Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie

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СКАЧАТЬ It seemed like a victory.

      Characteristically, Charles overplayed his hand. Despite ample warnings, he decided to extend Laud’s counter-revolution to Scotland, whose church was much more straightforwardly Calvinist than England’s and whose political culture was much less polite. The imposition of a version of the English Book of Common Prayer on Scotland in 1637 provoked first riots, then full-scale rebellion. In February 1638, a Scottish National Covenant was ostentatiously signed in Edinburgh and rapidly distributed across the country. The Covenanters affirmed their loyalty to the king while furiously denouncing popery. Declaring that King Charles’s changes “tend to the re-establishing of the popish religion and tyranny”, they swore to give the “utmost of our power, with our means and lives”, to defend “the true religion and his majesty’s authority”. If that meant defending the king’s authority from the king himself, so be it.¹

      Charles’s instinct was to respond with force. Through 1639–40, he tried to cobble together an army. He could raise men from his third kingdom, Ireland, but paying them was another matter. In April 1640, he risked summoning an English Parliament, to ask for taxes. But England’s political classes were not going to support a crypto-Catholic king in leading an army of Irish Catholics against Scottish Protestants. For all they knew, once the Scots were subdued, the Irish muskets would be turned on them, and a Catholic tyranny would be imposed openly. The “Short Parliament” was dismissed after three weeks of impasse.

      Charles, typically, tried to attack anyway, but the Scottish Covenanters had assembled a formidable army, led by returned volunteers from the European war. There was only one serious skirmish, outside the English military town of Newcastle on 28 August 1640, at which the seasoned Scottish forces scattered the king’s raw recruits. The Scots occupied much of the north of England, forcing the king to pay their expenses. Militarily defeated, financially exhausted, and almost completely politically isolated, Charles was compelled to summon another English Parliament. This one would endure in various forms for nearly twenty years.

      This new Parliament shamelessly used its financial muscle to roll back Charles’s counter-revolution. As well as extracting a series of constitutional concessions, it attacked the “popish” clique bewitching the king. Archbishop Laud was imprisoned. The earl of Strafford, the king’s Irish deputy, whose army had been so much feared, was executed. Charles consented to Strafford’s death only under excruciating pressure. His remorse at having done so would fortify him against sensible compromises for years to come.

      For some in Parliament, that was enough: the point had been made, the clock turned back, and normal life could resume. Others, however, reckoned that the entire pre-Laudian settlement had been exposed as a sham. The bishops whom Puritans had once pragmatically accepted were now revealed as tyrannical miniature popes. Those who had spent a decade defying those bishops at considerable personal cost were not about to compromise. They had tasted freedom, and they wanted more.

      It was not only the merchants, lawyers, and gentlemen in Parliament who wanted change. London was the world’s largest Protestant city, a Babylon filled with Puritan agitators, unemployed soldiers, and volunteers returning from the war in Germany. With the hobbling of Charles’s government and the release of Puritan prisoners, a carnivalesque anarchy had taken hold. A radical fringe was coming into the open as official censorship faltered. A storm of provocative, scabrous, and opportunistic pamphlets flew from London’s presses and whipped up the urban fire over which Parliament was simmering.

      In France in the early 1560s, and the Netherlands in 1566, the sudden withdrawal of government control produced an explosion of interest in and conversion to new religious choices. So it was in England in 1640–42. A petition calling for bishops and other ceremonial vestiges to be abolished gathered fifteen thousand signatures. An unknown young polemicist named John Milton published a foam-flecked diatribe against the “canary-sucking”, “swan-eating” bishops. An emerging constituency was arguing that the old establishment was enslaved to Antichrist and so needed utter abolition, not mere reform. An uncontainable suspicion and fury was building.²

      Still, the pull of consensus might have prevailed had it not been for Ireland. In October 1641, Irish Catholic landowners, emboldened by the political power vacuum and alarmed by the new mood in England, launched a coup. A surgical strike against leaders turned into a general rising almost by accident. Like the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre seventy years earlier, the widespread belief that King Charles had backed the plotters gave the violence legitimacy. Around four thousand Irish Protestants were killed, and twice as many died of exposure during the winter, having been expelled from their homes. Ireland seemed to have successfully shrugged off British rule.

      This rising raised the temperature of English politics beyond boiling point. Irish atrocity stories, each more exaggerated than the last, fanned England’s already-blazing anti-Catholic paranoia into a wildfire. Those who had been warning of a Catholic conspiracy to drown Protestants in their own blood felt vindicated. There were vigilante attacks on English Catholics. A “Grand Remonstrance”, presented to the king by Parliament in December 1641, blamed England’s woes on “a corrupt and ill-affected party” and “their mischievous devices for the alteration of religion and government” and insisted that bishops be abolished forthwith.³

      The problem was, how was the Irish rebellion to be crushed? Could the king be trusted with an army? What would stop him from allying with the Irish papists and bringing them to England to slaughter Protestants in their beds? But if he could not stand to England’s defence, then he had in effect abandoned his duties as king. In which case, his subjects’ first duty was to bring him to his senses, by any means necessary.

      For English moderates, this kind of talk was open rebellion. To accuse the king of treachery was to make a nonsense of all laws. Henry Burton, a radical minister whose missing ears were a token of his anti-Catholic bona fides, retorted that “if any human Laws be found to be contrary to Gods Word, they are invalid and void ipso facto”.⁴ To some, this was common sense. To others, it was treason. In January 1642, Charles attempted a coup of his own and tried to arrest the parliamentary ringleaders. Westminster closed ranks to protect them, and the king fled London. It was no longer his city.

      Even now, no one expected a full-scale war. As so often happens, both parties believed they would quickly defeat their opponents. Both seemed to themselves to be obviously right and moderate, and their opponents a fringe of extremists. Yet we cannot quite write this off as the naivety of a people who had lived in peace for so long that they had forgotten what war means. For over two decades, the English had been transfixed by the ghastly spectacle that we call the Thirty Years War, in which tens of thousands of English and Scottish volunteers and mercenaries had fought. As the political temperature at home rose, these men came pouring back, bringing with them up-to-the-minute military expertise and battle-hardened sensibilities. It was these veterans who made the Scottish mobilization and victory in 1639–40 possible. England, too, had all too many ex-soldiers: men with no skills other than killing, ready to be filled with martial zeal for whichever cause came calling. Continental butchery had inured a generation to war and had made it seem a natural state of affairs.

      Now it was coming to England. As a 1641 pamphlet put it, “The same wheel of mischief that hath wrought the worst in Germany since the year 1618 hath for some years last past been set also at work in England, Scotland and Ireland.” The Laudian counter-revolution, the Irish rebellion – it was all part of the same vast plot. Those who counselled peace were at best naive, at worst active agents of Antichrist.⁵

      And so, in 1642, Europe’s religious wars finally spilled across the English Channel. Both sides in the English Civil War drew on Continental veterans and imported Continental weapons. There was also a real threat of direct Continental intervention in England’s wars, forestalled by Parliament’s seizure of the Royal Navy. Parliamentarians, in particular, understood their war as part of a European struggle. The nickname Cavalier, applied to the royalist army, was a piece of Continental СКАЧАТЬ