Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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large meetings of the county gentry, and they represent a genuine attempt to

express a consensus of local opinion. Most bore large numbers of signatures,

ranging between 3,000 and 30,000, with even little Rutland mustering 560,

so they spoke for a fair number of the middling sort as well as for the gentry.

The petitions testify that parliament’s supporters in the provinces were see-

ing current issues and conﬂicts in much the same terms as the parliamentary

leadership, for the view of these that they expressed was broadly that of the

Grand Remonstrance. The gap that had opened during the previous summer,

when it was widely felt in the shires that Pym’s faction was driving too hard

and pressing the king too far, had closed. The petitioners were full of praise

and thanks for what parliament had achieved so far, but they believed that

further reform was needed and that a malignant party was obstructing it.

They shared Pym’s conviction that papists were at the heart of that party, and

that Arminians were no better than fellow-travellers. These petitions were

generally more moderate as regards religion than those in the root and branch

campaign of a year or so earlier, for they represented a broader range of opin-

ion; only one called for the total abolition of episcopacy, but twenty-two

demanded the removal of scandalous ministers. The one major difference

between the temper of the provinces and that of the central actors was that

whereas King Charles and King Pym were well aware that they were on a col-

lision course, the petitioners still spoke the language of accommodation.

They clung to their faith in the ancient constitution, and to their hope that

present differences could be reconciled and desirable reforms achieved with-

out any essential violation of it. Many counties called for the improvement of

defences and the better arming and training of the militia, and many supported

the Militia Bill (or Ordinance, in the later ones), but they were not con-

templating, let alone desiring, an imminent civil war. Their temper was defen-

sive. They were moved by lingering alarms about the army plots, and by more

present ones arising from the newsbooks’ stories of atrocities in Ireland, the

tales told by protestant refugees, and the persistent fear of a general uprising

by English catholics. Scares were endemic during the early months of 1642,

and Lancashire and Cheshire in particular were acutely apprehensive of an

invasion from across the Irish Sea.

It is easier now than it was then to see that such fears were foolish. The Irish

rebellion did reach its greatest territorial extent during January and February.

Its partisans secured Waterford, Tipperary, and Kilkenny during January; the

Earl of Thomond tried in vain to prevent county Clare from joining them, and

when Viscount Muskerry declared for them late in February most of county

Cork was lost. But Lord Clanricard managed to keep most of Galway from

open revolt, and at the end of January Ormond launched the ﬁrst major

218 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Fletcher, Outbreak, ch. 6.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 218

counter-offensive. The initiative was beginning to pass to the Dublin govern-

ment. On 20 February a proclamation by the king, declaring all those in arms

against it to be rebels and traitors, at last arrived in Dublin (it was dated

1 January). Henceforth the insurgents could no longer plausibly claim to be

his loyal subjects, and by this time further reinforcements had arrived from

England under George Monck and Sir Richard Grenville.

When the Lords ﬁnally passed the Militia Ordinance, the king had set off

on a slow journey to York, where he was hoping that his presence would ani-

mate what he supposed to be the greater loyalty of the northern gentry. A dele-

gation from both Houses met him at Newmarket on 9 March and presented

a declaration, setting forth in offensive detail the grounds for fear and distrust

that his prolonged absence from his parliament gave rise to, and requesting

him (not for the ﬁrst time) to return to his capital. Charles received it with

unconcealed anger. Next day the Earl of Pembroke, whom Charles had dis-

missed from the ofﬁce of Lord Chamberlain in the previous July for persist-

ently siding with his opponents, asked him whether he might not concede

that the Militia Ordinance should be operative for a limited time. Charles

‘swore by God, not for an hour; you have asked that of me in this, [that] was

never asked of any king, and with which I will not trust my wife and chil-

dren.’

In his formal reply on the 15th he declared that his subjects could not

be obliged to obey any act or order which lacked his consent, and he forbade

them to put the Militia Ordinance into execution. That same day, independ-

ently, the two Houses voted that the country was in imminent danger and that

the ordinance ‘ought to be obeyed by the fundamental laws of this kingdom’.

On receiving the king’s reply, they declared that those who advised him to it

were ‘enemies to the peace of this kingdom, and justly suspected to be

favourers of the rebellion in Ireland’. There were times when their political

judgement was as dubious as their constitutional position.

Charles reached York on the 19th, but he received no such welcome as he

expected, from either the city or the Yorkshire gentry, and he was deeply dis-

appointed. At the end of March he had only thirty-nine gentlemen and seven-

teen personal guards attending on him. He thought of travelling on to

Scotland, but Henrietta Maria, with whom he corresponded constantly in

cipher, discouraged him. She did, however, urge him to seize Hull by force.

He caused consternation at Westminster when he announced on 8 April that

he intended to go to Ireland in person with a force armed from the Hull ar-

senal, for parliament’s natural fear was that once he was at the head of an

army he would ﬁnd another use for it. The two Houses begged him not to risk

his life in such an expedition, and refused their consent to his departure. He

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 219

Rushworth, Historical Collections, III, pt. i, 533. Parliament’s declaration, presented on

9 March, is on pp. 528–32; the king’s reply, parliament’s vote thereon, and the vote of 15 March

on the Militia Ordinance are on pp. 533–5.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 219

was doubtless angry that they supposed he needed it. The Commons were

anxious about the precious magazine in Hull and had recently ordered that its

whole contents should be shipped to the Tower, but the Lords had amended

the order to a request to the king to authorize the transfer, which he indig-

nantly refused. He had the support of about a score of Yorkshire gentry who

petitioned him on 22 April not to let the arms leave the county but to seize

them himself.

Next day he set out for Hull with about three hundred horsemen, after

sending a letter ahead to Sir John Hotham, announcing his intention to

inspect the magazine. He did not believe that Hotham would defy him face-

to-face. Hotham’s position was uncomfortable, for the Lord Mayor and most

citizens would gladly have admitted the king, but he had strict orders from

parliament, so he ordered the gates to be shut and the drawbridges raised. His

small garrison was loyal to him, and from the city wall he refused his

monarch’s personal demand to be admitted. Charles had him proclaimed a

traitor on the spot, and rode off furious and humiliated. It was the ﬁrst direct

military confrontation between an Englishman and his sovereign for more

than a century and a half, and the prolonged pamphlet controversy that

ensued testiﬁes to the profound impression that it made.

The Hull affair was only one of the topics that fuelled the paper war that

was waged all spring and summer. There was a constant exchange of declar-

ations between the king and parliament, and all of them were promptly print-

ed, for they were addressed at least as much to the public at large as to the

formal recipients. Each side was trying to put the better case to the political

nation, primarily to win its support, but partly (one senses) to stoke up the

ﬁres of their own self-righteousness to a heat that would nerve them for a war

for which few were temperamentally ready in the spring. From May onward

most of the king’s declarations were drafted by Hyde, who was not only a

master of language but understood equally the mentalities of his parliamen-

tarian opponents and those of the conservative country gentry whose alle-

giance was in the balance. One of the most interesting questions for the

historian is how Charles, who seemed so isolated in the early months of 1642,

was able to ﬁght the ﬁrst battle of the Civil War on equal terms and to keep

up a fair chance of outright victory for nearly three more years. Part of the

answer lies in the skill with which his propaganda was conducted during the

crucial months when the English people were having to choose sides. His dec-

larations took all possible credit for what he had already conceded, especial-

ly in the legislation of 1641; they expressed his total condemnation of the

Irish rebellion; they afﬁrmed his devotion to the laws of the land, which they

claimed were now being violated by parliament. They portrayed him as the

defender of order against lawless tumults and seditious petitions. And above

all they repeatedly afﬁrmed his commitment to the true protestant religion, as

220 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 220

embodied in the Church of England, which despite all attempts to smear the

court with popery and Arminianism was his strongest suit. Radical, icono-

clastic puritanism had made many enemies in the past year, and sectaries were

almost as much a bogey as papists.

The parliament had a harder task in putting its case to the conservative

majority of provincial England. It was committed to calling an Anglo-

Scottish synod of divines, whose brief was to include the revision of the prayer

book, and the Scots were pressing to have it assembled soon. To allay the jus-

tiﬁed fears that Anglicans felt about it, the two Houses published a declar-

ation on 8 April, saying that while its purpose was to reform the government

and liturgy of the church, it was intended ‘to take away nothing in the one or

the other but what shall be evil and justly offensive, or at least unnecessary

and burdensome’.

To all who loved the church as it was, or as it had been

under James I, this was a hollow reassurance, and it proved to be a false one.

On the constitutional side, parliament’s very real need to deny control over

the country’s military resources to the king forced it into an equally uncom-

fortable position. When it publicly declared on 5 May that the Militia Ordin-

ance was to be put into immediate execution, he responded, ﬁrst in a printed

answer and then in a formal proclamation on the 27th, by again charging his

subjects on their allegiance not to obey it. The two Houses replied by declar-

ing that parliament was constitutionally empowered to provide for the king-

dom’s peace and safety,

and what they do herein hath the stamp of the royal authority, although His Majesty,

seduced by evil counsel, do in his own person oppose or interrupt the same; for the

king’s supreme and royal pleasure is exercised and declared in this high court of law

and council, after a more eminent and obligatory manner than it can be by personal

act or resolution of his own.

They accordingly declared the king’s proclamation to be void, and com-

manded all constables and other ofﬁcers to execute the ordinance under par-

liament’s protection. Their claim rested on a very forced application of the

medieval doctrine of the king’s two bodies, which distinguished his natural

person from his embodiment of a public authority established by law. Every-

one accepted that whenever a judgment was delivered in one of the king’s

courts it was the king’s judgment, whether he personally agreed with it or not,

and that no other court stood as high as the High Court of Parliament. But it

was one thing to say that he could not interfere with the due process of law

and quite another to deny him the monarch’s ancient power to make binding

decisions in matters of state. Since Charles was not a minor like Edward VI,

the implication was that he was non compos mentis like Henry VI, and this

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 221

Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 247–8.

Ibid., pp. 256–7.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 221

made a great many people uneasy. The parliamentarians were in fact making

up a theory of constitutional monarchy as they went along, and by and large

posterity has thanked them for it, but they can have convinced few but the

converted when they claimed to have the fundamental laws on their side. As

the law and custom of the constitution then stood, the king had the better

case, but the idealized King Charles presented by Hyde and his other apolo-

gists was a different creature from the inconsistent opportunist with whom

the parliamentarians actually had to deal.

At almost the same time as the contentious declaration just quoted, the two

Houses issued a more comprehensive statement of their objectives. The Nine-

teen Propositions of 1 June were a response to another request from the king’s

camp for a full set of proposals, as a basis for a negotiated settlement, but they

are signiﬁcant not as a recipe for an accommodation, which they plainly were

not, but as the fullest public statement of the aims for which the parliament

ﬁrst went to war. They went further than ever before in seeking to subject the

executive and the judiciary to parliament. Not only were all privy councillors

to be approved by both Houses, but all political decisions which were prop-

erly the council’s business were to require the consent of the majority of coun-

cillors, attested by their signatures. The size of the council was prescribed: not

more than twenty-ﬁve members or less than ﬁfteen. The seventeen highest

ofﬁcers in the government, the judiciary, and the royal household were not

only to be chosen with the approval of both Houses but were to ‘hold their

places quam diu bene se gesserint ’ (so long as they conducted themselves sat-

isfactorily). They were no longer to be removable at the king’s pleasure. His

children were to be educated by governors and tutors approved by parlia-

ment, and to marry only with its consent. Among other anti-papist proposals,

there was to be an act requiring the children of all catholics to be brought up

by protestants in the protestant religion. The king was required to consent to

whatever reforms parliament should advise in the government and liturgy of

the church, after consulting with the forthcoming assembly of divines.

Catholic peers were to lose their votes in the Lords, and henceforth newly

made peers were not to be admitted to sit without the consent of both

Houses. Invading yet another sphere of the prerogative, the king was

requested to enter into a closer alliance with the United Provinces and other

protestant powers.

The severity of these terms suggest that their authors believed that Charles

was incapable of making war and would have to capitulate. That was rapid-

ly becoming less likely, for between mid-May and mid-June a stream of valu-

able supporters left Westminster and joined him in York. They included a

bevy of moderate peers and Lord Keeper Littleton, but the most important of

222 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 249–5.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 222

them were the leaders of the constitutional royalists in the Commons, Hyde,

Falkland, and Culpepper. Hyde had hitherto sent Charles the drafts of his

answers to the parliamentary declarations from Westminster, but now he

could advise him personally. It was Falkland and Culpepper, however, who

were entrusted with framing his answer to the Nineteen Propositions, in a

document that came to assume as much signiﬁcance as the Propositions them-

selves. The King’s Answer was an eloquent vindication of the traditional con-

stitution as most parliament-men had understood it before the current crisis.

It upheld the authority of parliament as the king’s ‘Great and Supreme

Council’, but maintained that he was very much a part of it. Hyde subse-

quently objected to it because it presented the king alongside the Lords and

Commons as one of the three estates of the realm, whereas he himself identi-

ﬁed the estates as the Lords Spiritual, Lords Temporal and Commons, with

the king as head and sovereign over them all. But the Answer’s purpose,

which was very apposite to the circumstances of the summer of 1642, was to

reafﬁrm the time-honoured functions of the crown and the two Houses in a

constitution which held the classical elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and

democracy in an ideal balance. ‘The power, legally placed in both Houses,’ it

argued, ‘is more than sufﬁcient to prevent and restrain the power of tyranny’

which the monarch might threaten without such a balance, but the House of

Commons was ‘never intended for any share in government, or the choosing

of them that govern’. Only ill comes from ‘the encroaching of one of these

estates upon the power of the other’. If the monarchy fell, the church would

follow and in all probability the Lords too, and in the end

the common people [would] set up for themselves, call parity and independence lib-

erty, devour that estate which had devoured the rest, destroy all rights and proprieties

[properties], all distinctions of families and merit, and by this means this splendid and

excellently distinguished form of government [would] end in a dark, equal chaos of

confusion, and the long line of our many noble ancestors in a Jack Cade or a Wat

Tyler.

Such arguments were probably almost as effective in rallying conservative

country gentlemen to the king as were their fears for the Church of England.

The most effective counter to them came not from parliament itself but from

the pamphleteer Henry Parker, whose Observations upon some of His

Majesty’s Late Answers and Expresses appeared at the beginning of July. It

was the most inﬂuential and widely discussed statement of radical parlia-

mentarian theory in all the proliferating pamphlet war of 1642. Parker was a

barrister and the younger son of a Sussex knight, and he had already made his

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 223

Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, p. 20. For the full text, which is considerably more interest-

ing than Kenyon’s brief excerpts convey, see J. Malcolm (ed.), The Struggle for Sovereignty:

Seventeenth-Century Political Tracts (2 vols, 1999), I, 145–78.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 223

name with a tract on the illegality of Ship Money. Addressing the problem

that subjects faced when parliament was commanding one thing and the king

commanding the contrary, he grasped that the issue had come to be one of

sovereignty, which was a concept alien to the common-law mind. Where did

ultimate authority in the state lie? On his very ﬁrst page he confronted the

king’s claim to derive his from God and the law. God, he retorted, was no

more the author of royal than of aristocratic power, but gave his sanction to

all power, whether supreme or subordinate, that was rightly bestowed.

‘Power is originally inherent in the people’, Parker resoundingly asserted, and

the law that governed its exercise was whatever particular human societies

had agreed among themselves: ‘When by such or such a law of common con-

sent and agreement it is derived into such and such hands, God conﬁrms that

law: and so man is the free and voluntary author, the law is the instrument,

and God is the establisher of both.’

The people, when consenting to the

bestowal of power, may ﬁx what bounds and ordain what conditions they

please, so the power vested in the English crown is not absolute but ﬁduciary,

a trust conveyed by the people for the people’s good. In normal circum-

stances, Parker acknowledged, the power to make laws or ordinances in Eng-

land lay with the king and parliament jointly, but in the present situation,

when the king had deserted parliament (by withdrawing his presence and

rejecting its repeated pleas to return), it lay with parliament to take order for

the safety of the people. If king and parliament issued contrary commands,

parliament must be obeyed, because it represented ‘the whole community in

its underived majesty’.

Monarchy, if unrestricted, tended of its nature

towards tyranny, but the Lords and Commons so perfectly represented the

whole nation that they could not conceivably ordain anything that was not

advantageous to it. Considering the arbitrariness of the franchise and the

large number of rotten boroughs, this to modern eyes is the weakest part of

Parker’s argument, for experience tells us that no amount of parliamentary

reform will guarantee that elected legislators unfailingly serve the public

interest or refrain from promoting their own. He maintained that parliament,

in its composition, was ‘so equally, and geometrically proportionable’ that

the interests of none of the estates of the realm could be overswayed. He was

a democrat only to a limited degree; he happily accepted that the two Houses

consisted essentially of the nobility and gentry, who, he said (borrowing the

very words of the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions) ‘serve for an excel-

lent screen or bank . . . to assist both king and people against the encroach-

ments of each other’.

For Parker, tyranny and ‘ochlocracy’ (government by

224 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

H. Parker, Observations upon some of His Majesty’s Late Answers and Expresses (1642;

reprinted in facsimile in W. Haller (ed.), Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution (New York,

1933), II), p. 1.

Ibid., p. 15.

Ibid., p. 23.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 224

the populace) were two extremes to be avoided. His object in 1642 was to

convince men of substance that their interest lay in supporting parliament,

and when, ﬁve years later, the Levellers came forward with far more radical

ideas than his, he was to deplore them.

Although the greatest controversy was over the control of the land forces

(Parker’s tract being one of many to which the militia question gave rise), king

and parliament clashed just as directly over that of the navy. The Earl of

Northumberland was Lord Admiral, but he was too ill in March to take com-

mand of the ﬂeet in person. Parliament requested him to name the Earl of

Warwick as Vice-Admiral and to delegate the active command to him, but the

king had already appointed Sir John Pennington to the post. Charles refused

to back down, warned parliament to keep out of the matter, and forbade

Warwick’s appointment. Parliament nevertheless directed Northumberland

to instate him. Later, as Northumberland’s parliamentarian leanings became

plain, Charles dismissed him and made Pennington Lord Admiral, yet War-

wick (on parliament’s directions) was in the Downs before him, and it was

Warwick whom the ﬂeet wanted. All but ﬁve captains accepted him as Ad-

miral on 2 July, and those ﬁve were overborne by their own crews. Thereby

the navy was lost to the king for the whole of the ﬁrst Civil War, though a con-

siderable part of it was to rally to him in the second.

The navy, being a close-knit, professional organization, was in a position

to make its own choice of allegiance; the county militias, being neither close-

knit nor professional, were not. A contest for the control of the trained bands

was waged desultorily through the summer and autumn. Following parlia-

ment’s order to put the Militia Ordinance into execution, they were mustered

in fourteen counties by mid-July, and in nine more between August and Octo-

ber. They were to be of limited use when it came to civil war, partly because

their arms and training were so often defective, still more because they were

so reluctant to march beyond their own county boundaries; but Charles could

not afford to relinquish them to his opponents, and he wanted their weapons,

such as they were. Since parliament had pre-empted the normal channels of

command, through the lord and deputy lieutenants, he resorted to a pro-

cedure which dated from long before the lieutenancy. He began on 11 June to

issue Commissions of Array, which directed named local magnates to raise

and train men for his service. Their use went back to Edward I’s time, and had

been regulated by a statute of 1405 which had lapsed long ago. They were

archaic in form, and in Latin. It was nearly a century since they had last been

seriously employed, and when Charles had tried tentatively to revive them

during the Bishops’ Wars their legality had been strongly challenged. It was

disputed again now; nevertheless his commissioners of array succeeded in

holding musters in eleven counties between July and October, and they

attempted to do so in a dozen more. In a number of shires they came into

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 225

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 225

sharp conﬂict with the deputy lieutenants or others who were trying to exe-

cute the Militia Ordinance. Musters were held by both sides in Lancashire,

Cheshire, Warwickshire, and Leicestershire, all deeply divided counties.

Success in mustering the trained bands, however, gives us only a very

limited clue to the strength of local feeling for or against king or parliament.

In some cases the motive for assembling them was to defend the county

against the military preparations that were afoot in neighbouring territory,

rather than to contribute to a warlike situation. There were quite large areas

where neither side held musters, but this did not necessarily betoken apathy.

It could mean that the local gentry were mostly like-minded, and conﬁdent

enough of their ascendancy to put off any military preparations until they

were forced to face the fact of a war that they had hoped to avert, and would

anyhow rather see fought elsewhere. That must help to explain why there

were no musters in the four northern counties or in the whole of Wales,

regions where gentry royalism was particularly strong, and why in the

parliamentarian heartland of East Anglia the Militia Ordinance was execut-

ed only in Essex before the Civil War began, and not at any time in

Cromwell’s native Huntingdonshire.

Yet there were areas where the musters did give a clearer indication of genu-

inely popular support, and that is where volunteers for the parliament came

in spontaneously. In Warwickshire and Northamptonshire they outnumbered

the enrolled trained bands substantially, and at least thirty-four towns, not

counting London, raised volunteers for parliament between June and Sep-

tember. By contrast the only town known to have displayed popular royalism

at this stage was Hereford, where the common people shouted down a minis-

ter who tried to preach a ‘Roundhead’ sermon in the cathedral.

The king

indeed found great difﬁculty in raising foot soldiers. On 20 May he formed a

small personal guard of 200 gentlemen volunteers, all from Yorkshire and

many of them catholics, but though he caused his drums to be repeatedly

beaten in the county during the next three months very few volunteers

came in. He did little better when he made recruiting forays into Lincolnshire,

Leicestershire, and Nottinghamshire. Here and there, groups of loyal gentle-

men were willing to raise troops and even regiments of horse, using their

inﬂuence among their substantial tenants and their yeomen neighbours, but

at the lower social level from which infantrymen were drawn the response

was miserable. He tried to broaden his territorial base by making William

Seymour, Marquis of Hertford, lieutenant-general of all the western parts

from Oxford to Land’s End, including much of Wales. But when Hertford

came to Somerset at the end of July with a small armed force, hoping to raise

it into an army by means of the king’s Commissions of Array, he met with

226 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Ronald Hutton, The Royalist War Effort 1642–1646 (1982), p. 4.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 226

massive popular resistance. A crowd of 12,000 or more countrymen turned

out to oppose him, and after a week in Wells he beat a humiliating retreat to

Sherborne, having raised only about 900 men. The king himself, when he set

out from York for Nottingham in August to raise his standard, commanded

only about 800 horse and even fewer foot.

If public reaction in the provinces to the increasingly warlike confrontation

between king and parliament seems muted, this should not necessarily be

attributed to ignorance or indifference. There were many ways whereby all

levels of the population were made aware that a great quarrel was afoot, and

likely to culminate in war: public readings of royal and parliamentary dec-

larations by magistrates and parsons, many sermons, musters of the trained

bands, a spate of pamphlets, and any amount of talk in taverns and ale-

houses. There was a very widespread reluctance to accept the war as

inevitable, and something will be said in the next chapter about the many

attempts to keep it at bay by local accommodations and pacts of neutrality.

These were not evidence of apathy—rather the opposite. But if there was once

a tendency (which I shared) to underestimate the degree to which people

below the ruling class were aware of and involved in the issues of the day, it is

possible to go too far in the other direction. It has been argued, for instance,

that the increasing pressure and self-assertion of the middling sort, right

down to artisans and apprentices, transformed the political confrontation of

1640–1 into a social revolution by 1642, and that in consequence of this,

royalism came into being as essentially the party of order. This is to overstate

the political initiative and consistency of purpose among the protesting class-

es, and to take evidence from the London area too far as typical; it also over-

simpliﬁes the motives of most royalists, though it points to a very signiﬁcant

factor in the process whereby the king, who had seemed so isolated after his

attack on the Five Members, was able to ﬁght on at least equal terms in the

ﬁrst battle of the Civil War.

One cannot ﬁx a precise point in time at which the war became inevitable.

The issues, as we have seen, were deﬁned long before the ﬁghting started, but

only a minority of those who took up arms were striving for the same object-

ives as the protagonists. Few royalists fought, as the king, did, to restore his

personal powers to what they had been before the Scottish rebellion; the aims

of most were to defend the ancient constitution (as reinforced by the acts of

1641) and the Church of England, both of which they rightly saw as threat-

ened by parliament in 1642, and to safeguard the age-old social hierarchy

from the threat of subversion. On the other side, only a minority of parlia-

mentarians outside the capital really desired the more drastic political

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 227

David Underdown, Somerset in the Civil War and Interregnum (Newton Abbot, 1973),

pp. 32–8; Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 363–4; J. L. Malcolm, Caesar’s Due: Loyalty and King

Charles 1642–1646 (1983), p. 41.

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