Cavaliers and Roundheads. Christopher Hibbert

Чтение книги онлайн.

       2 TAKING SIDES

       ‘I have heard foul language and desperate quarrelings even between old and entire friends.’

      Henry Oxinden

      Immediately upon landing on the Continental shore the Queen set about enlisting help in her husband’s cause, attempting to persuade foreign princes that it was in their own interest to support a fellow-sovereign in his hour of need, cajoling money from the Prince of Orange, doing all she could to induce Charles’s uncle, King Christian IV of Denmark, to come to his nephew’s aid, raising money for weapons and for the pay of volunteers, complaining of persistent colds and coughs and intermittent headaches, yet tireless in her endeavours and firm in her resolve.

      She met with little success. King Christian was preoccupied with the protection of Danish interests in northern Germany and with the prevention of Swedish encroachments. The Prince of Orange was hampered by his Protestant people’s support of the English Parliament. Everywhere she went or looked to for help the Queen was made aware of the reluctance of foreign courts to come to the aid of a King who had lost the support of his capital and largest seaport and who was likely to lose the support of his fleet, whose principal naval dockyard at Chatham was already in the hands of Parliament and most of whose captains and crews were soon to declare their allegiance to the Puritan Earl of Warwick, the Lord High Admiral, a forthright, level-headed man of ‘a pleasant and companionable wit and conversation, of an universal jollity’, as Edward Hyde described him, who in turn declared for Parliament and was to make an incalculable contribution to the success of its cause.

      Faced with the prospect of losing control of the land forces of the country as well as of the navy, the King dug in his heels. Months before, a Militia Bill, which would have effectively transferred military command from the King to Parliament, had been proposed. It was now pressed upon him again. He would never accept it, he protested. ‘By God! Not for an hour! You have asked that of me which was never asked of any King.’

      The House of Commons declined to accept the King’s refusal. They issued the Bill on the authority of Parliament as an Ordinance, providing for the safeguarding of the realm, revoking military appointments previously made by the King, and taking it upon themselves to appoint the Lords Lieutenants of counties who were to be responsible for the recruitment of troops. It was a provocation which the King could not accept, his determination never to lose his right to command his army being just as fixed as his resolve never to lose the right to choose his own advisers. Much to the unconcealed pleasure of extremists on both sides, the battle lines were now drawn: the time for talking and compromise had passed; the struggle was about to begin.

      Indeed, it had, in a sense, already begun. In almost every county where beacons were being set and postboys galloped down the roads with urgent messages, there were quarrels and occasional fights; men walked about armed and shouted insults to each other across the streets. Even in the closest families there were deep divisions. In the Verney family, for example, a family described by the King as ‘the model he would propose to gentlemen’, the father, Sir Edmund Verney, Knight-Marshal of the King’s Palace, although prompted in the past by ‘his dislike of Laudian practices’ to vote steadily in the House of Commons in opposition to the King’s wishes, felt in duty bound to stand by his master when called upon to do so. His third son, Edmund, who was to die fighting in Ireland, also sided with the King. But Edmund’s eldest brother, Ralph, Member of Parliament for Aylesbury, threw in his lot with Parliament, much to the family’s distress. ‘I beseech you consider,’ Edmund wrote to him, ‘that majesty is sacred; God sayeth, “Touch not myne anointed.” Although I would willingly lose my right hand that you had gone the other way, yet I will never consent that this dispute shall make a quarrel between us. There be too many to fight with besides ourselves. I pray God grant a sudden and firm peace, that we may safely meet in person as well as affection. Though I am tooth and nail for the King’s cause, and shall endure so to the death, whatever his fortune be; yet, sweet brother, let not this my opinion – for it is guided by my conscience – nor any other report which you can hear of me cause a diffidence of my true love to you.’

      Their father confessed that he did ‘not like the Quarrel’ and heartily wished ‘the King would yield and consent to what they desire’. But his conscience was concerned ‘in honour and in gratitude’. He had eaten the King’s bread and ‘served him near thirty Years’, and he would ‘not do so base a Thing as to foresake him’ now.

      The Cornish squire Sir Bevil Grenville, grandson of Queen Elizabeth’s admiral, ‘a lover of learning and a genial host’, who had many friends amongst the Parliamentarians and was to die fighting bravely against them, said much the same thing: ‘I cannot contain myself within my doors when the King of England’s standard waves in the field, the cause being such as to make all that die in it little inferior to martyrs…I go with joy and comfort to venture a life in as good a cause and with as good a company as ever Englishman did; and I do take God to witness, if I were to choose a death it would be no other but this.’

      For men like Edmund Verney and Bevil Grenville it was not only that the King’s majesty was sacrosanct, there was also the belief that the King was the defender of the true Church; and although religion became of much more importance later in the struggle than it was in the beginning, it was even now of grave concern. Moreover, while it was never primarily a class struggle, there was an undeniable fear amongst many of the King’s supporters that the lower classes would use this opportunity to turn upon their masters, that the predominantly Puritan merchants and shopkeepers of the towns were intent on upsetting the structure of power to their own advantage, that the King’s opponents represented rebellion and chaos as opposed to law and order. Sir Thomas Gardiner, the Recorder of London, told Ralph Verney that he had overheard the most anarchic speeches being made in Oxfordshire, working men announcing, ‘The gentry have been our masters for a long time and now we have a chance to master them.’ ‘Now they know their strength,’ Gardiner added, ‘it shall go hard but they will use it.’

      Many of those who sided with СКАЧАТЬ