Cavaliers and Roundheads. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ of whom resented the King’s having resorted to an ancient and, for them, most inconvenient tradition by calling upon his tenants-in-chief to attend upon him with an appropriate number of men. ‘We have had a most cold, wet and long time of living in the field,’ wrote Thomas Windebank, one of the many sons of the King’s Secretary of State, Sir Francis Windebank, when the war was over, ‘but kept ourselves warm with the hope of rubbing, fubbing and scrubbing those scurvy, filthy, dirty, nasty, lousy, itchy, scabby, shitten, stinking, slovenly, snottynosed, logger-headed, foolish, insolent, proud, beggarly, impertinent, absurd, grout-headed [daft], villainous, barbarous, beastial, false, lying, roguish, devilish, long-eared, short-haired, damnable, atheistical, puritanical crew of the Scottish Covenant.’

      As the Scottish rebel army advanced purposefully towards the border, the English forces began to crumble away; and at Berwick in June the King, who – always reluctant to recognize that his authority was limited by what it was possible to achieve – had declared that he would ‘rather dye than yield to these impertinent and damnable demands’ of the Scots, was now obliged to come to terms and to agree to a meeting of a General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and to the election of a Scottish Parliament to negotiate a peace. The differences between the two sides, however, particularly on the question of bishops, were too marked for settlement. The Scottish Parliament was adjourned and war seemed inevitable once more.

      Thomas Wentworth, soon to be created Earl of Strafford, came over from Ireland to give his advice in 1639. The King’s principal Secretary of State at this time was Sir Henry Vane, an assiduous courtier of the Queen, a ‘busy and bustling man’, smooth, cunning, evasive and equivocal. His views, when he could be prevailed upon to express them, contrasted sharply with those of the Earl of Strafford, whom he much disliked and by whom he was much distrusted in turn. It was Strafford’s opinion that prompt, vigorous and if necessary ruthless action was essential. For far too long the government of the country had been drifting along indecisively, uncertainly directed by such incompetent and procrastinating ministers as Vane who told the King what he wanted to hear rather than what he ought to know. In pain, limping from gout and weakened by dysentery, Strafford was blunt and irritable, his ‘soure and haughty temper’ as Philip Warwick described it, much exacerbated. To resolve the country’s problems, he said, a very large sum of money would be needed; therefore a new Parliament must be called.

      The King had always found it difficult to like Strafford. So had the Queen. But both recognized in him, as did William Laud, a man of forceful authority whose thoroughgoing policies had brought order and some measure of prosperity to Ireland and might extricate England from its present troubles. Strafford’s advice was accepted: in April 1640 the Members of what was to become known as the Short Parliament assembled in the chamber of the House which had remained empty and silent for so long.

      Most of these Members, elected for the first time, were inexperienced in the ways and customs of the House. They gazed about the chamber, one of them said, wondering ‘who should begin’. Some looked towards John Hampden, Member for Buckinghamshire, who was described by Edward Hyde, Member for Wootton Bassett, as ‘the most popular man in the House’. The eldest son of a Buckinghamshire landowner of ample fortune, Hampden had first been elected to Parliament in 1621, and had since achieved national fame by undergoing a term of imprisonment for refusing to pay Ship Money. Respected as Hampden was, though, he was not much of an orator and had always shown more aptitude for committee work than for public debate.

      It was left, therefore, to an older member who had first entered Parliament in 1614 to take the lead. This was John Pym, a thickset, scholarly-looking man, intense and studious, with a rough and shaggy appearance which gained him the nickname ‘Ox’. Like Eliot and Hampden and so many other Parliamentary leaders of his time, he came from an old country family. The son of a gentleman from Somerset, he had been at Oxford before entering the Middle Temple; and, though he was never called to the bar, his speeches were those of a clever lawyer, precise, considered, telling, quite without the frantic rhetoric of Sir John Eliot’s harangues.

      He had earned the dislike of the King by his speaking against the Duke of Buckingham, and he now alienated his erstwhile friend the Earl of Strafford by advising his fellow Members of the Commons to refuse to vote any money for the King’s war against the Scots until the country’s grievances had been considered and satisfied. Strafford reacted characteristically to this provocation: he advised the dissolution of Parliament and, since an army strong enough to subdue the Scottish rebels could not be raised in England, the use against them of an army from Ireland. The situation, Strafford insisted, was getting out of hand: there was rioting in the City; south of the river a mob had surged towards Lambeth Palace, forcing the Archbishop to seek shelter in Whitehall; apprentices, dock hands and watermen were marching through the streets with drums, waving staves at passers-by and shopkeepers. ‘Unless you hang up some of them,’ Strafford warned the King, ‘you will do no good with them.’ Several rioters were accordingly imprisoned; two of the ringleaders were hanged; and the rack was brought out for the last time in England to torture one of them. Order for a time was restored. But the City Aldermen continued to refuse to contribute to the loan which was essential to a successful prosecution of the Scottish war.

      The English army which marched north that summer against the Scottish rebels was consequently both underpaid and ill-supplied as well as ill-disciplined: two Roman Catholic officers were murdered by their men, who then deserted. Nor did it have the undivided support of the civilians it left behind. Before it marched two of its soldiers fell into conversation with two clothiers in the Green Dragon Tavern in Bishopsgate Street. The clothiers expressed sympathy for the Scots, whereupon one of the soldiers said they must be Puritans. One of the clothiers asked if ‘he could tell what a Puritan was, whereat [the soldier] flew into such a rage he threw a trencher, and hit him on the head’.

      The English army, defeated at Newburn on 28 August, met the fate which all sensible men had predicted; and the terms to which the King was obliged to agree were deeply humiliating: the Scottish army was to be paid £850 a day until its claims were settled; and it was to be left in control of Northumberland and Durham. The Scottish provincial government was also to be paid its expenses. So yet another Parliament would have to be called in London, and it was not likely to accept dissolution as tamely as had its predecessor, nor to rest until the King’s ‘evil counsellors’ had been removed from office.

      The Members of this new Parliament, which, summoned in November 1640, was to become known as the Long Parliament, directed their attack first against Strafford, whom they had arrested and taken away to the Tower. Then William Laud was impeached and sent to join him there. Several less courageous counsellors slunk abroad.

      The Queen took it upon herself to stiffen her husband’s resolve. Distressed by the death of their little daughter Anne, frequently in tears, sleeping badly and feeling ill, she pleaded with the King to stand firm against the demands of Parliament, not to disband the Irish army, at one moment plotting to rescue Strafford from the Tower, at another trying to placate John Pym and his fellow Puritans by reducing the number of Roman Catholics in her household and by arranging for the marriage of her eldest daughter Mary to the Protestant Prince of Orange, whose requests for the hand of her second daughter Elizabeth had previously been rejected with scorn, constantly badgering the King not to give way to the Commons’ demands.

      The King’s policy, such as it was in these alarming months, was to wait upon events, promising and prevaricating, standing his ground as long as possible, then reluctantly giving way, endeavouring to persuade the Commons that their revolutionary demands threatened to bring the whole country to disaster, and that, as he put it to them himself, a skilful watchmaker might improve the working of a watch by taking it to pieces and cleaning it, provided that, when he put it together again, he left ‘not one pin out of it’.

      Yet the determination of Strafford, endorsed by the Queen, to remain in the Tower for ever rather than to advise the King to surrender to Parliament in exchange for his freedom made a reconciliation with the Commons difficult to achieve, while the need to pay the Scottish rebels to prevent СКАЧАТЬ