Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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The Old English organized in protest against James’s proclamation and the

threat to their faith, and it soon became clear that the Irish and English gov-

ernments disagreed about the treatment of Irish catholics. The former was all

for severity; the latter favoured a policy of conversion rather than compul-

sion, though it supported the imposition of recusancy ﬁnes, which were how-

ever only patchily collected. The illegal Irish hierarchy presented a problem,

and in 1612 the aged Bishop of Down and one of his priests were tried and

executed for treason, pour décourager les autres. That left just one catholic

prelate resident in Ireland and four others in exile. Thereafter the orders from

England were that priests should not be hunted unless they were suspected of

treason; and the papacy responded, on the advice of the exiled primate of Ire-

land, by appointing as resident bishops only men who were unquestionably

loyal to the king. The Irish government made examples of some towns which

obstinately elected recusants as ofﬁcials, seldom with lasting results, and tried

even less effectively to broaden the imposition of recusancy ﬁnes. The latter

were suspended during Prince Charles’s jaunt to Madrid in 1623, and the

greater leniency continued into the new reign. But an intolerable policy made

bearable by non-enforcement was hardly a permanent solution.

Meanwhile the Church of Ireland was taking a theological direction dis-

tinct from that of Canterbury. Trinity College Dublin, its intellectual centre,

had been modelled on Cambridge’s most puritan college, Emmanuel, and

was largely staffed with Emmanuel graduates. Instead of embracing the

Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles, the ﬁrst protestant convocation of

the Church of Ireland approved and adopted its own articles of religion in

1615. They were formulated by the outstanding intellect of the early

Stuart Church of Ireland, Dublin-born James Ussher, who was one of Trinity

College’s ﬁrst scholars and was to become Archbishop of Armagh and pri-

mate in 1625. The articles, which embodied Whitgift’s Lambeth set among

many others, did not directly conﬂict with the Anglican Thirty-Nine, but they

were far more positively Calvinist, and expressly afﬁrmed the doctrine of

double predestination. They also ﬁrmly identiﬁed the pope with the ‘man of

sin’, or Antichrist. They were held in great esteem by the anti-Arminian party

in England, many of whom, right down to the Civil War, would have liked to

see them adopted by the established church at home. They made the Church

of Ireland more than ever the communion of the New English, for they virtu-

ally condemned the rest of the population of Ireland to eternal torment. But

even as the colonial class at prayer the Church of Ireland was under strain,

having difﬁculty on the one hand in accommodating the increasing number of

Scottish Presbyterian settlers in Ulster, and on the other containing a minor-

ity that would respond sympathetically to the efforts of Archbishop Laud. Its

divisions were to widen under Charles I.

48 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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three

The New Reign

It will (I hope) be clear by now that Charles’s inheritance was by no means an

impossible one, but that success in managing it would depend very much on

his personal qualities. That was true of all monarchies in an age when the sov-

ereign’s power of decision was so great, but Charles’s throne was particular-

ly vulnerable because he ruled over three disparate kingdoms, and because

in England successful government depended to a degree then unusual on con-

sent. The task before him called for insight, judgement, tact, ﬂair, and dedica-

tion. He possessed the last quality in abundance, but he was short of all the

others.

He certainly had a lofty conception of his ofﬁce and an earnest desire to

exercise it worthily; if good intentions had been enough he would have been

among the best of British kings. He worked harder at the business of govern-

ing than his father had done; he would never be found in the hunting ﬁeld

when he should have been attending to matters of state, or at Newmarket

when he should have been at Westminster. He revered his father and in many

ways took him as a model, accepting as dogma the doctrines of divine right

that for James had had just a touch of the intellectual exercise. But in certain

respects, some conscious some perhaps not, he reacted against him. His strict

personal morality and his abstemious habits doubtless had deeper roots than

a distaste for his father’s looser ways, but the rapid transformation of the

royal court represented a deliberate rejection of the coarseness and license of

the last reign. In contrast with James’s bonhomous familiarity towards those

whose company he enjoyed, Charles imposed on his entourage his own

almost obsessive predilection for order, hierarchy, and decorum. The court

became inﬁnitely more digniﬁed, and in a deeper sense more civilized, for the

connoisseurship that he showed in collecting the treasures of the past and in

patronizing the ﬁnest artists and architects of the present adorned it with

many things of rare beauty. But the severely formal ritual that he prescribed

widened the gap between him and all but a very narrow circle of his subjects.

He was a much more deeply religious man than his father, and was the ﬁrst

monarch to grow up in the faith of the Church of England, as deﬁned in the

Elizabethan settlement. In contrast with James’s preference for Calvinism, he

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was an enthusiastic patron of the Durham House or Arminian divines,

though their appeal for him lay more in their exaltation of authority and hier-

archy in ecclesiastical government, and their insistence on a seemly ritual in

worship, than in their doctrines concerning the availability of divine grace.

He lacked his father’s intellectual interest in theology, and the ban he imposed

on public disputation concerning predestination, either for or against, seems

to have sprung from a personal aversion to the probing of such mysteries.

This was one of many things that he shared with William Laud, whom he

chose as Dean of the Chapel Royal when Andrewes died in 1626. At the ﬁrst

opportunity he translated Laud from St David’s, the poor and remote Welsh

see to which James had reluctantly appointed him, to Bath and Wells in 1626

and to London in 1628; only Abbot’s longevity kept him from Canterbury

until 1633. Charles and Laud met each other’s needs, for Laud was as assidu-

ous in exalting the royal authority in both church and state as the king was in

commanding obedience to the church and its bishops. Yet the two men

were not as personally close as used to be thought. Laud lived in constant

uncertainty as to just where he stood with his royal master, and it was prob-

ably not until the late 1630s that he felt fully secure in his favour.

Even those

in close and frequent contact with Charles found his mind and character hard

to read, and later generations have found it no easier; it is signiﬁcant that no

fully satisfactory biography of him has yet been written.

Three of James’s qualities were conspicuously lacking in his son: his

shrewd intelligence, his wisdom in the ways of the world, and a certain

natural authority. Charles was not stupid, but his mind was narrow and inﬂex-

ible, and since his imagination was severely limited he too often failed to fore-

see the results of his decisions or to gauge their impact on other people.

Indeed decisions did not come easily to him, and once he had painfully arrived

at them he tended to afﬁrm them so uncompromisingly that if a tactical with-

drawal should prove necessary, as it often did, it was bound to be humiliat-

ing. James had not cut a very regal ﬁgure, but by the time he came to the

English throne he was thoroughly at home in his royal ofﬁce, and when he

gave commands he had a healthy conﬁdence that he would be obeyed.

Charles was apt to insist obtrusively on his royal authority because for much

of his reign he lacked assurance in the exercise of it; the habit of command did

not come naturally to him.

One can only conjecture how much his difﬁdence and lack of easy contact

with others stemmed from his upbringing: his parents’ joyless marriage, his

sickly childhood, in which he saw little of his unsatisfactory mother and

seems to have formed no other warm attachments, and his having been over-

shadowed until he was nearly twelve by a more able and outgoing elder

50 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Sharpe, Personal Rule of Charles I, pp. 284–5.

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brother. Prince Henry’s immense popularity, and the outbreak of national

grief at his early death, may have driven Charles further into his shell. His

mind was well on the way to being formed before he became heir to the

throne, so his self-preparation for kingship was a conscious rather than an

instinctive process. The portrait of him in his late teens, probably by Abra-

ham van Blyenberch and now at Montacute,

tells us almost as much about

him as the later Van Dycks; the pose and expression strive for authority, but

the hands (and not only the hands) hint at some lack of inner conviction. After

he became king, at twenty-four, he often spoke like an autocrat, and at heart

he leaned more strongly towards absolutism than James had done, even

though his mind accepted that an English king’s powers were not unlimited.

He lacked, however, the sheer zest for the actual exercise of power, and the

satisfaction in the demanding day-by-day deploying of it, that a successful

autocrat really needs. The court masques in which he delighted projected an

idealized image of benign kingship that encouraged him in his tendency to

take his good intentions for deeds. He had no ﬂair for managing people,

because he did not easily understand them. With a very few individuals he

formed deep and loving relationships, but in his contacts with most of his

councillors and nobles and courtiers he lacked his father’s common touch. He

could express himself clearly and cogently, in spite of his famous stammer,

but in his public pronouncements one too often senses an urge to justify him-

self to his own satisfaction rather than to make a convincing case to his audit-

ors and his subjects at large. His digniﬁed affability was carefully cultivated,

but behind it a natural warmth was lacking. He seems to have been totally

humourless.

His difﬁdence and his lack of instinctive political judgement made him un-

usually dependent on advice. He listened to it conscientiously, and not only

from those counsellors who were naturally congenial to him, but he was not

easily persuaded when it ran counter to his own opinions or inclinations, and

in such cases he was apt to be suspicious of it, however honestly it was given.

Buckingham exercised a greater sway over him than he ever had over James,

but in contrast with James’s infatuation with the Duke there was nothing

homosexual in the relationship, at least at a conscious level. Buckingham was

a consummate courtier, and he cultivated the heir for a considerable time

before the old king died. The journey to Madrid together bound Charles to

him in total devotion. His age advantage of eight years was just right for his

purpose of building up an almost total ascendancy over the unsure and inex-

perienced prince, to whom he seems to have given the conﬁdence in his

actions that so far he naturally lacked. Charles never gave his love and trust

The New Reign 51

Plate 8; for attribution see Malcolm Rogers, Montacute House (National Trust, 1991),

pp. 77–8.

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so freely to anyone else except his wife, and he only turned to her after

Buckingham’s death.

One of the puzzles is to explain why a man who so prided himself on his rec-

titude as Charles did, and who professed to set such store by honest dealing,

acquired from early in his reign a reputation for deviousness and untrust-

worthiness. It was partly because a certain habit of distrust made him secretive,

so that his intentions were often imperfectly understood. He was also prone to

interpret opposition, even the principled dissent of good subjects, as dislo-

yalty, and he regarded loyalty as so absolute a duty that he could consider

himself released from his undertakings when he thought it wanting. Central to

his political creed was his belief in the sanctity of an anointed king’s authority

and in his sacred duty to preserve it. If a conﬂict arose between keeping his

word and acting as he believed a king should act for the safety of his crown

and people, then his regality absolved him, and if a subject seemed to be posing

a threat to the crown itself, no holds were barred in dealing with him. When it

came to civil war, he did not believe that the king need keep faith with rebels.

The casuistry which in those times permitted crowned heads to conceal or

even deceive was widely understood in the sphere of international relations,

but Charles exercised it rather freely towards those of his own subjects whom

he regarded as his enemies. Yet deviousness was not his main failing as a king,

for what princes in his time did not practise deception? More serious were his

lack of insight into human motivation and his fatally weak sense of what was

politically possible and what was not. He was tragically miscast: the things

that gave him the deepest satisfaction in his mature years, his religious faith,

his wife and family, and his art treasures, bespeak a sensitive and essentially

private man. The unluckiest chance of his life was his brother’s death, which

exposed him to the most public and taxing of all callings.

The ﬁrst ﬁfteen years of his reign, down to the crisis that set in when he con-

fronted the Short Parliament, fall into three phases. The ﬁrst continued the

run of frequent parliaments that had begun in 1621, with three within a span

of under four years. It ended with Charles so violently at odds with the third

of them that he resolved to dispense with parliament in England (though not

in Scotland and Ireland) for an indeﬁnite period. The so-called personal rule

that followed lasted for eleven years, but its outward calm was broken when

Scotland rebelled against his attempt in 1637 to impose a Prayer Book on the

Kirk. That inaugurated the phase of Anglo-Scottish war which lasted almost

until the Long Parliament was summoned. This chapter is concerned with the

ﬁrst two phases. The events of both were still so vividly in the minds of the

members of that parliament, and raised so many issues that they felt they had

to settle, that an outline of them forms a necessary background to our main

story.

52 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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The reign opened with England on the brink of war with Spain, for James

had felt impelled ﬁnally to help his son-in-law back to his principality. It was

still undeclared, for James had refused to take the formal step until parlia-

ment voted him enough money to wage it, but an English expeditionary force

of pressed men had already crossed the Channel under the mercenary leader

Count Mansfeld. Unfortunately, instead of ﬁghting its way into Germany to

recover the Palatinate for Charles’s brother-in-law the Elector Palatine, this

force was rotting away through disease and desertion in Holland. The inad-

equate sum which James’s last parliament had voted for the war was already

being swallowed up fast when he died.

Charles felt no hostility towards parliament as an institution when he came

to the throne. Encouraged by his father, he had attended the House of Lords

in the last two parliaments, and he had enjoyed the experience. The last one

had been the most amenable since Elizabeth’s death, and he would have kept

it in being if he could, but by law it terminated with the demise of the

monarch, so he had to call another. When it met in June 1625 it was basically

well disposed towards him, but it was suspicious of the French marriage

treaty and concerned over Mansfeld’s unhappy expedition. Instead of voting

generous supplies, as Charles hoped, for the war to which the last parliament

had committed him, the Commons made only a token grant and called for an

investigation into how the previous subsidies had been spent. Furthermore,

instead of following the precedent of every reign since Edward IV’s and grant-

ing tonnage and poundage to the king for life, they voted them for one year

only. This was not a deliberate attempt to deprive the crown of essential rev-

enue. What they had in mind was to review the antiquated structure of the

customs revenue and negotiate a deal that would rationalize it, eliminating

the hated impositions in the process. But that would take time, and since

London was currently stricken with the plague they did not want to spend the

summer months there. The Lords, however, declined to pass the temporary

bill, seeing it as an affront to the king, so he went on collecting tonnage and

poundage without parliamentary consent. He really had no choice, for he

could not govern without the customs, but it remained a source of grumbling

until 1641. The Commons angered him further by complaining of an increase

in recusancy and blaming it on his marriage treaty; they also reopened the

attack on the doctrines of Richard Montagu, who had angered them with his

Appello Caesarem, published earlier in the year. Provocatively, they had him

arrested; Charles warned them to desist and reappointed Montagu as a royal

chaplain. The quarrel rumbled on through the next two parliaments, espe-

cially after the king, equally provocatively, made him a bishop.

Desperate for revenue to carry on the war, Charles adjourned parliament

to Oxford, and in Christ Church hall he appealed to the patriotism of both

Houses. A great ﬂeet, he told them, was getting ready to sail. He was doing his

The New Reign 53

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best to keep the lines of parliamentary government open, and he had reason

to feel let down. But the Commons’ support for the war was evaporating, for

they believed that the crown’s ﬁnancial difﬁculties arose mainly from mis-

management and self-enrichment at the state’s expense. As Sir Edward Coke

put it in a major speech, ‘the ship hath a great leak’.

The ﬁnger was pointed

more and more plainly at Buckingham, and not without reason. That

was more than Charles would stand for, and on 12 August he dissolved

parliament.

The great ﬂeet duly sailed in October with Cadiz as its objective, but the

operation was so bungled that more than half its men were lost. The sight of

the miserable survivors who landed at Plymouth in December, ragged, stink-

ing, and sick, transformed one west country MP, Sir John Eliot, from a client

of Buckingham into his bitterest opponent. Buckingham bore the blame

because he was Lord Admiral, though the expedition was seriously under-

funded (which was not his fault) as well as incompetently led. It was also held

against him that English warships which had been loaned to the King of

France under the marriage treaty had been used in action (through no wish of

his) against a Huguenot ﬂeet. Buckingham’s relations with France, where

Cardinal Richelieu had recently become Louis XIII’s all-powerful minister,

were steadily worsening.

Sheer ﬁnancial necessity forced Charles to call a new parliament, the third

in three years, in February 1626. In the false belief that opposition sprang

from only a few factious men, he debarred the members who had most dis-

pleased him in 1625 (including, ironically, his future minister Sir Thomas

Wentworth) by making them sheriffs. Sheriffs could not stand because by law

they had to reside in their counties throughout their term. The result, however,

was merely to give more inﬂuence over the House to the ﬁery Eliot and

others who were less restrained and responsible than the men excluded.

Nevertheless the Commons were ready to consider ways of giving the crown

a sufﬁcient revenue for its peacetime needs on a permanent basis, but at a

price: Buckingham must be brought to account for wasting the king’s estate.

Since Charles would not hear of this, they gradually advanced to the point of

impeaching the favourite. Impeachment was an ancient judicial process, dis-

used since the ﬁfteenth century until something like it was revived in 1621, in

which the Commons preferred the charges and appointed prosecutors, and

the whole House of Lords sat as judges. It was used only in the case of ‘high

crimes and misdemeanours’, and of men who might be too great, or too

strongly protected, to be subject to the process of the ordinary courts of law.

It had recently been employed to bring down James I’s Lord Chancellor,

Francis Bacon, Viscount St Albans, and his Lord Treasurer, Lionel Cranﬁeld,

54 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 244–6.

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Earl of Middlesex; Buckingham had had a heavy share in the latter’s down-

fall. The charges against Buckingham were many, but there were four main

reasons why both houses were ready to proceed against him: he had grossly

enriched himself at the kingdom’s expense; he had perverted the exercise of

the crown’s patronage in favour of himself, his kin and his creatures; he had

dominated the king’s counsels to an extent that virtually eclipsed the proper

authority of the privy council; and he had been seriously incompetent as Lord

Admiral. Charles, in an effort to halt the impeachment, summoned both

houses to Whitehall. He ordered the Commons to drop the proceedings, and

told them that unless they voted supplies immediately and unconditionally,

he would dissolve parliament that very week. ‘Remember’, he said in words

ominous for the future, ‘that parliaments are altogether in my power for their

calling, sitting and dissolution; therefore as I ﬁnd the fruits of them either

good or evil, they are to continue or not to be.’

Despite his threat, he hung on

for over two and a half months before he actually dissolved the parliament.

By then there was no other way to stop the impeachment from proceeding,

and he had not received a single subsidy.

Still believing that only a few malevolent politicians were standing between

him and his subjects’ loyalty, Charles had letters sent to all the deputy lieu-

tenants and JPs in the country, requesting them to collect as a free gift the four

subsidies and three ﬁfteenths that the Commons had been prepared to vote if

their grievances were remedied. The result was abject failure; county after

county responded that it would give by way of parliamentary grant or not

at all.

Charles and the privy council then sailed into even more troubled constitu-

tional waters and demanded a Forced Loan. The Tudor monarchs had quite

often demanded forced loans from corporations and wealthy individuals, but

in 1626 commissioners were appointed to levy the equivalent of ﬁve subsidies

from everyone who was rated in the subsidy books. To the public at large it

was indistinguishable from a large parliamentary grant, except that parlia-

ment had not granted it. Financially the Forced Loan was a success because

very nearly ﬁve subsidies were collected, but seventy-six gentlemen went to

prison rather than pay it. (At least ﬁfteen peers also refused to pay, but signiﬁ-

cantly only one was imprisoned; peers were privileged, even in disobedi-

ence.) Five of the imprisoned refugees launched a cause célèbre by taking out

writs of habeas corpus, which required the crown to state the reason for their

imprisonment; they hoped thereby to bring the legality of the Loan under the

judgment of the common law. The judges had collectively declined the king’s

request to pronounce it legal in advance, and he had sacked the senior Lord

Chief Justice in consequence. They were faced with a dilemma, however,

The New Reign 55

Quoted in Roger Lockyer, Buckingham (1981), p. 316.

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when the privy council’s return to the habeas corpus stated simply that the

prisoners had been conﬁned per speciale mandatum domini regis (by special

command of our lord the king). The crown was exercising its prerogative

power, which the judges collectively had upheld in 1592, to detain individ-

uals without declaring the cause. When used, as it normally was, in circum-

stances where reason of state enjoined secrecy, as in the case of suspected

spies or conspirators, there was no objection to it; a trial would be expected

to follow, if those arrested were not released. But it was another matter to

deny both bail and trial to loyal subjects who were taking a principled stand

against arbitrary taxation, and to prevent the Court of King’s Bench from

adjudging the legality of the Loan. In this famous Five Knights’ Case the court

simply ruled that the prisoners should not be bailed, probably expecting that

in due course the council would inform it of what their offences were. The

case left both sides dissatisﬁed. By keeping the ﬁve in prison, the court’s rul-

ing implied that the king was within his powers in demanding a loan and in

punishing those who refused it. On the other hand Charles failed to get it to

afﬁrm the general right of the crown to imprison subjects without declaring

the cause.

Meanwhile England embarked upon war with France in 1627, not long

after that country had made peace with Spain. The causes were complex,

involving the hiring of English warships by France and the threat to use them

against a Huguenot revolt centred upon La Rochelle, as well as the seizure by

each country of merchant ships belonging to the other. Rather than go to war

with the two greatest European powers simultaneously, while lacking the

ﬁnancial and military resources to ﬁght either, England would have been far

wiser to settle the quarrel by diplomacy, as Richelieu wished to do. But Buck-

ingham thought he saw a chance to gain some much-needed popularity by

relieving the Huguenots in La Rochelle, which he tried to do in June 1627 by

leading in person a large amphibious expedition against the offshore Ile de

Rhé. He lost more than half of it and sailed home defeated in November—a

third national humiliation to add to Mansﬁeld’s expedition and Cadiz, and

the worst. The proceeds of the Forced Loan had been spent, and the govern-

ment could only meet its debts to the City of London by a massive sale of

crown lands. There was nothing for it, the privy council advised, but to call a

new parliament.

It met in March 1628, united as never before in pursuing the redress of

grievances, but for the most part anxious to avert another premature dissol-

ution. The Commons therefore held back from attacking Buckingham or

venting their religious grievances, strongly though they felt about both. They

offered the king ﬁve subsidies, an unprecedented grant though far short of

what he currently needed, if he would assent to a Bill of Rights that would

make it statutorily unlawful to levy any tax or loan without parliament’s

56 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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consent, to imprison any subject without trial, or to billet soldiers on uncon-

senting civilians (as had widely been done in the current war). All these prac-

tices lay in the king’s view within the royal prerogative, which he regarded as

a power entrusted to him by God to employ as he thought ﬁt for the good of

the people, and hence outside the reach of the law. Sir Edward Coke, who

introduced the bill, believed on the other hand that the law was the supreme

authority in the land and conferred on the king all those prerogatives that he

legitimately exercised. If he abused or exceeded them, parliament could deﬁne

them by statute. But Charles would not hear of a statutory limitation upon his

prerogative, and after much search for a compromise it looked as though

another deadlock had been reached. Then Coke proposed an expedient: let

them proceed not by a bill but by a petition of right. This was a procedure

open to any subjects who believed themselves wronged by an action of the

crown or its agents; the crown could not be sued, but they could formally peti-

tion to enjoy their right according to the law of the land. What parliament

now agreed to present to the king was a unique Petition of Right on behalf of

all his English subjects, to secure them in perpetuity from the three abuses that

the bill had treated, and in addition to ban the exercise of martial law within

the realm—a matter that was to become important again in 1639–40.

The Lords gave their concurrence, and Charles seemed on his way to a bet-

ter relationship with parliament than he had yet enjoyed. He almost threw it

away, however, by his ﬁrst answer, which merely granted ‘that right be done

according to the laws and customs of the realm, and that the statutes be put

in due execution’. This was wholly unsatisfactory, for it implied that no

change was to be made in the laws, whereas the whole point of the Petition of

Right was to state the law unequivocally in those areas where its scope and

the exercise of the royal prerogative had been in dispute. His evasive response

set the Commons upon preparing a Remonstrance concerning the whole state

of the kingdom which remarkably preﬁgured the Grand Remonstrance of

thirteen years later, when the country was heading for civil war. During the

debates on it the members displayed more sustained anger (though it was

mixed with grief) than at any time before 1640, and the main object of their

wrath was Buckingham, despite Charles’s express command not to name

him. But the essence of this Remonstrance, as in that of 1641, was its linking

of two major general grievances, namely innovation in government and innov-

ation in religion, and its attribution of both to the machinations of a ‘popish

and malignant party’, with which the king’s favoured Arminians were

allegedly hand in glove. Equally prophetic was the fear of the Irish which John

Pym, a rapidly rising ﬁgure, brought into the debate—fear of their open prac-

tice of popery, of the catholics in high places and in commands in the Irish

army, and of the Irish soldiers among the forces still afoot in England. A fur-

ther parallel with 1641 was that detestation of Buckingham, as the great evil

The New Reign 57

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