Cavaliers and Roundheads. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ lead; the water tables, pipes and much other of the lead in almost all places cut off…The choir stripped and robbed of her goodly hangings, her organ and organ loft.

      The communion table [stripped] of the best of her furniture and ornaments. Many of the goodly monuments of the dead shamefully abused, defaced, rifled and plundered of their brasses, iron-gates and bars; the common Dorter (affording good housing for many members of our Church) with the Dean’s private chapel and a goodly library over it, quite demolished, the books and other furniture sold away…Our very common seal, our registers and other books, together with our records and evidences seized, many of them irrecoverably lost; the Church’s guardians, her fair and strong gates, turned off the hooks and burned.

      Everywhere self-appointed preachers, ‘cobblers, tinkers and chimney-sweepers’, women as well as men, were haranguing congregations and inciting them to further excesses, talking for hours on end, often unintelligibly. A button-maker had to be dragged from the pulpit of St Anne’s. Aldergate where he had been drawing out ‘his words like a Lancashire bagpipe and the people could scarce understand any word he said’. The leatherseller Praise-God Barebone, whose two brothers were stated to have been named Christ-Came-Into-The-World-To-Save Barebone and If-Christ-Had-Not-Died-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebone, preached a sermon reported to have lasted five hours of a winter’s afternoon to a congregation ‘about the number of an hundred and fifty’.

      Distressed by such reports and by the speeches of the more vehement and progressive Members of Parliament, a group of more moderate men began to emerge. Among them were Lucius Cary, son of the first Viscount Falkland, an accomplished, impulsive, learned and delightfully good-natured young man, Member of Parliament for Newport; John Hampden’s cousin, Edmund Waller, a vain poet with an exceptional gift for declamation, who confessed that he had a ‘carnal eye’ and that he wished only to enjoy his wealth and popularity in peace; Sir John Culpeper, Member for Kent, a ‘man of sharpness of parts and volubility of language’, in Edward Hyde’s description, a persuasive orator, though short-tempered and irresolute; and Edward Hyde himself, ‘a fair, ruddy, fat, middle-statured, handsome man’, with ‘an eloquent tongue’ and a ‘dexterous and happy pen’, who was then Member for Saltash. The devotion of these men to the Church of England was rarely as fierce as their opponents’ dislike of it: as one of them, Lucius Cary, ‘was wont to say, they who hated bishops hated them worse than the devil, and they who loved them did not love them so well as their dinner’. Yet, as the Puritans became ever more zealous and uncompromising, so these more reasonable Members of Parliament and their adherents showed themselves increasingly prepared to defend the established Church and to support the King. Before the King could take advantage of this change in his fortunes, however, in October 1641 a rebellion broke out in Ireland, the third of his troublesome kingdoms, now released from Strafford’s firm rule; and the tide turned once more.

      The rebellion, in which thousands of British settlers were massacred by native Irishmen, became known as the Queen’s Rebellion. For it was she, her enemies protested, who was behind it all, who was in secret correspondence with the Catholic Irish, who now dominated the conscience of the King and would persuade him to make use of the army, which would have to be raised for the suppression of the rebellion in Ireland, to crush opposition at home.

      The Commons were determined to ensure that the King did not gain control of this army. Under pressure from Pym, they sent him a message demanding the dismissal of his present advisers and their replacement by Ministers who enjoyed the confidence of Parliament. They also sent him a petition, calling for the bishops to be denied their votes in the House of Lords, as well as their Grand Remonstrance, a critical document which, in two hundred clauses debated for weeks, set out their complaints and listed the grievances they intended to have redressed.

      The King, insisting that he had no unworthy advisers – and commenting privately, ‘The Devil take him, whomsoever he be, that had a design to change religion’ – publicly replied that the Church of England had no need of the reforms for which the Commons pressed. Encouraged by reports of deep divisions in the Commons and believing he had the support of the House of Lords, he decided not merely to stand firm but to attack: he ordered firm action to be taken against the mobs parading the London streets and swarming about Westminster Hall shouting, ‘No Popery! No bishops! No popish Lords!’ He dismissed the Puritan Lieutenant of the Tower and replaced him with Captain Thomas Lunsford, a swashbuckling desperado who had, some years before, narrowly escaped being put on trial for murder and was said to roast the flesh of babies. The appointment of Lunsford to so important a post occasioned further tumults. There were renewed demonstrations against bishops in Westminster, where coaches were held up and roughly searched and their occupants questioned by rowdy gangs. John Williams, the Welsh-born Archbishop of York, collared an apprentice who was loudly shouting, ‘No bishops!’ and endeavoured to drag him into the Lords, but ‘the rest of the fellows came jostling in upon the Archbishop in such a rude manner that the Archbishop escaped very hardly with his life’.

      Over the next few days there were violent clashes in Westminster Hall where Captain Lunsford and his swaggering Royalist friends, mostly unemployed army officers, marched up and down with drawn swords, threatening to ‘cut the throats of those roundheaded dogs that bawled against bishops’. There was trouble, too, around Westminster Abbey, where stones were hurled from the roof at a crowd of apprentices trying to break into the building to rescue some of their friends being held inside for questioning, and in Whitehall where there was fighting in the nearby streets in which several men were killed and wounded.

      Although the King dismissed Lunsford, he continued to provoke his opponents. He appealed for volunteers for an expedition to Ireland; and, when the Commons impeached twelve bishops and were reported to be threatening to impeach the Queen, he ordered the arrest on vague but wide-ranging charges of Lord Mandeville, the Earl of Manchester’s son and the leading Puritan agitator in the House of Lords, and of five of the most vexatious Members of the House of Commons: Pym, Hampden, Denzil Holies and two men who had been most active in the proceedings against Strafford, William Strode, the young Member for Beeralston, and Sir Arthur Haselrig, a Leicestershire baronet, in the opinion of Edward Hyde an ‘absurd, bold man’, who was used as a stalking horse by his cleverer though less forceful colleagues.

      To order the arrest of these men was a simple matter; to have them actually taken into custody was not, since the King could not get the order confirmed and the Commons refused to acknowledge its legality. The Queen and a young friend of hers, Lord Digby, son of the Earl of Bristol, urged the King to go down to the Commons with an armed guard and to arrest the men himself. ‘Go, you poltroon,’ the Queen is alleged to have cried out furiously when her husband hesitated to adopt so drastic a course. ‘Go and pull those rogues out by the ears, or never see my face again.’

      She had made such threats before: she would go back to France, she had said, or retire to a convent if he would not show his enemies who was master of his kingdoms. Obediently he agreed to go. He kissed her and told her he would be back within the hour.

      Sending a message to the Lord Mayor forbidding him to take any action in defence of Parliament, and calling upon the Inns of Court to have all lawyers and students capable of bearing arms ready to take action against his enemies, the King left in his coach on 4 January 1642 for New Palace Yard, accompanied by several courtiers, and followed by a crowd of excited Londoners wondering what was afoot, and by four hundred armed men described by a young lawyer whose sympathies lay with Parliament as ‘desperate soldiers, captains and commanders, papists, ill-affected persons, being men of no rank or quality…panders and rogues’. The King entered the House of Commons and, courteous as always, took off his hat as he walked towards the Speaker’s chair, nodding as he went to various silent Members whose faces he recognized.

      ‘Mr Speaker,’ he said, ‘By your leave, I must for a time make bold with your chair.’

      He sat down, explained his presence, and asked for the five Members to come forward. There was no response. The House remained perfectly quiet.

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