Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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Spaniards to surrender, and followed up his success with the most complete

conquest of Ireland that England had yet effected. Mountjoy was just com-

pleting it when James came to the throne, and for the rest of the reign Ireland,

with her power of resistance seemingly broken, was storing problems for the

future rather than manifesting them pressingly in the present.

Ireland had a higher population than Scotland—perhaps 1,400,000 in

1600, rising very fast to as much as 2,100,000 by 1641

—though most of it

was even poorer and economically more backward. It was no less culturally

divided, consisting as it did of three unequal and imperfectly assimilated

elements. Much the largest was the ancient native stock, Celtic in race and

Gaelic in language (closely related to that spoken in the Scottish Highlands),

whom the English have often called the Old Irish, to distinguish them from

the Old English. Theirs was a clan culture, though Irish clans were called

septs; it dominated western Ireland, and until the Jacobean plantations it was

supreme throughout Ulster. Its system of landholding was hardly compatible

with English conceptions concerning individual ownership, and its custom-

ary brehon law clashed uncomfortably with the English common law. The

Old Irish were passionately catholic, though their catholicism was largely

untouched by the reforms associated with the Council of Trent and the

Catholic Counter-Reformation. There was already tension between the

native clergy who never left Ireland and the sons of the gentry who trained for

the priesthood in the several Irish colleges in Rome and in the Spanish Nether-

lands, for the latter aspired to bring Irish catholicism into line with the

Counter-Reformation. The Old Irish spanned a wide social spectrum, for

poor as most of them were they boasted a native nobility whose greater

members shared a life-style and often intermarried with the second element in

the population, the Old English (or Anglo-Irish).

Before the Tudor and Stuart plantations the Old English were indisputably

the ascendancy class. They were mostly the descendants of Anglo-Norman

lords who had settled and carved out great estates for themselves in the

Middle Ages, and they represented an older colonial dominance. They in-

cluded such great houses as the Fitzgeralds, Butlers, and Burkes (originally de

Burghs), but there were a few lords of Gaelic extraction who so fully shared

their outlook and interests as to be inseparable from them; Donough Mac-

Carthy, Lord Muskerry, is an example. Except in those regions where the

great Old Irish families held sway—mainly Connaught and Ulster (before the

plantation)—the Old English dominated local government, and regarded

themselves as an essential part of the colonial regime. They had stayed loyal

during the rebellion of 1593–1603, but their loyalty was already under strain,

28 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne (eds.), A New History of Ireland, III (Oxford,

1978), pp. 388–90 (by L. M. Cullen).

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and the strain became increasingly severe under the early Stuarts. In the ﬁrst

place the great majority remained Roman Catholics, and whatever de facto

toleration they enjoyed, their religion subjected them to various disabilities.

They saw it as the ultimate aim of the English government to bring the whole

Irish population within a protestant Church of Ireland. Secondly, the policy

of plantation, which began on a small scale under Mary Tudor, threatened

their possession of their own estates, for their title could seldom satisfy the

strict criteria of English law. Thirdly, the increasing efforts by the English

crown, from the 1530s onward, to rule Ireland through an English Lord Lieu-

tenant or Lord Deputy and a council in Dublin threatened their status and

encroached on their very large power in their own regions. They therefore

found themselves more and more in conﬂict with the third element in the

population, the New English who acquired Irish estates under the various

plantation schemes.

These settlers were nearly all protestants, and though they developed inter-

ests that were not always at one with those of the English government they

stood much closer to it than the Old English did. It was from the crown that

they had acquired their grants of land and other privileges, and they looked

to it for further opportunities, and for protection. But the only part of Ireland

that was fully under English rule was the Pale, which extended from Dundalk

to a little south of Dublin, and up to thirty miles inland. Even there the New

English shared their dominance with the longer-seated Old English Lords of

the Pale. It was only in the Pale and the plantations that the Church of Ireland

held any real sway, for as the next chapter will make clearer it scarcely pre-

tended to be more than the church of the protestant settler community. Its

Calvinistic doctrine and its identiﬁcation of the papacy with Antichrist put

the rest of the Irish people literally beyond redemption, and although there

was no attempt to force catholics to attend its services it was no friend to the

Old English. It upheld the exclusion of catholics from public ofﬁce, implied

that their professions of loyalty were not to be trusted, and opposed any for-

mal toleration of the exercise of their religion. Fortunately the realities of

political and social life in Jacobean Ireland were not as intolerant as its estab-

lished church’s professions, but the fears among Irish catholics of protestant

intentions had far more substance than the fear of popery among protestants

in England.

Ulster, which had been the centre of rebellion in the 1590s, remained the

least anglicized and most wholly Gaelic province of Ireland in James’s early

years. The dominant families were the Old Irish houses of O’Neill and

O’Donnell, whose heads, the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, wielded great

territorial and political power. They continued to give grounds for suspicion

after the defeat of the rebellion, and in 1607 the English privy council sum-

moned them both to London. Instead of obeying they ﬂed to France. The

Three Kingdoms, Three Peoples 29

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English government construed the ‘Flight of the Earls’ as proof of their

treasonable intent, and they were adjudged to have forfeited all their estates

to the crown. It was a golden opportunity to extend the policy of plantation

to Ulster. The original plans were quite small-scale and made generous provi-

sion for those Irish who lived peaceably, but there was a minor rising in 1608,

unnecessarily provoked by the governor of Derry, and James and the privy

council panicked. The revised plan opened almost all the six counties of

Armagh, Cavan, Coleraine (renamed Londonderry), Donegal, Fermanagh,

and Tyrone to English and Scottish settlers, allocating at the most a quarter

of the territory to the native Irish. Most of the latter received nothing, and few

of those who did get grants were allowed to retain the land that they actually

occupied. The rest of the territory was divided into estates, mostly of 2,000

acres, and allotted to ‘undertakers’, who accepted speciﬁc obligations to

reside on them, settle a quota of colonists on them, and defend them. These

obligations were seldom met. The aim was the complete segregation of the

Irish and settler populations, but the new owners found it economically

impossible to subsist without taking Irish tenants, though their terms forbade

it. Consequently there were few parts of Ulster where settlers were not great-

ly outnumbered by natives, even by James’s death. By 1622 about 3,700 fam-

ilies (roughly 13,000 adults), with English and Scots in about equal numbers,

had been introduced into the six ‘escheated’ counties, while another 7,500

adults had settled in Down and Antrim, where plantations had been estab-

lished in Elizabeth’s reign. Large numbers of Scots had also settled in

Munster.

Naturally enough, the Irish population of all ranks had been resentful of

the plantations, and the early settlers had gone in fear of their lives. But by the

end of the reign the threat of violence had receded, amid a surprising amount

of mutual accommodation. The English common law had made solid

progress, but in other ways, such as housing, the settlers had to some degree

gone native. There was still a latent store of discontent, however, for most

Irish tenants had no security of tenure and they had not forgotten their old

loyalties. Living as they did in Church of Ireland territory, they also felt the

subjugation of their religion more acutely than their compatriots elsewhere.

English political dominance over Ireland was greater after the Elizabethan

conquest than before, but there were quite strong practical limitations to it.

Constitutionally, the Lord Lieutenant (or Lord Deputy—the powers were the

same whatever the title) was a colonial governor, and the Irish council in

Dublin existed purely to advise and assist him. By Poynings’s Law (1494)

no bills might be introduced in the Irish parliament without prior approval,

not only by the Lord Lieutenant and his council but by the king and the

English council. The Irish parliament, like the English, had two houses, and

hitherto the Old English had numerically dominated both. But before James

30 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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summoned it for the only time in his reign, in 1613, he created new seats on a

lavish scale, nearly all in Ulster and many representing newly incorporated

tiny boroughs of protestant settlers, little more than villages in size. His

blatant aim was to ensure a protestant majority in the Commons; of the sixty-

four members who represented Ulster, only one was a catholic. Sixteen of the

twenty lay peers who attended were catholics, but they were outvoted by

twenty Church of Ireland bishops, all in effect royal nominees. Yet despite

such gerrymandering the Dublin government could not have things all its own

way, and no English monarch could rule Ireland by decree. With little of mili-

tary force to dispose of, with even less of a bureaucracy, and with a chronic

problem in pursuing ﬁnancial self-sufﬁciency, government could not dispense

with the co-operation of the Old English at least. If England’s rulers could

have accepted that the catholicism of the Old English and of the more angli-

cized Old Irish was not incompatible with their loyalty, if they could have con-

ceded them their religious liberty and their right to full political participation

(especially ofﬁce-holding), and if they had limited the colonization of an

admitted underpopulated country so as to preserve the property rights of the

peaceably inclined Irish, the history of the country in the coming decades and

for many generations after might have been less tragic. Seen with hindsight,

Ireland was the kingdom in which James’s rule was least successful.

The fact that Charles I inherited a multiple monarchy certainly made his task

complex and demanding. Each of his three realms presented problems (what

seventeenth-century state did not?), yet none was in a state of crisis, and there

was no inherent reason why he should not have gone on governing them with

the sort of imperfect success that his father had achieved. He needed to be sen-

sitive to the state of feeling in all three, to keep himself accurately informed,

and to judge competently what were the limits of the politically possible in

each. On all three counts he was to fail. His throne was unlikely to be in dan-

ger unless all three became seriously destabilized at the same time, and that

was not to be foreseen in 1625, because there was no need for it to happen.

That it did happen was more due to errors of policy—not all of them of course

his personal errors—in the twelve or ﬁfteen years following his accession than

because of anything intrinsically doom-laden in the situation which he in-

herited. One element in that inheritance, however, which called for a special

degree of understanding and statesmanship was the state of religion in each

of his kingdoms. Religious fears and aspirations were to be the prime cause of

the Scottish rebellion in 1638 and a major factor in the Irish rebellion of 1641;

and though religion was not foremost among the immediate issues over

which the English Civil War broke out, religious convictions played an incal-

culable part in the way men and women chose sides when it came to the

breach. The subject therefore calls for a chapter to itself.

Three Kingdoms, Three Peoples 31

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two

King Charles’s Inheritance II:

The Matter of Religion

So large did religious differences and fears loom in the course of Charles’s

reign that it may come as a surprise to ﬁnd how relatively stable the religious

situation was when he came to the throne, at least in England and Scotland.

James had inherited a Church of England which had won the loyalty of the

great majority of the English people, and thanks to the ﬁrm measures of

Elizabeth’s later years it had little to fear from either catholics on the one side

or Presbyterians or separatists on the other. That was still true when he died.

The fear of popery was something about which neither the English nor the

Scottish peoples were wholly rational, but Gunpowder Plot apart there was

little enough reason for it during James’s reign. The vast majority of English

Roman Catholics were loyal, law-abiding subjects, located mostly in a few

rural areas where concentrations of catholic gentry families protected the

priests who risked fearful penalties (though these were hardly ever enforced

now) to minister the sacraments on which their religion depended for sur-

vival. Counting both the recusants, who submitted to regular ﬁnes and other

disabilities rather than attend parish worship as the law required, and the

more numerous ‘church papists’ who conformed just far enough to avoid

such penalties, the catholic community under James I numbered around

40,000 men, women and children—a mere one per cent of the whole popu-

lation, though about a tenth of the gentry and a ﬁfth of the peerage were recu-

sants. James himself was very ﬁrmly protestant, though his penchant for

crypto-catholic councillors and courtiers aroused some suspicion. The

catholic threat from overseas receded during most of the twenty years of

peace with Spain that began in 1604, especially after Spain concluded the

Twelve Years Truce with the Netherlands ﬁve years later. The international

scene changed in 1619, however, when the rebellious protestant nobility of

Bohemia elected Frederick, the Elector Palatine and James’s son-in-law, as

their king. As such, Frederick would have had a second voice in the electoral

college which chose the Holy Roman Emperor, thus altering its balance from

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a catholic to a protestant majority of four to three. This was a nightmare

prospect for the House of Habsburg, but an imperial army routed Frederick

at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, and a Spanish one occupied his

own principality on the Rhine. Frederick was to be an exile for the rest of his

reign.

James had for years been rousing misgivings by his close working relation-

ship with the Spanish ambassador, the Count of Gondomar, and by his keen-

ness on marrying Prince Charles to a Spanish Infanta. He now thought that

the best prospect of securing the return of the Palatinate to Frederick lay in

concluding a diplomatic deal with Spain, whose king was kinsman to the

Emperor, and sealing it with a Spanish match. Charles himself was so taken

with the idea that in 1623 he set off for Spain incognito, in company with

Buckingham, to woo the Infanta in person. It was a mad escapade, but the

wild public rejoicing when the pair came home without the lady showed how

unpopular James’s policy was, and how easily the fear of popery could be

revived. It rose again in 1625 when Charles married Henrietta Maria, the

ﬁfteen-year-old sister of Louis XIII of France, not least because of well-

grounded suspicions that there was a secret clause in the marriage treaty,

promising to suspend the penal laws against catholic recusants. But this time

the fear was less acute, because France’s commitment to the international

catholic cause was heavily qualiﬁed by her enmity with Spain, her friendship

with the Dutch, and her toleration of her own Huguenot population. More-

over Charles’s relations with his young bride were for the ﬁrst few years

reassuringly cool.

If the fear of papists was later to swell until it signiﬁcantly contributed to

the genesis of civil war, conﬂict within the Church of England was to play an

even greater part in dividing the nation. Such conﬂict was kept within quite

narrow bounds during James’s reign, and consensus prevailed; but to under-

stand why the potential for division remained present, and why it widened so

unhappily under Charles, it is necessary to go further back. The Church of

England had always afﬁrmed an identity distinct from that of the Roman,

Lutheran, and Reformed (Zwinglian or Calvinist) churches, though that iden-

tity underwent quite rapid changes in its early years. The liturgy in use down

to the Civil War, the Book of Common Prayer of 1559, was a compromise,

like the rest of the Elizabethan settlement, in this case between the earlier

Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552. The Thirty-Nine Articles, the church’s con-

fession of faith, were not formulated by convocation until 1563 (though they

were based on the Forty-Two of ten years earlier), and Elizabeth did not allow

parliament to give them statutory authority until 1571. She disliked religious

controversy, especially if it challenged her own authority as the church’s

Supreme Governor. She did not want to stir the hostility of the large numbers

of her subjects who were still at heart attached to the old catholic rites, and

The Matter of Religion 33

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she distrusted the zeal of the opposed minority who hoped that the 1559

settlement would prove to be just a half-way house to the full reformation

that some of them had embraced, as exiles, during Mary’s reign, in Geneva

or Zürich.

During the early part of her reign, opposition to her settlement focused

mainly on clerical vestments and liturgical ceremonies, but as under Charles

I seventy years later, this was symptomatic of deeper disagreement as to how

a church should be constituted and what a Christian should believe. In the

early 1570s a puritan movement emerged which in many ways preﬁgured

the opposition to Charles, though its main objectives and preoccupations

changed considerably over the years. For most of Elizabeth’s reign it was

mainly concerned with church government and discipline. Various develop-

ments were impelling strongly committed English protestants to seek a closer

identiﬁcation of interest with the Reformed churches abroad; they included

the unique authority that Geneva developed under Theodore Béza after

Calvin’s death in 1564 as an exemplar of Reformed ideals, the onset of the

French Wars of Religion and the revolt of the Netherlands, then England’s

own involvement in war with Spain and the succession of catholic plots

against the queen’s life. Militant puritans strove to give the national church a

form of government and jurisdiction that would render it virtually independ-

ent of its lukewarm Supreme Governor—a Presbyterian form. In place of

archbishops, bishops, archdeacons, and their various courts, they would have

built the church’s polity on the base of a consistory in every parish, consisting

of a minister and a group of lay elders with powers of justice over the faith

and morals of the congregation, which meant the whole local population.

Within a deﬁned area called a classis or classical presbytery, the constituent

ministers and elders were to meet regularly, exercise powers of ordination

and excommunication, and from time to time elect representatives to a

provincial synod. A national synod was to crown the whole pyramidal

structure, which could operate if need be quite independently of the secular

state, though the ideal was a partnership.

To Elizabeth, who was very much her father’s daughter, such a threat to

her authority was anathema. She and her bishops nipped the ﬁrst wave of the

Presbyterian movement in the bud in the early 1570s. It revived in the mid-

1580s, however, in the so-called classical movement, on a sufﬁcient scale to

threaten a serious rift in the church, and with some lay support in parliament.

This time she had an Archbishop of Canterbury after her own heart in John

Whitgift, and within a few years he and his fellow-bishops, with the help of

the Court of High Commission, had scotched the attempt to presbyterianize

the Church of England from within. By James’s accession it was virtually

dead. What survived of Elizabethan puritanism was a certain doctrinal bent,

to which we will turn shortly, and a strong zeal to extend the preaching of the

34 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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Word, at a time when large numbers of parish clergy were still too ignorant

and ill-educated to put together a simple sermon. In regions with a large infu-

sion of puritan clergy and laity, the practice survived of holding ‘exercises’,

which were meetings of neighbouring ministers in which the more proﬁcient

tutored the less in the expounding of the Scriptures, before a lay audience.

This usage descended from what had more usually been called ‘prophesyings’

in Elizabeth’s earlier years, and which she (who distrusted preaching) had dis-

liked so much that she had suspended Whitgift’s predecessor Archbishop

Grindal from all his episcopal functions when he bravely refused to prohibit

them. Another way of securing regular sermons where the incumbent could

not or would not provide them was to fee a ‘lecturer’ (an ordained minister,

but not beneﬁced in the parish concerned) to preach every Sunday and market-

day. Sometimes this was done by the more well-to-do parishioners; some-

times neighbouring clergy took turns to ﬁll a gap, or to preach in the nearest

market town; and in some towns the corporation or other benefactors

endowed weekly lectures (i.e. sermons), to be delivered on market-days.

Endowed lectureships embodied in a relatively unobjectionable form the

Reformed churches’ principle that pastors and teachers should receive a call-

ing from their congregations.

Until quite late in Elizabeth’s reign, differences over church government

bulked much larger than controversies over doctrine. Predestination, over

which there was to be so much contention in the next two reigns, was hardly

an issue yet among English protestants. They all believed that since the Fall

the will of man was so corrupted by sin that nothing he did by his own mere

volition could earn him merit in the sight of God; salvation could come only

through faith, and that saving faith was attainable only through the free gift

of divine grace. All agreed that humankind was divided into the elect and the

reprobate, and that God had predestined the elect to salvation; the reprobate

would of course go to hell. The unresolved question—and this is an area that

became so ﬁlled with eggshell-ﬁne distinctions that non-theologians tread in

it at their peril—was whether God had absolutely predestined the reprobate

to damnation, so that no effort of theirs to believe and repent could save

them: whether, in other words, Christ had died for all mankind or only for the

elect. The early English reformers, including Hooper and Latimer, taught

clearly that Christ died for all, and so did Bishop John Jewel, whose works

carried great authority in the early Elizabethan church; in their belief, saving

faith was available to all who opened their hearts to it, and the reprobate

excluded themselves from salvation by their deliberate sins. Béza, however,

elaborating on Calvin’s own teaching, enunciated the doctrine of double pre-

destination in its harshest form: the reprobate were no less fore-ordained to

damnation than the elect to salvation. The rigour and logic of his formula-

tion, coupled with the prestige of Geneva among the converted, had a strong

The Matter of Religion 35

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attraction for many of the more intellectual Elizabethan churchmen, and high

Calvinism eventually took a powerful hold on the universities. It was the

more attractive for standing at the furthest distance from the abhorred

Roman Catholic doctrines concerning free will and the shocking assumption

that men and women could acquire merit in God’s eyes through good works.

It requires an effort to understand its appeal today, but there are some who

are still drawn by it.

In the Church of England there was always a spectrum of opinion on the

troubled points of free will, free grace, and predestination, single or double.

But late in the sixteenth century the theological centre of gravity shifted

towards Calvinism within the establishment, and not only in the universities.

When young Samuel Harsnett, whom Charles I was to make Archbishop of

York forty-ﬁve years later, boldly went against the grain and attacked the

harshness of the prevailing predestinarian doctrine in a famous sermon at

Paul’s Cross in 1584, Whitgift censured him for it and ordered him to preach

no more on the subject. A more sustained attack on high Calvinism developed

at Cambridge a decade later, led by the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity,

who was the Huguenot refugee Peter Baro, and a young fellow of Caius

College called William Barrett. They drew down on themselves the wrath of

the Vice-Chancellor and the senior heads of colleges, but the noise of the

ensuing disputes spread far beyond Cambridge, until Whitgift felt obliged to

intervene. In 1595 he approved a set of nine statements of the Church of Eng-

land’s position on the troubled points of doctrine which became known as the

Lambeth Articles. The ﬁrst stated that ‘God from eternity predestined certain

men to life and condemned others to death’; the fourth that ‘Those who are

not predestined to salvation shall of necessity be damned on account of their

sins’; the seventh that ‘Saving grace is . . . not given to all men by which they

may be saved if they so will’.

The Lambeth Articles have often been taken as

proof that Whitgift was a thorough-paced Calvinist in doctrine, but some

modern scholars have argued that he dissociated himself from the belief that

God gave his elect a certain knowledge of their salvation, and that his aim was

to put a check on both sides in the current controversy. The main argument,

now and for some time to come, was not between predestination and free will

but about the precise manner in which predestination operated. Nevertheless

the Lambeth Articles acquired such authority among puritans in the early

seventeenth century that they repeatedly pressed to have them added to the

Thirty-Nine in the Prayer Book.

36 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

The Lambeth Articles, translated from the Latin, are printed in Claire Cross, The Royal

Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church (1969), p. 205. For views on their interpretation, see H. C.

Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 344–90; Peter

Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 209–26; and Peter

White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 101–11.

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Elizabeth’s reaction to the episode was characteristic. Having signiﬁed her

high displeasure to Baro for raising the theological dust, she showed scarcely

less of it to Whitgift for venturing to pronounce on the points at issue by virtue

of his authority as primate. She forbade him to publish the Lambeth Articles

and threatened him, only half in jest, with the penalties of praemunire for

clerical encroachment on royal authority, through which her father had

brought down Cardinal Wolsey. Elizabeth, it should be remembered, inter-

vened in ecclesiastical affairs at times more autocratically than either James

or Charles ever did, at least in England. It was not good to get on the wrong

side of her. Baro left Cambridge in 1596, when his tenure of his chair was not

renewed, and Barrett had to make two recantations to save himself from

expulsion from the university. Yet though such anti-Calvinists were a small

and disfavoured minority at that time, there was a direct continuity between

them and the school of divines that Charles I was to promote.

James I shared Elizabeth’s dislike of public disputation over the mysteries

of the divine decrees, though unlike her he was keenly interested in theology

and seriously knowledgeable about it. Soon after his accession he received a

petition from a sizeable group of puritan ministers, calling for a number of

modest reforms in the practices of the church. In response he summoned a

group of bishops and moderate puritan clergy to confer under his presidency

at Hampton Court. He hugely enjoyed himself, but initially he mistook the

aims of the puritans, speaking as if the Elizabethan movement was still in its

militant phase. His much reported words, ‘no bishop, no king’, were quite

wide of the mark, because no one in the conference was opposed to bishops

as such, or to the royal supremacy; episcopacy was not to become an issue

again in England until 1641. Predestination was discussed, but it was not the

central matter of debate, because nearly everyone present would have found

common ground in the Lambeth Articles. James was opposed to any changes

of substance in the church’s government or worship, which he profoundly

admired, but the discussions were generally harmonious, and out of the con-

ference came the priceless jewel of the Authorized Version of the Bible.

Fifteen years later James sent delegates to a much more important meeting

of divines, the Synod of Dort, whose repercussions were still affecting theo-

logical debate down to the Civil War. By the time that the synod met at

Dordrecht in Holland in 1618–19, doctrinal dissension was not only tearing

the continental Reformed churches apart but threatening actual civil war in

the Dutch Republic. In the late sixteenth century a professor of theology at

Leiden called Jacob Hermandzoon, or by his Latinized name Arminius, had

led a challenge to the Bezan doctrine of predestination parallel to that which

troubled Cambridge, though the two movements arose independently. He

believed in the predestination of the elect, and he did not hold that it lay

within the free will of every individual to embrace or reject salvation, but he

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