
Quoted from Clarendon State Papers (Oxford, 1767), II, 97–8, by Conrad Russell in ‘Why
did Charles I call the Long Parliament?’, History 69 (1984), 375. My whole paragraph is much
indebted to this article.
ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 156
very wide desire for it when the parliament first met. The picture that some
textbooks used to convey of a House of Commons dominated by an organ-
ized opposition, and bent on countering the threat of absolutism with a pro-
gramme of reform inspired by an ideal of parliamentary monarchy, was wide
of the mark. This parliament was indeed more responsive than any previous
one to the desires of the electorate, and feelings throughout the broad polit-
ical nation that returned it ran high. The prevailing hope, however, was not
for drastic change, and certainly not for prolonged confrontation, but for a
return to an idealized norm: to the ancient constitution as it had functioned in
Queen Elizabeth’s golden days, and to the protestant Church of England of
pre-Arminian times.
The autumn elections of 1640 aroused even wider excitement and compe-
tition than those of the spring, and there were contests in somewhere between
a third and a half of the constituencies. In more of them than ever before, can-
didates appealed to the voters on national issues, and since the electorate as a
whole was growing in numbers quite rapidly, political involvement reached
further down the political scale. Voters were multiplying for several reasons.
In the counties, the forty-shilling freeholders who held the franchise had been
men of substance when the act of 1429 first gave them the vote, but more than
a century of inflation had brought many quite poor men within its entitle-
ment—so many indeed that sheriffs could not distinguish just who were free-
holders and who were not when a large concourse assembled on polling day.
The loudest shout generally carried it. In the boroughs, which returned over
four times as many members as the shires, the long Tudor trend towards oli-
garchy was being decisively reversed. This was partly because more and more
townsmen were literate and politically aware, and hence eager for a say in
choosing their representatives, and partly because gentlemen from outside
the constituency, on the look-out for parliamentary seats, were courting the
popular vote and encouraging the mass of inhabitants to challenge the cor-
poration’s right to select their members for them. Hence there were more and
more disputed elections, which went to the Commons’ Committee for Priv-
ileges to be determined, and in 1624, 1628, and above all in 1640–1 the com-
mittee ruled in favour of a wide franchise in borough after borough. England
was still a long way from democracy as we understand it, but by the time the
Long Parliament had finished settling disputed elections, something like a
third of all adult males in the country were entitled to vote.
In opening up the borough franchises since the 1620s, the Commons had
been deliberately trying to make it harder for courtiers and royal officials to
go carpet-bagging. There was a very widespread animus against court candi-
dates in the elections to the Long Parliament, thanks not a little to the efforts
of puritan preachers, and the number of elected members with court connec-
tions was an unprecedentedly low 15 per cent, compared with over a third in
Climacteric I: ‘a Posture of Defence’ 157
ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 157