Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660
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Charles I’s early parliaments, and if the new king had had a happier touch in
managing them, and had kept out of wars he could not afford, an overdue
reform of the fiscal system need not have had to wait for another generation.
James was deeply reluctant to be drawn into the Thirty Years War, which
broke out in 1618, but his only daughter Elizabeth was married to the Calvin-
ist Frederick, Elector Palatine, who rashly accepted the crown of Bohemia.
He soon lost it, and his own Palatinate was invaded by a Spanish army in
1620. Family honour and the protestant cause were at stake; Prince Charles
and James’s favourite the Duke of Buckingham were eager that England
should come to Frederick’s aid, and a strong current of public feeling sup-
ported them. But James realized, as they did not, that England had become
unfitted to engage in any large-scale war, except at sea. For more than a cen-
tury a military revolution had been taking place on the continent. Musketry
and artillery necessitated a sophisticated battle drill, which along with devel-
opments in siegecraft made war a far more costly and professional business
than when York had fought Lancaster. No power could engage in it on equal
terms without at least the nucleus of a fully trained and equipped standing
army, and in 1625 England was the only significant country in Europe with-
out one. Apart from the tiny garrison of the Tower of London, the defence of
the realm rested entirely with a county-based militia, consisting of select com-
panies known as the trained bands. They were of course spare-time soldiers,
and even the modest requirement that they should muster for training on one
day in each summer month was not always met. In 1604, when the long war
with Spain ended, parliament repealed the Tudor statutes which had regu-
lated the militia, so from then on it rested on no other legal foundation than
the royal prerogative. During the years of peace the trained bands tended to
be trained less and less, because the responsible gentry magistrates were often
unwilling to levy the necessary rates to buy them muskets and to pay a pro-
fessional soldier as muster-master. There were to be patchy attempts to
improve their effectiveness, but their most serious limitation lay in their
extreme reluctance to march beyond the bounds of their own counties. They
were never a match for professional soldiers, and the Scottish Covenanters
were to expose their weaknesses cruelly in 1639–40. To engage in landed
warfare overseas, the crown had to enlist or press men who were usually
quite untrained, and the result in Charles’s early years was one fiasco after
another.
The same financial stringency that denied the early Stuarts a standing army
deprived them of that other mainstay of absolute monarchy, a nationwide
salaried bureaucracy. In France and Castile, for example, the men who really
directed local government, especially in the towns, were the king’s paid ser-
vants; so were the magistrates who locally administered his justice, and the
collectors who brought in his taxes and customs duties. In England the
18 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640
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government of the counties lay in the hands of the leading gentry families, and
that of nearly all significant towns in the mercantile elite from which the
mayor and corporation were drawn. The all-important magistrates in the
counties were the justices of the peace, who in their quarter sessions not only
adjudged all but the most serious crimes but carried out a wide range of
administration. There were getting on for 2,000 of them in England and
Wales by 1625. They derived their commission from the crown; they acted
under the direction (not in normal times very close) of the privy council, and
the law that they executed was the king’s law, the common law of the land.
They were unpaid, but the commission of the peace set a coveted seal on their
standing in the county, so that their loyalty and co-operation could normally
be depended upon. They varied greatly, however, in the seriousness with
which they took their work; some did very little, but the active core who
attended sessions regularly showed an impressive sense of social duty to the
local community, and not least towards the poor.
The JPs were the most versatile and indispensable of the crown’s unpaid
local commissioners, but they were not the only ones. At the head of the
county community stood the lord lieutenant, usually a senior nobleman, some-
times a great minister, but either way often absent at court. He had special
charge of the militia, but the real responsibility for it fell on half a dozen or so
deputy lieutenants, chosen from the senior JPs of the shire. Their commission
was prestigious enough to find ready takers, but colonels of regiments and
captains of companies in the trained bands were growing harder to come by,
since their duties were both expensive and inconvenient. There was wide-
spread reluctance, too, to take on the ancient office of sheriff, though his irk-
some and costly duties lasted only a year. When parliament voted subsidies,
gentry commissioners supervised their collection, though the hardest work
fell on the village constables, who were also unpaid.
The JPs and all the other commissioners in the counties depended heavily
on the assistance of the high constables in the hundreds and the petty con-
stables, churchwardens, and overseers of the poor in the parishes. So much
reliance on unpaid local service might look like a weakness in the English
state, though it had not seemed so when Tudor government was at its best.
Arguably the crown was better served, and its subjects too, by the voluntary
service of gentry magistrates than more absolute monarchs were by their
salaried bureaucrats, for the latter’s offices had in very many cases been made
purchasable when the king was desperate for revenue, and their holders
tended to be more intent on extracting a good return on their investment than
on serving either the crown or the community. But the English system of local
administration, coupled with the strong survival of parliament, did make
Stuart government ultimately dependent on consent to a degree that was very
rare in the seventeenth century. If the kind of direction that king and council
Three Kingdoms, Three Peoples 19
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gave to their indispensable agents in the localities became seriously unaccept-
able, the waves of discontent could spread far down the social scale. But in
1625 the notion that large numbers of the ‘natural rulers’ of the counties
might withdraw their obedience, and take their orders from a parliament that
was defying the king’s commands to the point of civil war, as was to happen
in 1642, would have seemed quite incredible.
James was a less popular monarch than Elizabeth had been in her prime,
and most of his ministers were inferior to hers. He lacked both the art and the
inclination for the kind of continuous public spectacle through which she had
wooed her people, and his court, in contrast with hers, was vulgar, venal, and
extravagant. Yet the older historians, put off by his unprepossessing man-
ners, his homosexuality, and his love of pontificating about his royal powers,
overdrew the contrast between him and Elizabeth, whose regime had come
some way down from its high plateau of success and popularity in her later
years. He had been, and remained, a very shrewd and successful King of Scot-
land. In England he made his mistakes, of course, but he generally learnt from
them; his intelligence and experience usually restrained him from persisting in
unwise courses or engaging in dangerous confrontations. There was no
calamitous fall in the prestige and authority of the monarchy.
James used to be excessively blamed for courting constitutional trouble by
preaching a novel doctrine of the divine right of kings and rousing fears of
royal absolutism.
6
But there was nothing of substance in his ideas of divine
right that had not been common coin under the Tudors; all that was new was
the frequency, and sometimes the overblown rhetoric, with which he as-
serted them. None of his subjects doubted that the king held his authority from
God. Government, it was universally agreed, was ordained by God as neces-
sary for the control and welfare of fallen mankind; England’s government
was unquestionably a monarchy, therefore the king’s power was divinely
sanctioned and resistance to it was a mortal sin. Only if he commanded some-
thing contrary to the laws of God might a subject refuse to obey him, but in
that case he or she must passively submit to the consequences of disobedience.
If more was heard now of divine right than in the high Tudor period, it was
not just because James had a good conceit of himself as a political philosopher
but because doctrines of resistance had lately been so much in the air—not in
England certainly, but in his native Scotland as well as on the continent.
During the French wars of religion and the revolt of the Netherlands, both
Calvinist and catholic (especially Jesuit) theorists had argued that their co-
religionaries had a right, indeed a duty, to resist rulers who persecuted them,
since all kings derive their title from the consent of their people, and their
20 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640
6
The Oxford History of England furnishes a good example: see Godfrey Davies, The Early
Stuarts 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1937), pp. 30–2.
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authority ceases to be legitimate if they abuse the power that the people con-
fer on them. No one had advanced such resistance theories more eloquently
than James’s own former tutor, George Buchanan.
It was to counter such doctrines rather than to promote a systematic abso-
lutism that James wrote his two major treatises on divine right, both pub-
lished before he became King of England. Scotland’s constitution was
different from England’s, and in Scotland James had had to deal both with
armed resistance and with a strong clerical challenge to his royal authority. In
his writings he was much more concerned with what legitimized kingly
authority and whence it derived, namely God’s ordinance, than with its pre-
cise extent in practice. Belief in its derivation from God did not necessarily
imply that royal authority was absolute; indeed for James’s English subjects
the doctrine of divine right was quite compatible with their equally widely
held belief that kings were obliged to rule according to the laws of the land.
James did not dispute this; indeed in a famous message to parliament in 1610
he authorized Salisbury to say on his behalf that ‘though he did derive his title
from the loins of his ancestors, yet the law did set the crown upon his head,
and he is a king by the common law of the land.’ Though it was ‘dangerous to
submit the power of a king to definition’, he further acknowledged ‘that he
had no power to make laws of himself, or to exact any subsidies de jure [as of
right] without the consent of his three estates’.
7
On other occasions James’s
pronouncements were more questionable, but in his central claim he was con-
sistent: what the king lawfully commanded had God’s sanction, and must be
obeyed as a religious as well as a civic duty; and whatever he commanded,
even if it was against the laws of God, he must not be actively resisted, because
ultimately he was accountable only to God. Few Englishmen would have
quarrelled with that in 1625, or for quite a long time after.
This is not to suggest that James always saw eye to eye with parliament and
the common lawyers in constitutional matters. The common law enjoyed an
extraordinary prestige, even veneration, in England. Lawyers regularly out-
numbered merchants in early Stuart parliaments, but the proportion of MPs
who had had a smattering of a legal education was much higher—well over
half the House in the Long Parliament. Very many of the wealthy gentry sent
their sons to one of the Inns of Court for a year or two, not to become profes-
sional barristers but to acquire a bit of metropolitan polish, form useful
friendships, and (optimistically) to acquire enough legal lore to be useful to
them as landowners and JPs. They may not in fact have learnt much law, but
they did absorb the notion, beloved by the profession, that the common law
of England went back to time immemorial, that it had survived the Norman
Conquest essentially intact, and that parliament as an institution antedated
Three Kingdoms, Three Peoples 21
7
J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution (2nd ed., Cambridge, 1986), p. 11.
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the Conquest by centuries. Histories were published under the early Stuarts
which showed what a breach the Conquest had really made and when parlia-
ment had really originated, but they scarcely dented these cherished beliefs,
which were upheld with all the authority of Sir Edward Coke, the most
renowned, revered, and belligerent of common lawyers. James had several
serious clashes with Coke as Lord Chief Justice, before he finally sacked him
in 1616. Few held Coke’s extreme view that the law and the constitution had
survived unchanged in essence from the mists of Anglo-Saxon antiquity, but
very many believed that they had evolved since then through scarcely percep-
tible adjustments in the nation’s changing circumstances, so that at every
stage they embodied its collective wisdom and fitted its needs like a glove.
Despite much common ground, there could be clashes between James’s
conception of the royal authority and that of the common lawyers, and
clashes certainly occurred. Coke and his kind held that the law itself was the
supreme source of authority, and that the royal prerogative was simply that
area of it that the law committed to the king’s personal exercise and discre-
tion. James believed that the divine origin of his authority placed him intrin-
sically above the law, but that a good king obliged himself to rule in
accordance with it in all matters that touched the lives, liberties, and property
of his subjects. This difference of principle surfaced in disagreement as to the
source of parliament’s precious customary privileges, which first came in
1604 and returned more acutely in 1621: were they a grace, which the king
granted anew to each parliament when the Speaker made his formal request,
or were they (as the Commons asserted in 1621) ‘the ancient and undoubted
birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England’?
8
Such conflicts of prin-
ciple might lead to serious trouble under a more stiff-necked and less astute
monarch, but James forbore from pressing them too far. Most of his sub-
stantial disputes with parliament, including those over the impositions in
1610 and 1614 and over foreign policy in the early 1620s, were conducted
without raising really disturbing questions of constitutional theory. By keep-
ing the language of divine right to that generalized plane on which it could be
used uncontroversially, in order to inculcate obedience, and by respecting the
common law tradition in those legal and constitutional areas which involved
the liberty of the subject, James learnt to play his part in maintaining a high
degree of consensus, right to the end of his reign.
9
Yet if neither clashes of ideology nor conflicts of class interest carried in
them the seeds of civil war, there was a more disturbing symptom of malaise
in the body politic in the emergence under James of the terms ‘Court’ and
22 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640
8
J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, p. 42; cf. pp. 31–2 for the Commons’ statement of
their position in 1604.
9
Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Polit-
ical Thought, 1603–1642 (1992), esp. ch. 6.
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‘Country’ to describe opposing interests. Henry Parker, in a famous pamphlet
of 1642, took it as axiomatic that ‘we have ever found enmity and antipathy
betwixt the Court and the Country’;
10
but ‘ever’ was quite mistaken, and
‘enmity and antipathy’ would have been an overstatement in 1625. Both
terms need to be defined, though they were used loosely and not always in
quite the same sense. ‘The Court’ with a capital C embraced the king, his
royal household, and his whole entourage of councillors and courtiers; by
extension it could include all who made their living by paid employment in
the crown’s service, and even those who were not so employed but looked to
great ministers or favoured courtiers for patronage. Modern distinctions
between the government, the civil service, and the royal household were far
less clear-cut in Stuart times. The highest household offices were worth
more to their holders than any strictly political ones except Lord Treasurer,
Lord Chancellor, and Secretary of State,
11
and were regarded as legitimate
remuneration for busy politicians. Buckingham, for instance, was Master of
the Horse as well as Lord Admiral, to name only two of his places, and the
Earl of Pembroke, an influential privy councillor (and incidentally the co-
dedicatee of Shakespeare’s first folio) was Lord Chamberlain as well as a
Commissioner of the Great Seal. All the more successful of the king’s minis-
ters were pluralists of this kind. In terms of the number of its officers and its
cost to the Exchequer, the king’s household, especially if the queen’s and the
prince’s are added, was a much larger establishment than the whole of the
central administration, taking that to mean the privy council and its staff,
the two Secretaries of State and theirs, the Exchequer, the Court of Wards,
the Duchy of Lancaster, the Mint, the Navy Office, the Ordnance, and all the
central courts of law.
The word ‘country’ carried a wider range of nuances. It could mean Eng-
land as a whole, of course, or the political nation which had some share in
running its affairs. But it was often used synonymously with county; anyone
who spoke of his ‘country’ could well mean (say) Cornwall or Lancashire or
Suffolk. Used in contradistinction from the Court, however, the Country sig-
nified all those of gentry status who held no paid office and had no other
material ties with government or the royal entourage. It became an idealized
and somewhat smug stereotype, contrasting the Country’s independence
with the Court’s sycophancy, the health of rural life with the filth and disease
of the capital, the honesty and neighbourliness of country living with the
intrigue and treachery of courtiers, and the wholesomeness of country
recreations with the court’s debauched and costly pleasures. During the
Three Kingdoms, Three Peoples 23
10
Henry 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,
1638–1647 (3 vols., New York, 1934), II, 177.
11
Aylmer, King’s Servants, ch. 4, esp. Tables 7 and 9.
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pro-Spanish phases of James I’s foreign policy ‘the Country’ also carried over-
tones of superior patriotism and firmer protestantism.
Yet Court and Country were by no means synonymous with government
and opposition, and they were not remotely comparable with political par-
ties. Still less should they be thought of as royalists and parliamentarians in
embryo. That polarization was nowhere in sight in 1625, and when it came in
1641–2 it split both the Court and the Country interests more or less down the
middle. The Country around 1625 was not to be identified with any coherent
set of agreed national policies opposed to those of the government, and the
Court was quite normally an arena for contending factions, not only compet-
ing for influence and reward but promoting different policies in opposition to
each other. For all the rhetoric of Court and Country, there was no hard and
fast line between them; they interpenetrated. Even the most successful minis-
ters and courtiers had need of a power-base of loyal and satisfied client-
gentry in the provinces, if they were not to be wholly dependent on the king’s
capricious favour, and no dishonour attached to accepting their patronage.
What has to be explained is why ‘the Court’ came to be an object of suspi-
cion during James’s reign, and why ‘the Country’ felt alienated by it. The fact
is that the crown and the king’s senior servants exercised so much patronage,
and redistributed so much of the country’s wealth, that to manage the court
with reasonable probity and good judgement was a significant part of
kingcraft. It was the part in which James was most lacking. Too much of his
patronage was bestowed on unworthy recipients, and he was lavish with
gifts and pensions which he could not afford. He sold not only the highest
honours that the crown disposed of, but an increasing number of offices
(though not those carrying high political responsibility). His court was not
only disorderly, but at times the centre of serious scandal. It also overspent
quite grossly, and precious revenue drained away through its extravagance
and corruption. The efforts at reform and retrenchment by James’s best Lord
Treasurer, Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, were frustrated by his
favourite Buckingham, who in 1624 was largely responsible for engineering
Middlesex’s impeachment. The shortcomings of his court were not irremedi-
able, however, and there seemed every hope that things would be better under
the new king, with his blameless morals, his passion for decorum, his young
wife and his dislike of sleaze. But though there was eventually some check to
waste and venality, Charles was as attached to Buckingham as James had
been, and after the favourite’s death his court was to fall into disrepute for
new and graver reasons.
Charles’s other two kingdoms were very different from England, and even
more different from each other. Scotland’s population was rising fast when
James assumed the English crown, but it was barely a quarter of England’s:
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maybe a million, maybe slightly less. That gave a density of 28 people per
square mile, compared with about 100 in England and 70 in Ireland. The gap
in relative wealth was wider, and the inflation which both countries suffered
was exacerbated by debasement of the Scottish currency; £1 sterling
exchanged for £6 Scots in 1565 but for £12 in 1601.
12
James had wanted to unite his two kingdoms as well as their crowns, and
had been wounded and angry when his first English parliament rejected an
Act of Union. Englishmen, he was hurt to discover, tended to look down on
the Scots, and were selfishly unwilling to admit them to the benefits of full
fellow-citizenship. It may be doubted, however, whether on balance a full
union would have advantaged either nation at that stage. Extraordinary tact
and skill would have been needed to incorporate within one realm two very
different societies (or rather three, taking the Highlands as they then were),
two quite distinct legal and judicial systems, two churches far apart in their
ethos and government, and a whole set of institutions from parliament down-
ward that differed more in fact than in name. Union proved hard enough to
bring off just over a century later, when both countries had benefited by the
experience of the intervening period. A premature attempt would have
broken the homogeneity which was the English kingdom’s greatest strength,
and would probably have subjected Scotland to a greater degree of subordina-
tion than she actually experienced, without yielding enough economic
advantage to compensate for it.
Scotland was a far less unified realm than England, for the Gaelic-speaking
Highlands and Islands were almost a kingdom apart. There the clan chief-
tains held their territories as tenants-in-chief of the crown, but the clansmen
took their law, as they took their land, from the chief, in accordance with
ancient custom. Yet heavily mediated though the king’s authority was in
those wild parts, Charles I was to have no braver champions than the High-
landers who followed the Marquis of Montrose, whereas Lowland Scotland
was to lead the way in raising rebellion against him. His most formidable
Scottish enemy, however, was to be a Highlander, and Archibald Campbell,
Earl of Argyll, typifies the kind of overmighty subject who could make the
government of Scotland very difficult. As hereditary Justice-General over his
vast territories Argyll was little less than a viceroy. His powers were excep-
tional, but other Scottish magnates, in the Lowlands as well as the Highlands,
still wielded a feudal jurisdiction that the English nobility had long lost, some
as hereditary sheriffs, others through ‘grants of regality’. They also retained a
powerful patriarchal hold over their kin and tenants, and could raise them in
arms. They had violently interrupted James’s reign more than once, but he
had finished by mastering them. He had checked their feuds, restricted their
Three Kingdoms, Three Peoples 25
12
Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470–1625 (1981), pp. 166–7.
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armed retinues, arbitrated their quarrels, and steadily taught them to bow to
the rule of law. When necessary he made them enter into large bonds to keep
the peace, and imposed heavy fines when they breached it, but on the whole
he achieved his impressive success by his personal touch—by knowing them
thoroughly and gaining their willing loyalty, rather than by confronting or
coercing them. After four years as King of England he would fairly boast that
he governed Scotland with his pen, and though he did not govern it as well at
a distance as he had done from within, the country quietly prospered and
remained at peace. Over forty years passed between the last serious riot in
Edinburgh, in December 1596, and the one that was to launch the Scottish
rebellion and thereby, quite shortly, to plunge all three kingdoms in crisis.
James kept a firm control over the Scottish privy council, which became
more a channel for his commands than a fully responsible executive and advis-
ory body. It included enough loyal Scottish magnates to reassure the nobility
that they were not neglected, which made it look on paper too large for effect-
ive administrative action; but its working core was much smaller, and con-
sisted mainly of lairds (who corresponded to the English gentry), lawyers, a
few bishops, and others of good burgess stock—all men who saw their own
advancement in devoted service to the king. James freely rewarded his most
efficient councillors and officers with hereditary noble titles, which served
both to satisfy their aspirations and to establish a sector of the peerage with
strong ties of loyalty to the crown. There were already between fifty and sixty
Scottish peers in 1603, as many as in England at that date, despite Scotland’s
much smaller population. By 1641 there were 105, not because titles were
sold, which was the main reason for their even greater increase in England, but
mostly through the ennoblement of deserving royal servants. The older aris-
tocracy was still a power that needed to be managed, as Charles would learn
the hard way, but James in his long reign put the Scottish crown in such a pos-
ition that a competent king need have no fear of overmighty subjects. He might
have more to fear from an overmighty Kirk, but James dealt shrewdly and
firmly with that too in his time, as will be seen in the next chapter.
Scottish parliaments were very different from English ones, and thanks
again largely to James’s efforts they were much more easily managed by the
crown. Scottish peers sat in them by right, of course, and so after 1597 did the
bishops. Commissioners elected by the royal burghs were a long-established
part of the membership, commissioners of the shires only a recent one, dating
from an act of 1587. James insisted that his chief officers of state should sit in
parliament ex officio, but in face of objections he agreed to restrict the num-
ber so entitled to eight. The shire commissioners were drawn from the lairds
and lesser barons, but in contrast with England most burgh commissioners
really were residents of the towns they represented, and engaged in commerce
or other urban occupations. The bishops, the officers of state, and the first-
26 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640
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generation nobles had all been chosen by the king, and since all the significant
towns were royal burghs he could exercise a good deal of influence over their
representation too.
The biggest difference between Scottish and English parliaments, however,
was that the former sat not in two houses but in a single assembly. If the estates
that composed it held any discussions apart, it was on an informal basis and by
specific arrangement. But there was seldom much time for debate at all, for
after the opening session the parliament regularly referred all the business
before it to a committee of the estates called the Lords of the Articles. It met
again in full session only to pass the measures that this committee laid before
it. Even before 1621 the king’s government could generally manage the choice
of the Lords of the Articles in its favour, but in that year the procedure was
made watertight: the bishops collectively chose eight nobles, who then chose
eight bishops, who then joined with the eight nobles to choose eight shire and
eight burgh commissioners. If even that did not suffice to deliver the Articles
into the crown’s hands, the presence ex officio of the senior officers of state
could be counted on to do so. Such blatant manipulation did not go unre-
sented, but since only one more parliament was to meet after 1621 before the
revolutionary ones of 1639–41 there was not much opportunity for protest.
Rather less successful was James’s attempt to establish commissioners of
the crown in every shire to deal with petty crime and various administrative
duties. It was launched in 1610 and widened by a comprehensive act of 1617,
which clearly showed its inspiration in the English system of JPs. But it cut
across the ancient rights of the burghs as well as the feudal jurisdiction of the
magnates, and by 1625 well under half the shires had JPs in operation. There
was never much prospect of introducing them except in the Lowlands, but
James was not greatly interested in the Highlands, and the gulf between the
two Scottish cultures unhappily widened during his reign.
Jacobean Ireland was a country of even more widely differing cultures. Its
status was not like that of Scotland, which remained a distinct kingdom,
theoretically on an equal plane with England, with whom it now shared a
king. Ireland by contrast was regarded as a dependency of the English crown;
members of the Long Parliament would liken its constitutional position to that
of Jersey or Guernsey. That was going too far, of course; Ireland had its own
council and parliament, but they were subordinate to those of England in a
way that Scotland’s institutions had never been. That was true even before the
late Elizabethan conquest, which was undertaken after the two greatest lords
of Ulster, the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, had in the name of the Irish
nobility offered the crown of Ireland to Philip II of Spain, with whom England
was at war. In 1601 a small Spanish army had landed at Kinsale, but Eliza-
beth’s general, Lord Mountjoy, had forced both Tyrconnell and the
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