Acknowledgements

I am profoundly grateful to Jeremy Black for the invitation to write this book. It was the perfect project at the perfect time, and I cannot thank him enough for giving me the opportunity. It has been a real pleasure working with Macmillan Press. I especially appreciate the professionalism of Vanessa Graham, Simon Winder and Judy Marshall. As always, I am indebted to Maija Jansson for her many favours and invaluable assistance at the Yale Center for Parliamentary History. I am also grateful to two colleagues who read parts of the manuscript and gave me excellent suggestions. Johann Sommerville commented on chapter 2, and Caroline Hibbard commented on chapters 3 and 4. I have profited greatly from their comments, though of course they are not responsible for what I have ended up saying.

A book of this sort, surveying the current state of scholarship in a field, is especially indebted to all the many authors who have contributed to the held. In my effort to assess this previous work, I hope readers will find that I have been as free with my praise as my criticism. I hope this is particularly true regarding the work of Conrad Russell. Some years ago Professor Russell and J. H. Hexter, an unlikely combination to be sure, gave me critical support and encouragement which I will never forget.

To My Parents

Introduction

‘I do plead for the liberties of the people of England more than you do’, King Charles I told his accusers. But there was no dissuading the makeshift court that had been assembled to engineer his execution. It took only a week for the judges to announce their predetermined verdict: ‘that he, the said Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy to the good people of this nation, shall be put to death by the severing of his head from his body’. Thus it was that on a cold January day in 1649, King Charles laid his head on the block, gave the signal to his executioner, and was beheaded with one blow of an axe in full public view. The crowd that had gathered for the spectacle clid not burst out in cheers. A young man who stood among them reported only ‘such a groan as I never heard before, and desire I may never hear again’. 1

It has never been easy for King Charles I to get a fair trial, but now is as opportune a time as any. The past two decades have witnessed a veritable deluge of new works about early Stuart politics. While these new works have caused excitement, they have also caused confusion. It has not always been clear how one work relates to another or how, in general, this new scholarship relates to older scholarship. More importantly for our purposes, it has not always been clear what the net effect of all this new scholarship is on the reputation of the king. The present book attempts to dispel this confusion. It guides the reader through recent literature about Charles, clarifies the relationship between one work and another, and assesses the extent to which new scholarship has improved upon old. This analysis is carried out, however, within a narrative framework which should make it more interesting and intelligible. The overall organisation of the book is chronological, and each chapter begins with a brief overview of events. Along the way there is enough background and explanation to meet the needs of readers not already well acquainted with the subject. We thus tell the story of King Charles I’s reign while simultaneously assessing the different interpretations

Charles I

which historians have attempted to impose on that story. Our goal -as the title of this series, ‘British History in Perspective’, suggests -has been to put Charles back into perspective by examining his life in relation to what historians have been saying about that life. A book of this nature cannot have the uninterrupted dramatic drive of a biography, but it can engage the reader at a more advanced level where the subject matter of history and the creative intellect of the historian meet.

The confusion about Charles I is a fairly recent phenomenon. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the great historian S. R. Gardiner wrote a multi-volume history of Charles’s reign that was so detailed and thorough it remained the standard authority for nearly 100 years. Writing in the Victorian era, it was natural for Gardiner to attribute the failures of Charles’s reign chiefly to defects in the king’s own character. As Gardiner explained, Charles worked hard and paid close attention to the minutest details of business. ‘For government in the higher sense’, however, ‘he had no capacity.’ To begin with, Charles did not view the world realistically. He ‘looked upon the whole world through a distorting lens’. He ‘refused to look facts in the face’ or ‘to subordinate that which was only desirable to that which was possible’. As a result, Charles was inclined to misread a situation and overestimate what he was capable of achieving. The problem was compounded because, once Charles adopted a plan, he was ‘obstinate in refusing to abandon’ it. Given these predispositions, Charles naturally encountered plenty of criticism, but he showed no capacity to absorb this criticism or learn from his mistakes. He ‘had no power of stepping out of himself to see how his actions looked to other people’. He was ‘uncompromising’ and ‘did not like to be contradicted’. He displayed a ‘persistent determination to ignore all opinions divergent from his own’. Instead of adopting a conciliatory stance, Charles’s characteristic reaction was ‘to relapse into silence, to fall back upon his insulted dignity, and to demand’ submission. One of Charles’s worst habits was his penchant for dividing people ‘into two simple classes - into those who agreed with him, and those who did not’. He combined ‘blindness, narrowmindedness, and obstinacy... with an exaggerated sense of the errors of his opponents’. All of these qualities made it likely that Charles would provoke confrontations and then lack the deftness to escape from those confrontations without making matters worse. There was a final, perhaps fatal, obstacle to any amicable resolution where Charles was concerned: he could not be trusted. Deep down inside,

Introduction

3

Charles lacked an ‘elemental quality of veracity’. He ‘gave and broke his promises’; he made ‘promises never intended to be fulfilled’. He practised ‘duplicity’, used ‘deception’, and resorted to ‘doubledealing’. 2 He was, to put it succinctly, a had king.

Near the middle of the twentieth century, several historians, more or less inspired by Marxism, tried to replace Gardiner’s Victorian emphasis on character with a more modern emphasis on impersonal socio-economic forces. The most famous episode in this effort was the ‘gentry controversy’, which promised a great deal more than it was able to deliver. Ultimately, it proved impossible to demonstrate that the political events of Charles’s reign, particularly the outbreak of the Civil War, were byproducts of deeper socio-economic transformations. A prominent founder of this school of interpretation was R. H. Tawney, and its most brilliant exponent was Christopher Hill. Back in 1940 Hill confidently asserted that the English Revolution was ‘a class war’ and ‘a great social movement like the French Revolution of 1789’/ Over time, however, Hill modified this crude Marxist formulation and developed greater appreciation for the complexity of history. 4 He attached increasing importance to the role of ideas and religion (particularly Puritanism); and he did not discount the personal role played by King Charles. In his popular textbook, The Century of Revolution, Hill listed the character of the king among the causes of the Civil War, and he elaborated: ‘the King’s high idea of his own station, his rigid inability to compromise in time, and his transparent dishonesty, made it impossible for him ever to have functioned as a constitutional monarch’. 5 Although Hill refined his position over time, he never stopped hoping for ‘a new socio-economic interpretation’/ 1 In Lawrence Stone, another major exponent of this approach, the disillusionment was more complete. His Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642 is sometimes described as a reassertion of the socio-economic interpretation, but a close reading of the book reveals a strong current of doubt running beneath the surface. In the opening chapter of his book Stone surveyed several social scientific theories of revolution, but he made very little effort to connect these to the actual revolution in England. In the balance of his book Stone dutifully rehashed the gentry controversy and offered numerous other sociological arguments, but he was forced again and again to admit: ‘None of the polarities of feudal-bourgeois, employer-employee, rich-poor, rising-declining, county-parish gentry seem to have much relevance to what actually happened in the 1640s.’ Stone started with the assumption that ‘this

Charles I

is more than a mere rebellion against a particular king’, but in fact the closer he got to the actual outbreak of Civil War, the more decisive seemed the ‘misguided personal decisions’, ‘bottomless duplicity’, and ‘proven untrustworthiness’ of King Charles. After the original publication of Stone’s book, he came more and more to appreciate the king’s personal responsibility. In a postscript added in 1985 Stone admitted that the importance he had attached to ‘the folly, obstinacy and duplicity of Charles I in causing the catastrophe was if anything understated’. Charles was, as Stone now described him, ‘a man who made every mistake in the book, and in consequence eventually brought disaster on himself and his country’. 7

One positive effect of the gentry controversy was that it spawned a multitude of local studies. These studies shifted attention away from Charles and the court to the countryside, away from the centre to the localities. The authors of these studies had remarkably little to say about Charles. They traced the lives of numerous provincial gentry whose dominant concerns revolved around county politics instead of national politics. For Alan Everitt, a pioneer in this field, there was practically no national consciousness but only ‘the localism of provincial people’. The county community was ‘a strange and introverted society’, and each county was ‘a little self-centred kingdom on its own’. 8 Similarly, Thomas Barnes’s early study of Somerset 1625-1640 was over 300 pages long, but the index listed only fourteen references to Kang Charles. Where Barnes did refer to Charles, he took an astonishingly original approach. ‘Few kings who have sat on England’s throne and few ministers who have counselled them’, wrote Barnes, ‘appear to have been more genuinely desirous of the subjects’ good than were Charles I and his principal counsellors.’ 9 This line of argument might have led to a wholesale reassessment of Charles, but neither Barnes nor other local historians embarked on such a bold project. In subsequent local studies Charles remained a shadowy figure relegated to the background. Although Charles was a far less prominent figure in these local studies than he had been in earlier histories that emphasised the high politics of Parliament and the court, he still oddly remained the decisive figure: royal policies were repeatedly shown to be the moving force that stirred up local enmities and laid the groundwork for what John Morrill called The Revolt of the Provinces . 10

A thoroughgoing reconsideration of King Charles did not occur until the development of ‘revisionism’. 11 This ambiguous term is perhaps best defined by concrete examples, and we shall consider

Introduction

5

several of these in the following pages. At this point, however, it may help if we provide a general characterisation of two kinds of revisionism in the early Stnart period. The revisionism that had the greatest effect on the reputation of King Charles dealt chiefly with the politics of the 1620s and 1630s. Works of this sort clearly deserved to be called revisionist because they did attempt to ‘revise’ the longstanding interpretation of S. R. Gardiner (and his successors such as J. R. Tanner, G. M. Trevelyan, and Wallace Notestein). Gardiner and his successors were faulted for writing the history of this period as if events were.leading inexorably towards Civil War (a teleological or Whig view) and for making critics of the Crown seem too modern and heroic. Revisionists concerned with the 1620s and 1630s questioned the whole concept of ‘opposition’ under Charles, and their work generally tended to cast the king himself in a more favourable light. This was truly revisionist.

Recent scholarship on the later years of Charles’s reign, especially regarding the outbreak of the Civil War, is also sometimes referred to as ‘revisionist’, but here the label is less deserved. For people who still believed in the socio-economic interpretation of history (the followers of Tawney, Hill, and Stone), this new scholarship looked revisionist because it stressed 'short-term causes of the Civil War as opposed to long-term socio-economic causes. There were a surprising number of these diehard disciples still around who presumed their interpretation was being challenged. They labelled new work about the roots of the Civil War as ‘revisionist’, and the label has stuck. For the most part, however, the so-called revisionists of the Civil War period did not even bother to address the dead issues of the socio-economic school. 1 " If one judges these historians against the real standard - that is the classic work of S. R. Gardiner - they appear less revisionist. Indeed they wrote detailed political narratives very similar to Gardiner’s. What distinguished their work from Gardiner’s was their emphasis on the accidental and unpredictable course of events, as opposed to his dramatic story of escalating conflict reaching its natural climax in the Civil War. They also told a more mundane story. In their version, faction, patronage, and self-interest were more important than high-sounding concepts like liberty and constitutional conflict. Most recently they have stressed the fact that Charles ruled over multiple kingdoms and the Civil War must therefore be viewed as a truly British, not just English, phenomenon. For the most part, however, revisionist work on the period surrounding the outbreak of Civil War has done more to

Charles I

augment than dispute Gardiner’s account. This is particularly true with respect to King Charles. Recent historians of the Civil War may be called revisionists for other reasons, but they have not revised the traditional view of the king. Their portrait of Charles may be more detailed, more complex, more finely nuanced than Gardiner’s; but it is still recognisably the same man. Consequently, as we shall see, it is far more difficult to put Charles back into perspective in the 1620s and 1630s (where differing viewpoints abound) than it is in the 1640s (where, despite other heated controversies, there is general agreement about Charles).

Turning from this general characterisation of revisionism as a movement to the specific work of individual historians, we can see more precisely how King Charles’s reputation has been affected. One of the first historians to call for a revised perspective on early Stuart politics was G. R. Elton. Although his own great expertise lay in the Tudor century, Elton began in the 1960s to publish a series of provocative essays on ‘The Stuart Century’. In these pioneering essays Elton anticipated many of the themes that would be associated with the revisionist approach to early Stuart politics: the Civil War was not inevitable (in Elton’s famous phrase, there was no ‘high road’ to Civil War); too much attention had been given to conflict in early Stuart Parliaments; too little attention had been given to harmony, shared assumptions, and the routine work of Parliaments; and the Civil War was more a breakdown of government than a Puritan or social revolution. On the question why the government broke down, however, Elton’s answer was decidedly old-fashioned: ‘the failure of Charles’s government ... was conditioned by the inability of the king and his ministers to operate any political system’. The system of government did break down. ‘But it did not break down because it had been unworkable from the first.’ Rather: ‘It broke down because the early Stuart governments could not manage or persuade, because they were incompetent’. 1 " Thus Elton called for a radically altered view of early Stuart politics but not a radically different view of King Charles.

Conrad Russell took the next logical step and quickly became the pre-eminent revisionist of the early Stuart period. Russell agreed with Elton that traditional parliamentary history had exaggerated constitutional conflict and assumed the inevitabilitv of the Civil War, but he parted company with Elton on the subject of Charles. In a pathbreaking article published in 1976, Russell declared, ‘it is impossible to follow Professor Elton in laying all the blame on

Introduction

7

incompetent kingship’. Russell was not concerned in this article with Charles’s competence or incompetence. The only adjective he attached to Charles was ‘poverty-stricken’. The article was not about Charles but about the structures, institutions, processes, and circumstances within which he operated. Russell portrayed the Crown and Parliament as ‘two declining institutions, both overtaken by the functional breakdown of English administration’. One major underlying cause of that breakdown was the increasing gap between the cost of government and royal revenue. Another major cause was the ‘permanent tension between the centre and the localities’. It was these impersonal, structural problems that undermined parliamentary politics, turning what Elton called the ‘point of contact’ into what Russell called the ‘point of friction’. 14 In 1979 Russell elaborated on these themes in his landmark book entitled Parliaments and, English Politics 1621-1629. There Russell laid particular emphasis on the role played by war in exacerbating the problems of early Stuart government and driving it to the point of breakdown. Russell’s overall conclusion was that the difficulties Charles encountered in these years were ‘first and foremost, not the difficulties of a bad King, but the difficulties of a nation reluctantly at war’. 15

On one front, then, revisionism made Charles look better by emphasising the daunting circumstances he faced: inadequate financial resources, structural weaknesses in the system of government, and an antiquated administration that tottered on the brink of ‘functional breakdown’, particularly under the strains of war. How could anyone have made this shaky system run smoothly? On yet another front, revisionists made Charles look better by taking a more cynical view of his contemporary antagonists. J. N. Ball, for example, took a more realistic view of Sir John Eliot, transforming the heroic martyr for liberty into an inept tactician who prevented an accommodation from developing between Charles and his Parliaments at the end of the 1620s. 1(> Similarly, Anthony Fletcher made John Pym seem the wrecker of a later period. As Fletcher told the story, Pym and a handful of associates who shared his warped fears of a popish plot drove the Tong Parliament into ‘a war that nobody wanted'. 1 ' Members of Parliament in general were made to seem less like principled men fighting over lofty constitutional issues and more like petty politicians fighting over money and power. 18 They resented the Duke of Buckingham’s monopoly of office. 19 They used Parliaments as opportunities to settle personal grudges and pursue their factional rivalries. They failed to comprehend the financial needs of the

Charles I

Crown. They were parochial men. Their foremost loyalty was to their counties, and they were paralysed by fear of offending their constituents back home. Far from seeking a larger voice in national affairs, they avoided responsibility."" Thus Parliament began to look, not like the seedbed of liberty, but like a hotbed of personal motives, ignorance, and obstructionism. How could Charles be expected to govern effectively when his work was constantly undermined by these factious and irresponsible Parliaments?

Charles did not have to be glorified. He simply looked better by comparison when Parliament and its members were cut down to size. Works published at the end of the 1970s had harsh words for Parliament. Russell insinuated that Parliament was ‘a negative, irresponsible, obstructionist, and vindictive body’. 21 Kevin Sharpe was equally contemptuous. ‘A disorganized, divided, and undisciplined House of Commons’, he charged, ‘proved unable to give counsel for the governance of the realm.’ 22 However, the prize for Parliamentbashing must go to J. P. Kenyon. In his textbook for the period, Kenyon ridiculed early Stuart Parliaments, describing them as ‘frenetically excited’ and subject to ‘dizzying changes of mood and outbursts of violent emotion’. Kenyon scolded his fellow historians for treating ‘Parliament’s excesses with the fond indulgence of a psychotherapist towards a schizoid juvenile delinquent’. It was erroneous, wrote Kenyon, to believe ‘that the political struggles of the seventeenth century revolved around nineteenth-century notions like personal liberty, freedom of speech or constitutional government’. MPs were not champions of liberty. Sir John Eliot, for one, was ‘unbalanced’ and his behaviour in Parliament was ‘indefensible’. 2, Finally, in a heated exchange with J. H. Hexter in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement , Kenyon described Parliament as ‘a parcel of self-centred and largely ignorant lawyers and landowners, to whom “liberty” meant little more than the freedom to do what you willed with those below you without interference from those above you’. 24

It was getting difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Indeed, one of the most salutary effects of revisionism was to destroy the simplistic assumption that there were two mutually exclusive ‘sides’ in early Stuart politics. This simply was not the way contemporaries viewed politics. It is anachronistic to impose the concept of adversarial politics on a political culture where it did not yet exist. 25 It was erroneous to think in terms of Crown versus Parliament. Parliament was not a monolithic bloc, many of its

Introduction

9

members were dependants of the Crown, and none of its members would have thought of themselves as standing in opposition to the Crown. 2b Likewise, it was erroneous to view early Stuart politics as a contest between ‘court’ and ‘country’. 27 These were not polar opposites; they cannot even be entirely differentiated from one another. Consequently, when a man like Sir Thomas Wentworth who had been a leading critic of royal policies at the end of the 1620s became a leading minister of the Crown in the 1630s, he had not gone over to the other side, least of all from the good ‘country’ side to the bad ‘court’ side. 28 Nor were there sharp ideological differences in the politics of early Stuart England. Commenting on the 1620s, Russell observed that ‘it is remarkable how little ideological division developed during these years’. 29 If contemporaries did not view politics in adversarial terms, if they did not see themselves as belonging exclusively to either court or country 7 , if they did not belong to one ideological camp or the other, then this necessarily cast Charles in a better light. He was no longer the focus of opposition, the chief protagonist in a battle between competing ideologies, the villain in a moral tale about the struggle for liberty against tyranny.

If there was any one villain in the early years of Charles’s reign, one might have thought it was the infamous Duke of Buckingham. However, in 1981 Roger Lockyer produced the most truly revisionist work of the decade: Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham 1592-1628. In this densely documented book, Lockyer completely altered the traditional view of Buckingham. Instead of being a political lightweight who ruined the early years of Charles’s reign, Buckingham was apparently a conscientious administrator, courageous leader, and visionary statesman who happily forgave his enemies and struggled valiantly to prevent the Habsburgs from overrunning all of Europe. In Lockyer’s view, ‘there was not a great deal wrong with Buckingham’s policies other than the money with which to carry them into effect’, and Parliament turned against him merely because he was ‘the personification of their own neuroses’. 30 Lockyer’s only concern was to exonerate Buckingham, but his work tended to vindicate Charles as well. The two men were inseparable political allies united in a common policy until the Duke was felled by an assassin’s knife. If Lockyer could succeed in improving Buckingham’s reputation, therefore, it would necessarily improve Charles’s reputation too.

While most of the work during the last two decades that enhanced Charles’s reputation did so only implicitly, a few did so explicitly.

Charles I

Stephen Orgel, Roy Strong, and R. Malcolm Smuts, for example, explored Charles’s contributions to the formation of a court culture that embodied the highest ideals of art and politics. 31 Martin J. Havran found ‘ample reason to amend to some degree the heavily negative interpretation of his life and reign’. Havran praised Charles for his broad-mindedness towards Roman Catholicism. He described Charles as ‘a gentle, humble, shy, compassionate, and scholarly man’ who won the respect of his contemporaries through his ‘deep spirituality, quiet,strength of character, and equanimity under stress’. 32 By far the most extensive defence of Charles, however, came from Kevin Sharpe. In two early articles that anticipated his later book on the subject, Sharpe took a distinctly sympathetic view of Charles, portraying him first as the victim of bad counsel in the 1620s and then as an earnest reformer in the 1630s who worked hard to foster order and virtue. 33

As a result of all the foregoing works, by the early 1980s it looked as if Charles’s reputation might take a permanent turn for the better. But then came another wave of new works that gravitated back towards Gardiner’s negative estimation. Local studies by William Hunt and Ann Hughes were less parochial than their predecessors; Charles figured more prominently in their exploration of an alienated countryside. 34 Richard Cust’s study of The Forced Loan and English Politics uncovered the darker side of Charles who turned out to be a vindictive and suspicious king obsessed with loyalty. 30 L. J. Reeve’s Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule depicted an even more sinister and autocratic king. 30 Both authors suggested that Charles was paranoid. An anthology edited by Richard Cust and Ann Hughes rediscovered Conflict in Early Stuart England. 37 One chapter in that anthology by Christopher Thompson strongly argued for the ‘orthodox rather than revisionist interpretation’ of the king’s dealings with Parliament. 38 On another front, Caroline Hibbard, Nicholas Tyacke, and Julian Davies rewrote the religious history of the period; and though they disagreed in other important respects, they all heaped blame on Charles for fanning the fires of religious controversy. 39 Other authors exposed Charles’s mismanagement of Scotland. In Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement 1625-1641, Allan I. Macinnes portrayed Charles as a dogmatic, self-righteous, and inept absentee monarch who displayed ‘crass insensitivity to Scottish sensibilities’. 40 Similarly, Peter Donald’s An Uncounselled Ring: Charles I and the Scottish Troubles, 1637-41 placed much of the blame for the Scottish crisis on Charles, who ‘showed a staggering unwillingness to

Introduction

11

listen to moderate judgement’. 41 On a much more sweeping scale, f. P. Sommerville’s book about Politics and Ideology in England 1603-1640 attempted to re-establish the importance of competing political visions and the reality of opposition in early Stuart politics. As Sommerville saw it, ‘ideological conflict is a blindingly obvious feature of early Stuart history’, and Charles played the central role in precipitating that conflict. 42 Finally, when it came to the Civil War, the prodigious work of John Morrill interpreted that event as an explosive combination of religious zeal and a king who was not only incompetent but ‘inaccessible, glacial, self-righteous, deceitful’. 43

Meanwhile, Conrad Russell did not stand still. He continued to downplay the role of constitutional or ideological conflict, but his opinion of King Charles proved more susceptible to change. As Russell turned his attention from the 1620s to the events surrounding the outbreak of the Civil War, he took an increasingly critical view of Charles. This negative view first appeared in a series of articles Russell published during the 1980s. Russell still sympathised with Charles in so far as he was handicapped by inadequate revenue and the difficulty of governing three disparate kingdoms, but the king’s faults now came to the foreground. Charles was a ruler who practically invited resistance. He failed to see political reality, refused to recognise the limits of the possible, compromised only under duress, broke his promises, and habitually resorted to force. 44 How far Russell had moved back toward S. R. Gardiner’s opinion of Charles was finally evident when he published his two major books on the outbreak of the Civil War: The Causes of the English Civil War in 1990 and The Fall of the British Monarchies in 1991. 45 To be sure, Russell’s approach to these years was far from reductionist. He explored an immensely complex web of circumstances, but the trail kept leading inexorably back to Charles. In one place, for example, Russell argued that Civil War resulted from the conjunction of seven key ‘events and non-events’, yet he observed that ‘nothing except perhaps Charles I can be likely to have been a cause of all seven of th ese’. Obviously Charles was not ‘the sole cause of the Civil War’, but he did appear to be the sine qua non. In the end, Russell concluded, ‘I find civil war without him almost impossible to imagine’. 46

The tide appeared to be turning completely against Charles, but then Kevin Sharpe’s massive study of The Personal Rule of Charles / appeared. Sharpe’s book was a throwback to the revisionism of the 1970s. Unrepentant and unpersuaded by more recent studies, Sharpe persisted in the themes that dominated his earlier articles. As

Charles I

Sharpe represented him, Charles was driven into the personal rule of the 1630s by the failings of Parliament, and he thereupon undertook an ambitious programme to reform church and state that was far more successful and generated far less resentment than previous historians allowed. If Charles lacked the aptitude of a politician, Sharpe argued, so much the better. Unlike most politicians, Charles was a man ‘of profound conscience and deep principle’ who steadfastly adhered to his convictions. 47 One cannot help but admire the magnitude and audacity of Sharpe’s defence of Charles, amounting to nearly 1000 pages and appearing almost simultaneously alongside Russell’s two more orthodox books. Both historians displayed an awesome command of the sources. Both wrote enormously detailed and compelling narratives. Where the character of Charles I was concerned, however, they could not both be right.

Where are we left, then, with respect to Charles? Despite the flurry of monographs or perhaps because of them, no one has yet attempted the daunting task of writing a whole new biography of the king. 48 That leaves us with a series of scholarly but piecemeal studies produced over the last two decades, each of which focuses on only an isolated period or aspect of his reign. Furthermore, many of these studies make little reference to one another or to previous secondary literature. This mode of operation makes it difficult for readers, even knowledgeable readers, to see how one work relates to another and to judge which is superior. A trend back toward Gardiner’s low opinion of Charles is evident in recent literature, culminating in Russell’s two formidable books. But how is this trend to be reconciled with earlier revisionist work on the 1620s, including Russell’s own, that portrayed Charles in a more positive light, and with Sharpe’s tenaciously favourable portrait of the 1630s? Clearly this is an opportune time - indeed an urgent time - to evaluate recent literature, weigh the relative merits of competing views, and put Charles back into historical perspective. Among the questions we will have to ask are the following. Did Charles create the circumstances of his own ruin, or was he a victim of circumstance? Did Charles change from one decade to the next, or can we find enduring qualities in his character throughout his reign? In the 1620s did he blunder into war and then mismanage the war effort, or was he urged into war by a Parliament whose subsequent lack of support sabotaged any hope of success? In the 1630s did he foster virtue, honour, and efficiency; or did he alienate sizeable numbers of his subjects through his domineering religious and fiscal policies? Was

Introduction

13

Charles chiefly to blame for the outbreak of the Civil War? Was he overwhelmed by the inherent difficulty of ruling multiple kingdoms, or did his own actions transform a difficult situation into an impossible one? Did his religious policies provoke the last of Europe’s religious wars, or was he the victim of zealous Puritanism, rabid anti-Catholicism, or a handful of desperate politicians like Pym who demonised the king in order to save themselves? How well did he acquit himself during the Civil War? Why did he fail to come to terms with the victors? And in the end, to put it bluntly, did Charles get what he deserved?

Prior Commitments

King Charles I did not begin his reign with a clean slate. When he ascended to the throne in 1625, he was already saddled with two huge liabilities - the Duke of Buckingham and war - and these liabilities bedevilled him for the next four years. The first step toward putting Charles into perspective is to understand how he had acquired these liabilities, and more especially to consider how far they were liabilities of his own making.

Buckingham

It was improbable, to say the least, that Charles would befriend Buckingham, who was the notorious favourite of his father, King James VI and I. Every indication we have is that Charles abhorred his father’s lifestyle and was determined to be as unlike his father as possible. Kevin Sharpe observed that Charles ‘was in many respects a complete contrast to his father’; and Thomas Cogswell called him a ‘mirror opposite’ of his father. 1 Whereas James presided over a raucous, disorderly court, Charles would make his court a model of decorum and order. Whereas James was a coarse man who drank to excess, Charles would prove to be an abstemious man of refined tastes and one of the greatest connoisseurs of art in his day. Whereas James was sociable and ebullient, Charles would be taciturn and private. Whereas James was alienated from his wife and engaged in a series of intimate relationships with male favourites, Charles and his wife would have an ideal marriage. Historians have not sufficiently

Prior Commitments

15

appreciated the degree to which Charles intentionally defined himself as the opposite of his father. It was not just that Charles happened to be the opposite of his father; he consciously set out to make himself the opposite of his father.

If Charles so abhorred his father’s ways, why did he befriend his father’s most famous favourite? To answer that question, we have to know more about the emotional tenor of his early life. Charles was born in Scotland in 1600, three years before his father succeeded to the English throne. Charles began life as a lonely and sick child who had difficulty learning to talk and walk. His mother, Anne of Denmark, has been redticed to a misogynist’s caricature by historians. Maurice Ashley actually called her a ‘dumb blond’." In reality, though, Anne was an intelligent woman who wanted to take a more personal role in the raising of her children than she was allowed to. Anne fought fiercely to keep her children by her side, but James insisted that Charles be removed from his immediate family and raised by guardians. ’ When James inherited the English throne in 1603, the whole family moved to England except Charles who was left behind for another year to improve his health before undertaking the arduous journey southward. He was nearly four years old when he rejoined his family in England. What made Charles’s childhood even worse was that he grew up in the shadow of his far more glamorous older brother, Prince Henry. Henry was widely admired except by King James who kept a jealous eye on his popular heir. Many people hoped that Henry would resume the Elizabethan war against Catholic Spain. As Roy Strong observed, the youthful prince became ‘the focus of a major popular cult ... the epitome of militant Protestant chivalry ’. Henry was enthusiastically grooming himself to play this heroic role when he died unexpectedly in 1612. 4 Despite his public image, Henry appears to have been a nasty older brother for Charles, lording his superior position over the younger boy and taunting him. What all this adds up to quite simply is a precarious and unhappy childhood; one need not agree with all the tenets of psychoanalysis to believe that it explains a great deal about Charles’s later behaviour, including his tell-tale stutter.

Charles was desperate for a friend. Coincidentally, as the health of King James deteriorated, Buckingham became more conscious of his own need to befriend Charles or face the prospect of losing everything when his royal benefactor died. Understandably, there was tension between Charles and Buckingham at hrst, since they were both in a way rival suitors for the king’s affection. On one occasion

Charles I

Charles was reported to have sprayed water on Buckingham. Judging from his later repudiation of James’s sexual mores, Charles must have had at least some inkling of the relationship between his father and Buckingham. But it is likely that the physical side of that relationship diminished over time (accelerated perhaps by the king’s declining health and Buckingham’s marriage in 1620); and that would help explain why Charles became less hostile toward Buckingham. James also took an active hand in this reconciliation; he very much wanted his son and his favourite to like each other. In a letter that he wrote to James several years later, Buckingham referred to ‘Baby Charles, whom you likewise by your good offices made my friend’, and he said that James ‘first planted me in your Baby Charles’s good opinion’. 5 It was certainly in Buckingham’s best interests to get along well with the heir to the throne. As Buckingham himself said, ‘I am suspected to look more to the rising sun, than my Maker’. 5 Charles * found, too, that if he wanted to stay on the good side of his father, Buckingham could be a useful ally.

Most historians characterise the friendship between Charles and Buckingham as brotherly. Charles Carlton, who has done most by far to explore the psychology of Charles’s childhood, described Buckingham as ‘a surrogate elder brother’, a ‘substitute for the elder brother he had lost six years before’/ Kevin Sharpe agreed that Buckingham played ‘the role of the charismatic elder sibling Charles had lost after the death of his radiant brother Henry’. 8 Roger Lockyer concurred that Charles found in Buckingham ‘not only the company he had hitherto lacked but also a replacement for his lost elder brother’. 9 Anyone who has lived unhappily in the shadow of an older sibling may well question the plausibility of this interpretation. Charles may have missed Prince Henry, but there is no reason to believe he was eager to rush out and replace him. Charles needed somebody who would make him feel better about himself and build up his self-esteem, not tear it down, as Henry had. This is the emotional need that Buckingham filled. He helped Charles to pass through his youthful identity crisis. He gave the young prince the necessary confidence to stand up to his father, even eventually to prevail over his father on the question of war. Buckingham became Charles’s alter ego. Together they were stronger than either one alone could have been. That is how Charles entered early adulthood thinking and acting in concert with Buckingham, and only the great favourite’s violent death would force Charles to go it alone.

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Rex Bellicosus

Charles came to the throne already allied to the death with Buckingham. He also came to the throne joined with Buckingham in a fierce determination to wage war. Why? There was pressure on Charles to take up the cause of militant international Protestantism after the death of Prince Henry, and this role might naturally have appealed to a young man. Judging from his coolness toward this crusade later in his life, however, it is doubtful that he would have embraced it at this point had it not been for other influences. Dearer to Charles’s heart was the plight of his sister Elizabeth, whose marriage to Frederick, the Elector of the Palatinate, placed her at the perilous centre of the Thirty Years War when it broke out in 1618. War also appealed to Charles as a way of declaring his independence and difference from his father. King James was a pacifist who abhorred violence in general and war in particular. One of his first accomplishments as king had been to end the protracted Elizabethan war with Spain. He had no interest in reviving that war, even after the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, even after his daughter and her husband were driven from their homeland. For his devotion to peace, James was styled Rex Pacificus. In this respect, too, Charles was determined to be different from his father. Finally, there was Charles’s own emotional make-up. As we will have ample opportunity to observe, he was quick to take offence, particularly when his will was thwarted or his honour questioned. His style of politics was confrontational. He was reported to have said early in life, ‘I cannot defend a bad nor yield in a good cause’. 10 While the sense of integrity implied by that statement is commendable, it also betrays an ‘unctuous rectitude’, to use L. J. Reeve’s phrase. 11 Charles tended to assume the righteousness of his own position and to be unyielding in its defence. All these qualities combined to make Charles a combative personality. It is a sobering fact to remember that he spent nearly half his reign at war - with Spain, with France, with his own subjects. As Bishop Goodman observed, ‘Never man did desire wars more than King Charles’. 12 He was Rex Bellicosus.

When Charles made his first major appearance on the public scene in the Parliament of 1621, his belligerent nature was not yet in full evidence. It was later said of Charles that he had ‘been bred in parliaments’. 13 The MP who made this statement (Sir Benjamin Rudyerd) meant it to imply that Charles could be expected to establish a good working relationship with Parliament. Charles’s

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behaviour in 1621 gave some reason to be optimistic on this score. His manner in the House of Lords appeared to he circumspect, but the attitude he expressed in private toward the lower House of Commons revealed a more spiteful and pugnacious side of his personality. From his vantage point in the Lords, Charles disapproved of the ‘unruly’ Commons, and he confided in Buckingham that he wished King James would issue orders that ‘such seditious fellows might be made an example to others’. He had spoken to members of the Privy Council on this matter, and they had agreed with him in general, ‘only the sending of authority to set seditious fellows fast is of my adding’. 14 It was, unfortunately, all too typical of Charles to brand MPs with sedition and try to suppress them by force. It was also typical of Charles to assume that Parliament should provide money as a matter of course. When the Commons approved a grant of two subsidies in 1621, he judged it ‘not so great a matter that the King need to be indulgent over them for it’. 15

In 1621 it was not yet unambiguously clear where Charles and Buckingham stood on the subject of war. Whatever their true sentiments, they had to defer to King James. Under the influence of the Spanish ambassador Gondomar, James had been led to believe that he could regain the Palatinate for his daughter and son-in-law through mere diplomacy without having to fight. As his part of the bargain, however, James would have to agree to a marriage between Prince Charles and a Spanish (Catholic) princess. The Parliament of 1621 had tried to avert this horrible prospect by petitioning the king to marry Charles to a Protestant, but James and Charles were both irate at this attempted intrusion into the affairs of the royal family, and negotiations over the projected Spanish Match continued.

In 1623 Charles and Buckingham determined to bring negotiations to a conclusion by going to Spain in person. This was a terribly risky, even reckless, stratagem. King James desperately pleaded with his son and favourite not to go, but they refused to be dissuaded and, in effect, overruled the king. This event marked the beginning of the end for James. He had lost the initiative to Charles and Buckingham, and he had become too weak and emotionally dependent to stop them. What Charles and Buckingham did with their newfound power hardly inspired confidence. Rather than sailing to Spain in a fleet that would have afforded them sufficient supplies and protection, they set off secretly on horseback, sailed across the Channel, and then continued overland to Madrid by way of Paris. They travelled practically alone with false beards and false names

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(Tom and John Smith). It must have been an exhilarating adventure for the two young men, but it was also a testimony to their immaturity and a near miracle that they arrived in Spain without having been robbed, captured and held for ransom, or worse. What they discovered upon their arrival, of course, was that the Spanish had no intention of concluding the marriage without obtaining major concessions from Charles, particularly regarding his religion. In negotiations that lasted several months, Charles and Buckingham came perilously close to making these concessions, although Charles appears to have thought he could later evade or stretch the meaning of some of these promises - a habit of mind that he would unfortunately carry to the grave. Both men were tinder considerable pressure to strike a deal lest they return to England empty-handed. Charles was further motivated by his personal desire for the Infanta. He embarrassed himself on more than one occasion by being too eager toward her, and the fact that she showed no reciprocal interest in him could only have deepened his sense of rejection. Gradually, it dawned upon Charles and Buckingham that they had exposed themselves to considerable danger and generally made fools of themselves with no real prospect of success. When they left Spain in September of 1623, they were filled with a new determination - to embark upon a war of revenge.

It is important to understand that Charles and Buckingham had decided upon war before they met the Parliament of 1624. When they returned from Spain, their objective was not to seek the advice and counsel of anyone but, rather, to manoeuvre King James and Parliament into embracing the course of action they had already decided upon. A few historians have found lofty justifications for this decision. Roger Lockyer, for example, alleged that Buckingham wanted war because in Spain ‘he had been made forcibly aware of the very real dangers that the expansion of Habsburg power offered to the western world’. Through his experience in Spain, Buckingham had also come to the realisation that ‘the best way in which to win concessions from a powerful, unscrupulous and arrogant enemy was by the sword’. 1(1 In a similar vein, Thomas Cogswell emphasised that Buckingham and Charles were motivated by their understanding of conditions on the continent where a series of stunning triumphs by Catholic Habsburg forces threatened to overwhelm the Protestant catise. In Cogswell's opinion, ‘Charles and Buckingham’s urgent press for intervention had much more to do with the radically altered balance of power than it did with their

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shabby treatment in Madrid’. It was only after their shabby treatment in Madrid, however, that Charles and Buckingham were sufficiently motivated to concoct a war plan; and even Cogswell conceded that ‘the vindication of sullied honor figured prominently’ in that plan . 17 Furthermore, although Buckingham eagerly assumed the role of international statesman, he was spurred on by domestic considerations. Concern for the future of the western world, no matter how sincere, was mingled with concern about his own personal future. The trip to Spain had not diminished Buckingham’s favour with the king, who had elevated him from a marquis to a duke during the interval, and it had served as an intense bonding experience with Prince Charles. But it was also a foolhardy escapade that ended in ignominious failure and raised suspicions about Buckingham’s loyalties. To avoid negative political repercussions, he had to show that, despite the protracted negotiations in Madrid, he was no friend of Catholicism or Spain, heading the charge for war was his best

hope of vindicating himself and turning the tables on his domestic

• 1 & enemies.

Granted that political and diplomatic considerations strengthened the desire of Charles and Buckingham for war and enlarged the scope of the actual plans they made afterward, contemporary testimony still supports the impression that the wellspring of that desire was injured male pride and a simple determination to even the score. Lord Kensington reported that when Charles boarded his ship to leave Spain, one of the first things he heard the prince say was that he considered it ‘weakness and folly ... in that after they [the Spaniards] had used him so ill, they would suffer him to depart ’. 19 Charles’s physician provided a similar description of his state of mind at this time . 20 King James likewise confided in a Spanish agent that the first thing Charles said upon his return was that he was ready to conquer Spain. (James also was reported to have said that Buckingham ‘had he knew not how many devils within him since that journey’. 21 ) Furthermore, Charles’s sister Elizabeth received letters from him written in Spain which left no doubt in her mind, as she told the Venetian ambassador, ‘that the marriage treaty will certainly be broken off and that her brother writes in such a manner as clearly to show his disgust and his desire for revenge ’. 22 What principally drove Charles and Buckingham into war was not Parliament or a perceptive understanding of continental politics but the simple desire for revenge. S. R. Gardiner got this right a century ago. Fie wrote: ‘Both Charles and Buckingham had come back with the full

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persuasion that they had been dtiped by the Spaniards, and with a full determination to take their revenge.’" ’ Robert E. Ruigh got it right in his study of the Parliament of 1624, writing that the prince and the Duke had returned from Madrid ‘with a burning desire for revenge against Spain’. 24 And more recently, Simon Adams got it right when he, too, concluded that ‘Buckingham and Charles were moved by their experiences in Madrid to seek a war of revenge’. 2 ’

No matter what motives one attributes to Charles and Buckingham, the decision to embroil England in war was their decision, and it was made well before the Parliament of 1624. It is important to bear this point in mind because it contradicts a line of argument that has been popular in recent years to the effect that Charles and Buckingham were pressured into war by the Parliament of 1624 and then left in the lurch by subsequent Parliaments that failed to honour the commitment allegedly made by their predecessor. Kevin Sharpe, for example, made Parliament seem the initiator of war. Sharpe wrote that Charles was ‘engaged, at the entreaty of parliament, in three wars’, and he described Buckingham as ‘the architect of the foreign policy advocated by parliament’. 26 Howard Tomlinson placed the blame squarely on Parliament for its ‘reluctance to finance a war which it had advocated’. 2 ' John Morrill enshrined this view in The Oxford History of Britain in one pithy sentence: ‘Parliament brayed for war but failed to provide the supply to make the campaigns a success.’ 28 Readers should beware of this argument. It is the perennial stab-in-the-back argument which explains away military defeat by blaming it on the politicians (in this case, the MPs of the 1620s). The stab-in-the-back argument does not do justice to those MPs who resisted or opposed the war. It is true, of course, that MPs had called (not brayed) for war back in 1621 when they were faced with the dreaded alternative of the Spanish Match. The situation was dramatically different in 1624, however. In 1624 it was Charles and Buckingham, not Parliament, who initiated the cry for war.

The Parliament of 1624

Of course Charles and Buckingham could not go about waging war by themselves. They had to persuade King James to seek war, and

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they had to manipulate Parliament into backing their enterprise. So the next question becomes: how successful were Charles and Buckingham in these efforts? Granted that they had already made the decision to embark on war before Parliament met, if they managed to obtain the unequivocal backing of Parliament in 1624, and then subsequent Parliaments reneged on this promise, there would still be some basis for the stab-in-the-back interpretation. But it did not happen that way either.

The Parliament of 1624 has been subjected to two major interpretations in recent literature. Conrad Russell argued that Parliament’s commitment to war was lukewarm at best. Although the House of Lords was eager for war, the House of Commons displayed no such urgency. 29 Russell detected a distinct change in mood as he turned his attention away from the bellicose Lords to the cautious Commons: ‘It is precisely this note of practical belligerence, of a sense of impending conflict between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, which is almost entirely lacking in the Commons’ debates of 1624.’ Russell found ‘very little in the Commons of the practical readiness to prepare for war’ that was evident in the Lords. Charles and Buckingham had conspired with several leading spokesmen in the Commons prior to Parliament’s meeting, and these men tried to rouse the House to action. Russell’s conclusion, however, was that this effort met with only limited success. MPs were worried about the high cost of war and hesitant to impose that cost on their tax-paying constituents. At best, under pressure from Charles, Buckingham, and the House of Lords, the Commons became ‘reluctant partners in the enterprise’. For all intents and purposes, then, ‘war had been forced on the House of Commons’, not the other way around. Since ‘the demand for war originated from Buckingham, rather than from members of Parliament’, it would be most accurate to consider these ‘Buckingham’s and Charles’s wars, and not Parliament’s wars’. 30

The alternative interpretation of the Parliament of 1624 came from Thomas Cogswell. As Cogswell told the story, Charles and Buckingham organised ‘one of the most effective lobbying groups in the history of early modern Parliaments’. This ‘Patriot’ party acted as ‘a formidable phalanx in the Commons’. In the critical debates of 19 and 20 March, a ‘rising tide of pro-war speakers’ overwhelmed the faint-hearted. If at times MPs appeared to be lukewarm about war, this was more appearance than reality. Proponents of the war had to keep cutting off discussion of the war’s details both to protect

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the delicate foreign alliances that were being negotiated and to prevent Parliament from learning too much about the exact kind of war that was being planned. Consequently, there never was a clear-cut vote on war in the Parliament of 1624, but this did not result from any lack of enthusiasm for war. As Cogswell saw it, there was more latent enthusiasm for war among MPs than Russell was able to detect. Cogswell concluded that Russell’s judgement was ‘surely too harsh’, and he cautioned his fellow historians to ‘react warily to the proposition that a majority of contemporaries and their parliamentary representatives were only marginally interested in the war’. Quite the contrary: ‘Englishmen by and large did not have to be dragged into the middle of a continental war; rather they seemed to want to be there.’ 31

How we judge Charles’s later actions depends very much on who is right about the Parliament of 1624, Russell or Cogswell. Russell is right. 32 Charles and Buckingham subsequently acted as if the Parliament of 1624 had given them an unqualified mandate to embark on war, but no such mandate in fact existed. Outside Parliament, one can find enthusiasm for war expressed in poetry, sermons, and polemical tracts. However, these sources are by their very nature biased, and it is impossible to say whether they represented the opinion of anywhere near a majority of MPs or the nation at large. The polemicist Thomas Scott certainly clamoured for war, but when it became a real possibility instead of a literary posture, the question is how many people who would have to take responsibility for the war were actually prepared to put their money where their mouth was? That is what MPs were being asked to do. If we look at the actual records of parliamentary debates in 1624 rather than polemical literature, there is admittedly room for interpretation. Nevertheless, one of the most impressive features of these debates is the way in which a handful of sceptics were able to slow down the headlong rush towards war. Among these sceptics were Edward Alford, William Mallory, Sir George More, Sir John Savile, and Sir Francis Seymour. What one historian said of Alford could be said of all these men: they ‘fought a rearguard action against the powerful interests propelling the country toward war with Spain’. 33 This was a dangerous business, not only because the war party was allied with the court but also because it could appeal to the potent forces of nationalism and religion. Anyone who dragged his feet on the subject of war could be smeared with accusations of disloyalty and Catholic sympathies. Sir Humphrey May subtly suggested that MPs who

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resisted war were giving comfort to the enemy. May warned, do not ‘give them [the Spanish] occasion to rejoice at our dissenting’. 34

There were strong emotions and deep suspicions running through the House of Commons in 1624. John Chamberlain described MPs as ‘so warie and cautious on all sides as yf they were to treat with en-nemies and in daunger to be overreacht’. Whereas anyone who resisted war ran the risk of having his patriotism and religion questioned, an MP who zealously advocated war ran the alternative risk of appearing to have made a bargain with the court, surrendering his independent judgement in return for the prospect of personal advancement. Chamberlain knew who these people were. He named Sir Edwin Sandys, Sir Dudley Digges, and Sir Robert Phelips (he could have added Sir Edward Coke). And he observed that these men ‘have so litle credit among them [other MPs] that though they speake well and to the purpose sometimes, yet yt is not so well taken at their hands for still they suspect them to prevaricate, and hold them for undertakers’. 35 It was perhaps to avoid this stigma that Sandys defected from the war party. 36 Historians can cite speeches from a handful of MPs who cautiously resisted war and speeches from a larger handful who eagerly advocated war. But we must remember that there were roughly 500 men sitting in the House of Commons, and for the overwhelming majority of these, we have no recorded speeches either in favour of war or against it. This does not leave us in the dark, however, about the degree to which MPs supported war. We have only to look at the measures they ultimately agreed upon.

Nothing passed by Parliament in 1624 called for war. What MPs did endorse with unadulterated enthusiasm was breaking off the treaties with Spain regarding a royal marriage and the restitution of the Palatinate. If these treaties could be terminated without war ensuing, that would have suited a great many MPs. Much of the debate in 1624 was therefore over this question of whether or not war would somehow automatically, unavoidably result upon the termination of the treaties. Unswerving advocates of war like Sir Edward Coke passionately argued that war was inevitable after breaking off the treaties, but this was a conjecture that simply could not be proved. Sir Edwin Sandys (after his defection from the war party) urged his colleagues ‘not presently to rush into a War’ because it was ‘Not a necessary immediate Consequence’. As Sandys now understood, the job of Parliament at this point was ‘not particularly to determine a war but to be prepared for it ’. 3 ‘ Breaking the treaties

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might provoke Spain into war, so it was sensible to strengthen the nation's defences while waiting to see what happened. However, as John Glanville said, ‘to provide for war before it be propounded is to christen a child before it was born’. 33 The text of the message both Houses gave to James outlining their position followed this line of argument. In return for dissolving the treaties, Parliament would supply James with money not toward a definite war but, rather, ‘towards the Support of the War which is likely to ensue’. It is true that the Commons voted an unprecedented sum (three subsidies and three fifteenths to be collected in one year), but this was roughly half the amount James had told them was necessary for war. More money would be forthcoming only ‘if You shall be engaged in a real War’. 39

Next, of course, there is the Subsidy Act. Cogswell asserted that this Act was proof that ‘the House in the end plumped for the war’. 40 Actually, it is the best proof that the House of Commons was not suckered into blindly supporting war. The Subsidy Act very carefully spelled out the specific uses for which the subsidy money was intended, what were commonly known as the four points: ‘[1] for the defence of this your realm of England, [2] the securing of this your kingdom of Ireland, [3] the assistance of your neighbours the States of the United Provinces and other your Majesty’s friends and allies, and [4] for the setting forth of your Royal Navy.’ Although the latter two points could conceivably be construed as a mandate for war, none of the points necessarily implied direct offensive military operations. What they did amount to was defensive preparations, a prudent shoring up of the nation’s defences and assistance to the Dutch, so that the nation would not be open to invasion if war did develop. (When the four points were paraphrased in subsequent royal commissions to the Council of War, they were expressed in even more unambiguously defensive terms - for example, ‘setting forth’ the navy became ‘putting our navy in readiness and safety’. 41 ) Sir Heneage Finch succinctly stated the Commons’ understanding that war was not inevitable and that the four points were essentially defensive in nature: ‘We find not that war is absolutely determined, only it is inferred as possible, which is to be provided for, as far as is fitting for to make us secure against it.’ 14 The words of the Subsidy Act itself, like the words of the joint message that preceded it, clearly stated that this money was being provided in case the termination of the treaties with Spain caused England to ‘be engaged in a sudden war’ or, as the Act said elsewhere, the ‘war that may hereupon ensue’. 43

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Furthermore, MPs tried to guarantee that the money they provided would be spent on nothing more than the four specific purposes they had agreed upon. The subsidy money of 1624 was allocated to the four points, and parliamentary treasurers were appointed to ensure that it was spent on just those four points. This process of allocation was a major concession of constitutional significance that Charles and Buckingham forced James to accept in order to get the money. 44 Finally, MPs knew that they were only providing for a possible eventuality. If war did actually ensue, the understanding they had was that they would be resummoned later in the year around Michaelmas to deal with this real war. In this next session, James told them, they would be allowed to consider ‘what is next to be done’. 45 Many MPs explicitly stated their assumption that the outbreak of real war would necessitate their meeting again in the fall, but William Mallory put it most colourfully. ‘If I were not in expectation to meet here again’, said Mallory, ‘I would not give a farthing.’ 46

It has become fashionable to describe Parliament in the 1620s as irresponsible, but the Parliament of 1624 could hardly have behaved more responsibly to their nation or their constituents. Under enormous pressure from Charles, Buckingham, and their allies in the Commons, the balance of MPs nevertheless refused to issue a blank cheque or an unqualified mandate for war. They did not naively allow themselves to be manipulated into ‘the open-ended financial commitment the duke had desired’. 4 ' What they produced instead was as close as they could come to an airtight contract, providing for the defence of the kingdom, allocating the subsidy money only to the immediate needs that had been identified, and ensuring that Parliament would be consulted again if those needs enlarged. MPs thought that the money they had voted would be spent exclusively on the four points for precautionary defensive preparations. They thought that if a real war ensued, Parliament would be called back into session to discuss its scope. Furthermore, many MPs thought that if war did develop, they could limit it to a relatively inexpensive naval war against Spain (what was called the ‘blue water’ strategy or a ‘diversionary’ war). In every one of these respects they were mistaken. Of course one reason these expectations did not come to pass was the death of King Janies, which could not have been anticipated. Another reason was that Charles and Buckingham wanted to complete difficult negotiations with potential allies, particularly France, before facing another Parliament. Yet another reason was the simple

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fact that no war ensued. The treaties with Spain were terminated, and no Spanish armada appeared off the coast of England. If the English wanted peace, they could have it. But of course Charles and Buckingham did not want peace, and that was the major reason the contract of 1624 collapsed.

The War Plan

The contract was made on false pretences to begin with. Unbeknown to Parliament, plans were already under way for a vast war on several fronts that would go forward no matter how Spain reacted to the termination of the treaties. This plan included naval assaults on Spain, but it also included land operations against Spanish and Imperial forces aimed more directly at the recovery of the Palatinate and carried out in concert with several Protestant and Catholic allies - France, Denmark, Sweden, the United Provinces, Venice, and Savoy. This was the plan that had to be kept secret from Parliament. This was the plan that entailed a costly subsidy of £30,000 per month to Christian IV of Denmark, who was Charles’s uncle, and £20,000 per month to the mercenary soldier, Count Mansfeld. These obligations alone came to £600,000 per year, a staggering amount which could hardly have been intended by most MPs when they voted for ‘the assistance of your neighbours the States of the United Provinces and other your Majesty’s friends and allies’. Indeed, this was the plan, as subsequent Parliaments discovered, that came with a total annual price tag of £1 million. It is hard to imagine any MP in 1624 knowingly authorising expenditures on that scale. This was also the plan that forced Charles to marry a French Catholic princess (who was not much better than a Spanish Catholic princess in most people’s eyes) as the price of a French alliance. Whose plan was it?

King James lived long enough to be implicated in the plan. When he spoke about war, he envisioned it as a crusade to recover the Palatinate, a prospect which sent shivers through the Commons. Sir Francis Seymour best expressed the apprehension of the Commons: ‘His Majesty speaks of a war in the Palatinate, which is a thing of infinite charge and to us impossible.’ 48 Throughout this Parliament, Charles, Buckingham, and all the supporters they could muster had

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to act like political ‘spin doctors’, reassuring MPs that no matter what James said, what he actually meant was a naval war against Spain. One of Buckingham’s clients, for example, assured the House that ‘the general aim and the necessity is apparent to be a war with Spain’. 49 Nevertheless, James persisted in thinking about a war in and for the Palatinate. In his declaration accepting Parliament’s offer of supply, James said that if he did not recover the Palatinate, ‘I could wish never to have been born’, and he vowed, ‘no Means shall be unused for the Recovery of it’. 50 Worse still, James tried to intervene in the, Commons to get the four points of the Subsidy Act revised to include the recovery of the Palatinate as a fifth point. Sir Walter Earle recorded that this effort ‘was utterly disliked by the House’ because, among other things, ‘that which was proposed was clean contrary to the intent of the House ... it being otherwise resolved upon debate before, viz. that the Palatinate should not be named’. 51 At the close of Parliament, James was still insisting that his goal was the recovery of the Palatinate, and he even threatened to amend the Subsidy Act to this effect with his own hand. 52 No wonder that Edward Nicholas described the members of Parliament departing ‘with much more discontent and fear of the success of this Parliament than when we came together’. 53

King James contributed to the early shape of the war plan, but the driving force was provided by Buckingham. In his biography of Buckingham, Roger Lockyer, far from foisting this plan off on James, gave full credit to the Duke, representing it as a masterful scheme to counter Habsburg aggression. 04 Simon Adams agreed that this was Buckingham’s foreign policy, but he took a dimmer view of it. The plan turned out to be a far cry from what Parliament had in mind because Buckingham ‘had no intention of making foreign policy in parliament, or even of taking parliamentary opinion into account . James and Parliament may have been talking past each other, but James at least was being relatively honest. Buckingham was more deceptive. To get the money he needed, Buckingham led Parliament to believe that they had an understanding spelled out in the terms of the Subsidy Act. Afterward, however, he had no intention of waiting to see if war ensued or limiting his actions to the four points. More than £60,000 of subsidy money was soon spent on a disastrous expedition to the continent led by Mansfeld, which Adams considered a ‘direct violation of the terms of the Subsidy Act’. Perhaps the Duke simply made the gross assumption that whatever the detailed language of the Act, he had in

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effect been given carte blanche to conduct the war as he pleased. Or perhaps, as Adams wrote, Buckingham’s ‘cavalier attitude towards the Subsidy Act can only suggest that he never had any real interest in its terms ’. 55

Was it Charles’s plan? Charles and Buckingham certainly worked in concert. Interestingly, though, no one would say that Charles was the mastermind behind the plan (as one could say of Buckingham) or that he was the key person whose preferences had to he taken into account (as one could say of King James). One reason it is impossible to assign individual responsibility for the war plan is because it was designed to satisfy several constituencies. Charles was hell-bent on war with Spain, but he also apparently felt a genuine duty to help his sister Elizabeth and her husband Frederick regain the Palatinate. Buckingham, like Charles, was eager to retaliate against Spain, but he also relished the role of international statesman, conducting ambitious diplomatic efforts to put together a grand alliance. No plan could go forward if it did not suit James, who was reluctant to attack Spain, objected to a purely religious war, promoted the alliance with France, and pushed for direct military operations aimed at recovering the Palatinate. Yet no plan was likely to win parliamentary approval which did not feature a revived naval war against Spain, preferably in alliance with the Dutch. Cogswell treated the war plan as a joint product of the prince and the Dtike, and he praised its ‘adroit resolution’ of all these differing strategic preferences. ‘Charles and Buckingham’, wrote Cogswell, ‘had taken great pains to draft a plan to overcome James’s objections and to attract the broadest possible support .’ 55 That puts the best possible face on a plan that looks like it was put together by a committee with something in it for everybody. In private Charles and Buckingham could keep James’s support by emphasising the campaign for the Palatinate, while in public they could win Parliament’s support by emphasising the naval campaign against Spain. Everyone who wanted war could find some piece of this package to like. But few people had any idea what the full package looked like; if they had known its full dimensions, they wotdd have had grave misgivings. Whether it was because of the need to placate all these constituencies, the megalomania of Buckingham, or the sheer lack of realism on the part of both the prince and the Duke, the plan that resulted was wildly ambitious and expensive. Whether the fault was more Charles’s or Buckingham’s it is impossible to say; the two men were now partners in war.

Charles I

First Impressions

All in all, then, what impression do we have of Charles before he actually succeeded to the throne? Charles was eager to take centre stage. As Conrad Russell described him, ‘Charles, unlike James, suffered from energy’. (Students may wish to note that Russell added, ‘both the energetic Stuarts lost their thrones, while both the lazy ones died in their beds ’. 57 )In the last two years of James’s life, Charles played an increasingly prominent role, surprisingly prominent in fact. Perhaps James was simply declining too much in his physical and mental capacities to rein in ‘baby Charles’, as he still called him, but it seems more evident that it was Charles’s alliance with Buckingham that made him irrepressible. What Charles did in these two years reflects both favourably and unfavourably on him. There is nothing favourable to be found in the trip to Spain. It was impetuous and foolhardy. The best construction that could be put upon it would be to claim that Charles understood the insincerity of the Spanish and was only attempting to call their bluff. If Charles had understood this much, however, he would also have realised that the trip was too dangerous to undertake. Besides, the letters that Charles and Buckingham sent back from Spain clearly indicate that they had no such understanding . 58 They went to Spain with the full expectation that they could complete the Match, and it took them an appallingly long time to figure out the real situation. These letters also reveal James’s pitiable emotional dependence on his ‘sweet boys’ and something of their own political instincts. For example, Charles urged his father: ‘I beseech your Majesty advise as little with your Council in these businesses as you can .’ 59 Under the circumstances, this may have been a prudent precaution, or it could have been a premonition of Charles’s penchant for secrecy and double-dealing. The latter interpretation is supported by a letter in which Buckingham and Charles instructed James how to handle the Spanish demand that ‘you promise that the Parliament shall revoke all the penal laws against the Papists within three years’. This was a preposterous promise on which James could not possiby have delivered. It presented no difficulty for Charles and Buckingham, however, because ‘if you think you may do it in that time (which we think you may), if you do your best, although it take not effect, you have not broken your word, for this promise is only as a security that you will do your best ’. 60 Here we find an early expression not only of Charles’s lack of political realism but also of his elastic view of promises.

Prior Commitments

31

What reflected most favourably on Charles in this period immediately before he came to the throne was his performance in the Parliament of 1624. ()l He played the heroic role of the youthful prince whose eyes had been opened by Spanish perfidy. Through his journey to Spain, Sir Benjamin Rudyerd told the Commons, Charles had ‘expressed unto the world his courage in undertaking it, his wisdom in managing it, and the experience thereof hath actuated and produced those excellent parts which are naturally in him and enabled him for great counsels and resolutions’. 62 Another contemporary observer, John Chamberlain, was impressed by Charles’s transformation. At the opening of Parliament, Chamberlain found the prince a changed man: ‘1 went especially to see the prince, who indeed is grown a fine gentleman, and beyond all expectation I had of him when I saw him last ... and, indeed, I think he never looked nor became himself better in all his life.’ A month later Chamberlain was still impressed. He remarked that the young prince ‘never misses a day at the parliament’, and he praised Charles’s ‘virtuous disposition, as being noted free from any vicious or scandalous inclination; which makes him every day more gracious, and his actions to seem more graceful than was at first expected’. Notice that on both these occasions Chamberlain expressed surprise that Charles had turned out so well, contrary to the expectations that had previously been formed of him. The trip to Spain ‘hath improved him so much’, Chamberlain explained, ‘that it is a received opinion he concealed himself before'. 6 ’

Charles worked hard to cultivate his new image and to get what he wanted out of Parliament. He participated in person in the deliberations of the House of Lords, and he did all that he could indirectly to influence the House of Commons. For example, MPs thrilled to Charles’s story that when he was in Spain, he had sent back word that if he was taken prisoner there, then James should ‘forget you have a son, & look after your daughter’. 64 On another opportunity Charles exhorted Parliament not just to show their teeth ‘but bite also’. If they should fail to act, the heir to the throne pointedly reminded his listeners, ‘it would be dishonourable unto yourselves as well as unto me who am now first entering into the world’. 65 Charles’s intervention was especially crucial when it came to clarifying or interpreting the king’s position. James was the loose cannon in the Parliament of 1624. Sometimes he spoke as if he was still wedded to peace. Other times he spoke alarmingly about the Palatinate or about the true cost of war. Charles and Buckingham

Charles I

worked frantically to keep James committed to war and to persuade MPs that, no matter what the old king seemed to say, what he had in mind was a naval war against Spain.

Overall Charles’s behaviour was widely applauded. He was the hero of the day. This impression had only been sustained, however, by silencing two major critics. Charles and Buckingham inadvertently furthered the development of parliamentary impeachment when they used this procedure to remove the Lord Treasurer (Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex) because he had conspired against Buckingham and opposed war on grounds of economy. Likewise, they contrived to keep the Earl of Bristol away from Parliament because, as special ambassador to Spain, he threatened to relate a less flattering version of what had occurred in Madrid. The ruin of Cranfield was total, but Bristol would prove to be a more tenacious critic. With remarkable prescience, King James tried to warn his son and favourite that they would live to regret the way they had empowered Parliament by involving it in questions of war and using it to destroy a royal minister, but the two young men were happily riding the tide of popularity. 66 Another older voice, the Earl of Kellie, understood the price of that popularity. He observed that Charles had been ‘a little too popular’ or ‘a little more popular than was fitting for him’, and he too predicted that the concessions Charles had made to garner popularity in 1624 would catch up with him in the future. 67

As these forebodings suggested, Charles’s popularity in 1624 was built on sand. Roger Lockyer asserted that Buckingham (and presumably Charles too) were ‘extraordinarily successful in bringing King and Parliament together in a commitment to war’. 68 But Parliament was not truly committed to war yet, least of all the war that was being planned. And in the interim before another Parliament met, those plans started going badly awry. In the hope of obtaining a French alliance, Charles married Henrietta Maria, the sister of Louis XIII, but the military alliance failed to materialise. Meanwhile the debt to Denmark kept piling up, and the army that was improperly financed by subsidy money under the command of Count Mansfeld literally disintegrated on the continent as a result of harsh weather, desertion, and disease. John Chamberlain was one of the contemporary observers mystified by this turn of events. Regarding the ‘talk of a league, offensive and defensive, against whomsoever’, he remarked: ‘If this be true, it is much otherwise than was given out at first.’ In Chamberlain’s opinion, ‘if we may live

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33

quietly at home, we shall not greatly care how the world goes abroad’. b9 Of course the English were not destined to live quietly at home. In March of 1625 Rex Pacificus died, and Rex Bellicosus took charge.

2

A Bad Start, 1625-1629

Charles I’s reign got off to a terribly bad start. At brst peace broke out, which was not what Charles wanted. Since Spain failed to attack England, Charles tried to attack Spain. This sputtering war with Spain then unexpectedly expanded to include war with France, which was supposed to have been Charles’s chief ally, and one ignominious military defeat followed another. Defeat abroad was paralleled by defeat at home, where Charles was unable to enlist the support he needed to prosecute the war successfully. A series of quarrelsome Parliaments refused to finance the war, assailed royal policies across the board, and turned with special animus against the Duke of Buckingham. To protect Buckingham from impeachment, Charles dissolved the Parliament of 1626. To pay for the war, he resorted to extraparliamentary measures. He levied a forced loan, imprisoned people who refused to pay it, billeted troops in private homes, and imposed martial law to maintain order among the mutinous troopsf None the less in 1628 lack of money again forced Charles back into the arms of Parliament, which proceeded to condemn all his extraordinary expedients in the Petition of Right, a document which Charles accepted but only under duress and with characteristic evasiveness. Shortly thereafter Charles received a much more personal blow when Buckingham was stabbed to death by a lone assassin. After the Duke’s assassination, one might have expected the parliamentary session of 1629 to make a fresh start, but it was no more cooperative than its predecessors had been. When Charles commanded the Commons to adjourn, disgruntled MPs held the Speaker in his chair long enough to conduct a confused vote on three resolutions declaring that anyone who encouraged certain policies they found objectionable would be considered ‘a

A Bad Start, 1625-1629

35

capital enemy to the Kingdom and Commonwealth’. Government at all levels had been strained to the breaking point by the effort to conduct a war without the necessary means, and the Crown was virtually bankrupt. Fed up, Charles resolved to govern without Parliament, reluctantly made peace, and turned for consolation to his French Catholic wife. Who was responsible for this mess?

Exoneration

There is a widespread misconception that, whatever else they disagree about, so-called ‘revisionists’ agree that King Charles was largely to blame for his own problems. One reviewer, for example, wrote that revisionists see ‘the early years of Charles I’s reign as troubled less by structural weaknesses of the monarchy than by the failings of the king’. 1 This is a gross misunderstanding of revisionist work on the 1620s. It would hardly have been revisionist to claim that Charles bungled the first years of his reign; that was the standard view established by S. R. Gardiner over 100 years ago. The only way to revise the standard history of the period 1625-29 was to direct attention away from Charles, to focus on structural weaknesses, to speak broadly of a functional breakdown of government under the strain of war, and not to raise the awkward question of how far Charles himself was personally responsible for straining the system where it was weakest and driving it to the point of breakdown. If there was any identifiably revisionist approach to these early years of Charles’s reign, therefore, it was not to blame Charles but to exonerate him. In the words of G. A. Harrison, revisionists were ‘intent on absolving Charles and Buckingham from much of the blame that historians have customarily placed on their actions’. 2

Kevin Sharpe and Conrad Russell made the strongest efforts to rehabilitate Charles’s reputation. In his pioneering introduction to Faction and Parliament , Sharpe blamed Buckingham, the Privy Council, and Parliament for what went wrong. Buckingham faction-alised the Council, which was not an especially talented body of men to begin with. The king was forced to turn for advice to Parliaments, but they too were ‘ill equipped to offer sound counsel'. The problem lay not with the king but with his counsellors. ‘The King needed able counsellors in order to govern well’, Sharpe explained, ‘and the

Charles I

parliaments of the 1620s had been unable to provide good advice.’ ‘On nearly all counts’, wrote Sharpe, ‘they failed.’ 3 In a later article, Sharpe related the problem of counsel to a communication problem. The court, the Privy Council, and the aristocracy in general ‘needed to maintain open communications’ with the king. ‘This in the 1620s they failed to do.’ 4 In Sharpe’s view, therefore, the turmoil that occurred in the early years of Charles’s reign resulted from a failure of counsel or a failure of communication, not the failings of the king.

Russell’s defence of Charles in the 1620s was not as blunt or direct, but it was much more extensive. As we noted in the introduc-ton, Russell’s seminal article on early Stuart parliamentary history shifted attention away from the person of the king toward the impersonal structural problems that plagued early Stuart government. In Parliaments and English Politics, 1621-1629, Russell elaborated on these structural handicaps and crippling circumstances. Above all, Russell emphasised the role of war. If there is any one idea associated with Russell’s interpretation of the later 1620s, it is the idea that war is the key. The political difficulties of this period, wrote Russell, were ‘first and foremost, not the difficulties of a bad King, but the difficulties of a nation reluctantly at war’. Or, as he wrote in another place: ‘It was this burden of war, imposed on an administration already in a state of functional breakdown by a Duke of Buckingham whose purposes, and even whose enemy, appeared unidentifiable, that brought relations between central and local government, and hence between King and Parliament, to the point of collapse.’ ’

The further Russell proceeded through the war years, the more sympathy he developed for Charles. At the outset he got the story right. In 1625 the actions of the House of Commons demonstrated that it was opposed to the war. ‘It was Charles and Buckingham’s failure to face this central fact’, Russell observed, ‘which produced most of the troubles of the next three years.’ By the end of his book, however, Russell shifted his position, making it seem as if Charles had been stabbed in the back by Parliaments which first demanded war then shamefully refused to support it. ‘The depth of incomprehension which grew up between Charles and his early Parliaments’, Russell now claimed, ‘arose from Charles’s pardonable belief that if they said they wanted him to fight a war, they would assist him to finance it.’ In this new version of the story, Charles made a ‘remarkable’ effort to reach an understanding with his Parliaments. And he made this effort because he truly believed in the institution of

A Bad Start, 1625-1629

37

Parliament, not just because he was desperate for cash. ‘Only a principled belief in Parliamentary institutions’, wrote Russell, ‘can explain the effort Charles made to work them between 1625 and 1628.’ Of course Charles kept running into a brick wall, but that was not his fault. He actually deserved more recognition for ‘the patience he showed with the negativism and obstructionism of the Parliaments of 1626 and 1628’. He ‘wanted to be known as a King who could get on with his Parliaments, and devoted a surprising amount of time and patience to attempting to succeed’. (>

Russell's most extreme case for Charles appeared in an article published in 1982/ Here Russell argued that ‘Charles had an attachment to the rule of law, yet he believed that the law must be compatible with his obligation to defend his kingdom’. Early modern monarchs like Charles ‘had no great objection to law, and strongly preferred to do things legally if possible’. On the other hand, ‘when a legal right came into conflict with an urgent necessity of defence, they gave priority to the urgent necessity’. 8 The trouble in the early modern period was that the representative assemblies which were called upon to finance war had no comprehension of the cost of war. Their ignorance and refusal to fund royal military enterprises put their nations in jeopardy. Of course the critical question was whether these military enterprises were truly necessary in the first place. To this question Russell had a plain answer: ‘The king could be presumed to know about military necessities.’ 9

Thus the revisionist interpretation of Charles in the early years of his reign represented him as a beleaguered king. His counsellors failed to give him good advice. His Parliaments failed to give him money. He was trapped in a war which others had wanted him to fight, yet deprived of the necessary means to succeed. He struggled valiantly to work through the ordinary parliamentary avenues, but he was at last forced to resort to extraparliamentary measures through no fault of his own. How well has this revisionist interpretation held up? Not very well at all.

The Parliament of 1625

To say that the difficulties of this period were ‘first and foremost, not the difficulties of a bad King, but the difficulties of a nation

Charles I

reluctantly at war’ begs the question. How was it that the nation came to be reluctantly engaged in war? As we saw in the previous chapter, it was Charles and Buckingham who made the decision to embark on war, and they orchestrated proceedings in the Parliament of 1624 toward that end. Russell is his own worst enemy on this point because it was his signal contribution to the historiography of the 1624 Parliament to note its lack of enthusiasm for war. Russell thought it was ‘becoming clear that the demand for war originated from Buckingham, rather than from members of Parliament’. He portrayed the House of Commons as ‘reluctant partners’ who had war ‘forced’ upon them by ‘Buckingham and his team’ or ‘the Duke, the Prince, and the House of Lords’. 10 Russell deserves credit for this major re-evaluation of the mood in the Commons in 1624, but it hardly squares with his interpretation of subsequent events.

The argument among historians today about the level of commitment to war is a mirror reflection of the argument that took place in the first year of Charles’s own reign. In 1625 the key issue was whether the previous Parliament had made a commitment which was now binding on the new Parliament to provide whatever money was necessary for war. 11 Did such an ‘engagement’ exist? Charles and Buckingham certainly thought so. 12 In his opening speech to Parliament, Charles bore down heavily on this point. He described himself as a man who was not free to act as he pleased but solemnly engaged to fight a war for the recovery of the Palatinate. And who had engaged him in this course of action? ‘It is you that engaged me’, said Charles. Representing himself as the agent of their will, Charles told Parliament that his actions were undertaken ‘by your entreaties, your engagements’. Elaborating on the king’s speech, the Lord Keeper drew particular attention to the word ‘engagement’. 13 In a later speech, Buckingham posed the question rhetorically, ‘by what counsel this great enterprise has been undertaken and pursued hitherto?’ ‘I answer’, the Duke declared, ‘First by the parliament.’ 14 Charles and Buckingham never wavered in their conviction that Parliament had authorised and should finance their undertakings. Today’s historians who make it seem as if Charles was left in the lurch by a mercurial Parliament are essentially taking the king’s own argument at face value. Roger Lockyer, for example, wrote that Charles felt betrayed by Parliament in 1625 when they would not support him in the prosecution of ‘the policy which both Houses had urged on the crown in 1624’. 15 Kevin Sharpe similarly wrote that Charles was ‘engaged, at the entreaty of parliament, in three wars

A Bad Start, 1625-1629

39

for which it had voted insufficient revenue’, and he described Buckingham as ‘the architect of the foreign policy advocated by parliament’. 16

Why is this sympathy for Charles and Buckingham unwarranted? First, as we saw in the previous chapter, they were not the pawns of Parliament in 1624. It was the other way around. Secondly, their effort to manipulate Parliament to their own ends had not entirely succeeded. MPs advised the Crown to break the treaties with Spain; they did not advise war. This is the distinction that Charles glossed over when he lectured Parliament in 1625: ‘I hope in God that you will go on to maintain it as freely as you were willing to advise my father to it.' 1 ' What was ‘it’? If Charles had been referring merely to breaking the treaties with Spain, he would have received no argument. But he was instead referring to an ambitious war on land and sea to regain the Palatinate - an interpretation of the 1624 mandate that was bound to provoke plenty of argument. Thirdly, Parliament had promised to provide further aid only if breaking the treaties led the Crown to become ‘engaged in a real War'. 16 MPs had suffered more from a war scare than a war fever in 1624. They were led to expect ‘a sudden war ... that may hereupon ensue’. 19 Amid this atmosphere of apprehension, they made provisional decisions to put the nation’s defences in order. This was never intended as anything more than an interim policy; only time would tell whether ‘a real war’ was necessary. They expected to face that decision when they met again. When they did meet again, not in the Michaelmas session they had expected to occur in the fall of 1624 but in a new Parliament of a new reign in the summer of 1625, the war that was thought likely to ensue had not ensued. Except for the subsidies promised to Denmark and the army sent to the continent under Count Mansfeld, which was disintegrating as Parliament met, England was not yet actually engaged in a real war. The issue in the Parliament of 1625, therefore, was not whether MPs wanted to support an ongoing war but whether they wanted to start a war. No defensive war had been forced upon them. No Spanish armada had descended on England. As Sir Edward Coke expressed it, ‘none invades - we have no “88”’. 20 Relieved of having to fight a defensive war, it was an open question now whether there was any compelling reason to initiate an offensive war. In any case, there seemed no urgent need to give money to Charles in the absence of an enemy. Fourthly, those MPs who were inclined to start a war wanted a naval war against Spain, not the kind of war that Charles and Buckingham

Charles I

appeared to be planning, involving expensive alliances and land-based operations directly aimed at recovering the Palatinate. As Robert Ruigh explained, ‘what they had wanted was a diversionary naval campaign against Spain; what they got was the endless prospect of subsidizing continental mercenaries to attempt the recovery of the Palatinate’. 21 In this connection, there was a strong body of opinion that Mansfeld’s expedition was not only inconsistent with the strategy Parliament had been led to expect but an actual violation of the Subsidy Act. 22 MPs were even more mystified by the strenuous efforts, of Charles and Buckingham to ally with the Catholic nation of France. One price of that alliance, the new queen, arrived in London just before Parliament met. To make matters worse, the Duke of Chevreuse and other French dignitaries who had accompanied her could be seen on the opening day of Parliament sitting as spectators in the House of Lords. 23

The expectations of 1624 simply did not square with the realities of 1625. Some MPs, especially royal officials who had worked alongside Charles and Buckingham in the interval between Parliaments, thought that what they were now proposing was perfectly consonant with what the previous Parliament had pledged to support. But other MPs who had not been party to the evolution of policy were more impressed by the differences. Sir Robert Phelips best summed up this viewpoint: ‘There is no engagement; the promises and declarations of the last parliament were in respect of a war. We know yet of no war nor of any enemy.’ 24 Charles and Buckingham knew what questions were being raised in Parliament. To allay this particular question, the Duke actually told MPs, ‘my master gave me commandment to bid you name the enemy yourselves’. 25 It was slightly ludicrous to put this question to Parliament. If no enemy loomed on the horizon, why name one? If forced to name an enemy, the bulk of MPs would presumably have chosen Spain. There was no engagement to wage war against the Holy Roman Empire for the recovery of the Palatinate. Edward Alford left no doubt on that point: ‘He holds we are not engaged to give for the recovery of the Palatinate; for when it was in the act of parliament [the Subsidy Act of 1624], as it was first penned, it was struck out by the order of the House.’ 25

Just as there was disagreement over the engagement Charles presumed to exist, so was there disagreement over the financial necessity he alleged. Nearly all of the 1624 subsidies had already been spent, and huge costs continued to accrue. In addition to the accumulating subsidies promised to the King of Denmark and Count

A Bad Start, 1625-1629

41

Mansfeld, another £300,000 was still required for the fleet. 27 The total cost to proceed with the current war plan over the next twelve months was over £1 million. 28 One must wonder whether Charles and Buckingham ever stopped along the way to consider the total cost of the obligations they were incurring. In view of these huge expenses, when the Parliament of 1625 granted Charles a mere two subsidies (which would have yielded at most £140,000), he asked for more on the ground that this amount fell far short of the necessity. But some MPs questioned whether this was only a ‘pretended necessity’. And others asked, if a necessity of this magnitude did in fact exist, then who had caused it? 29 The alleged necessity most debated in the Commons was the fleet, which would eat up all of the new subsidies and more. Charles felt it was absolutely necessary to finish preparing this fleet and send it to sea. He even went so far as to declare that it would be better for half the fleet to perish at sea than for none of the ships to sail. 10 In the Commons, however, it proved difficult to whip up enthusiasm. Cynics questioned why it had taken so long to prepare the fleet and what could be gained by setting it out so late in the year. 91 Phelips warned that it could actually do more harm than good because it might ‘stir a powerful king to invade us’. ’ 2 If no one cared to attack England, then why should it go out looking for enemies and provoke Spain into war, especially at a cost of £300,000?

It is important to remember that MPs in 1625 debated whether or not to launch the fleet, against whom, and at what cost. In other words, war could still have been averted. In his haste to generate sympathy for Charles, Kevin Sharpe confused the order of these events. The way Sharpe told the story, war was already under way, and the Parliament of 1625 engaged in ‘post-mortem debates’ about the Crown’s ‘first military ventures, the military expedition to the Palatinate of the mercenary Count Mansfeldt and the abortive assault on the Spanish treasure fleet at Cadiz’. 2 ” In reality, however, it is a simple fact that the Parliament of 1625 could not have engaged in a post-mortem debate about the failed assault on Cadiz because it had not yet happened. What MPs actually debated in 1625 was whether it was worth the cost to make an assault against an enemy who at that time was still unknown. Meanwhile there were real enemies who were too well known - pirates. MPs protested bitterly over the depredations of pirates. These protests could have been mainly a strategy for attacking Buckingham in his capacity as Lord Admiral, but they leave the impression that it might have been

Charles I

more popular to use the fleet against pirates than to embroil it in international warfare. 34

War was not the only gulf opening up between Charles and his subjects. In 1625 MPs actually spent more time on matters of religion than they did on the king’s request for supply. From the outset of his reign, Charles’s religious convictions were suspect. One obvious cause of concern was his marriage. Jubilation over the collapse of the Spanish Match quickly turned to dismay when Charles, rather than proceeding to marry a Protestant, chose a French Catholic wife. Moreover, MPs could observe from the effects that Charles must have agreed to be more lenient towards Roman Catholics as part of the deal. ‘What the Spanish articles were we know’, observed Phelips. ‘Whether those with France be any better is doubted.’ 35 To force Charles back into line, Parliament presented him with a petition complaining about foreign ambassadors who interceded on behalf of Roman Catholics and ‘the want of due execution of the laws against Jesuits, seminary priests, and popish recusants’. 36 Charles promised to do all that Parliament asked for, but in reality he could not fulfil this promise without breaking the promise he had already made to the French. Aware of that fact, MPs could only further doubt the king’s sincerity. 37

Charles was not honest on the subject of the religious concessions made to France, but his lack of candour is understandable. Charles, whose mother had been Roman Catholic, was truly exceptional in his willingness to deal with Catholics and even to marry one himself. There is no doubt that he would have been more popular as king if he had shared the virulent prejudice of most MPs against Roman Catholicism, but he would hardly have been more admirable as a human being. 38 Of course his leniency at this particular juncture arose from his need to placate the French rather than from any high-minded principle, but throughout his reign he was too friendly toward Roman Catholicism to suit the prejudices of his subjects. This was not the only cause for concern about Charles’s religious orthodoxy, however. He also raised suspicions because of his apparent preference within the Church of England for the doctrine of Arminianism (that is, the belief in salvation through free will, which the English associated with Roman Catholicism, as opposed to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination). One early indication of that preference was his intervention on behalf of the controversial Arminian clergyman, Richard Montagu. To shield Montagu from a parliamentary inquisition, Charles announced that he was a royal

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chaplain and should therefore be immune from imprisonment and questioning. Charles thus managed to block the persecutorial zeal of the Commons, but in the process he also issued a challenge to parliamentary jurisdiction. Edward Alford warned, ‘if we admit this, we shall take the way to destroy parliaments’. 39

Everywhere MPs looked in 1625 they were horrified, and some began to fix the blame on Buckingham. Mansfeld’s abortive expedition, the projected alliance with France, the Catholic queen, the fleet that required more money though it had no purpose - all seemed to be the Duke’s doing. His singular influence over the king and the many offices gathered into his own hands were other causes of resentment. 40 Sir Edward Coke observed that ‘a kingdom can never be well governed where unskillful and unfitting men are placed in great offices’. He also pointedly complained about the ‘multiplicity of offices to be held in one man’. 41 Sir Francis Seymour was more explicit: ‘Eet us lay the fault where it is; the Duke of Buckingham is trusted, and it must needs be either in him or his agents.’ 42 Sir Robert Phelips made perhaps the most radical speech of the entire Parliament, attacking Buckingham for his foreign policy and his monopoly of offices, and invoking historical precedent to challenge the royal prerogative if necessary to reform the government. A few days later he remarked: ‘We are the last monarchy in Christendom that retain our original right and constitutions.’ 4, These were ominous warnings that Buckingham’s inordinate power and war policy were raising divisive constitutional issues. 44

The Parliament of 1625 did not fail Charles; least of all did it fail to communicate its concerns. The attack on Montagu and the petition on religion should have alerted Charles that his religious policy was antagonising the very people he needed to support his foreign policy. The refusal to provide more than two subsidies should have alerted him to the fact that he did not have the political support or the material wherewithal to fight the kind of war he and Buckingham had designed. And the personal attack on the Duke should have been a warning to distribute offices and power more widely. Charles was given good advice during this period, but he refused to listen. If there was a communication problem, it sprang from the fact that Charles was not a good listener. When Charles encountered criticism, he did not absorb it. His reaction, instead, was to dig in his heels and attack his critics. Charles should have paid more heed to MPs like Coke and Phelips who had aided him in

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1624, but he preferred to view them as turncoats. He should have paid more heed to the sage advice of Lord Keeper Williams, but he removed him from office. 45 Most of all, Charles should have reconsidered his war plans because, in Conrad Russell’s own words, the actions of the House of Commons in 1625 had shown they were ‘against the war’. 46 Granted that he had gone too far to call a halt to the war, he might at least have reassessed the situation in 1625, as indeed members of Parliament had done, and scaled back his plans; but he was not the sort of person to make mid-course corrections.

As Christopher Thompson has written, the Parliament of 1625 reaffirms the ‘orthodox rather than revisionist interpretation’. Charles ‘appears to have thought that the simple notification of his wishes ought to have commanded obedience’. Instead of blind obedience, Charles encountered stiff opposition in 1625, and that opposition was motivated by truly national interests not merely localist concerns. 47 This is not to say that critics of the king’s policies were entirely in the right and Charles entirely in the wrong. On the subject of supply, for example, Charles knew he was a poor speaker, and it would hardly have been dignified for him to beg. Through his ministers in the Commons, he did repeatedly lay out the facts of his case. Buckingham, too, deserves credit for the amazing effort he made to answer questions in the Commons. The decision to pressure Parliament for more money after they had already granted two subsidies made sense in light of the Crown’s enormous needs (though it made less sense to persist in these demands by forcing members of Parliament to reconvene at Oxford during an outbreak of the plague). There were even good reasons to insist that the fleet must sail. Such sympathy as did exist for war was based on dreams of a revived Elizabethan naval war against Spain. To capitalise on this sentiment, Charles had to despatch the fleet and attack Spain. Had it succeeded, it might yet have galvanised political support for war. Furthermore, Charles had to take action to convince his potential allies that he was serious about joining the war. Charles’s determination went deeper than this, however. It was a matter of honour. And though he spoke in terms of the nation’s honour and the Parliament’s honour, he nevertheless left the impression that it was his own personal honour that was at stake. Charles still had a score to settle with the Spanish for the way they had treated him in 1623. More than that, however, he and Buckingham were now committed to a vast enterprise. The world was watching, and it would have been humiliating for Charles to back down. As the Lord Keeper expressed

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it, Charles desired ‘not to live otherwise than in glory and reputation’. Or, as another diarist recorded it, Charles ‘had rather go to his grave than not to go on in this design’. 48

There was one troublesome legacy from the Parliament of 1625 which cannot be blamed on Charles. The biggest single component of the king’s ordinary revenue came from the customs duties known as tonnage and poundage. Since the late fifteenth century, the initial Parliament of every reign had granted this income to the monarch for life. Charles’s first Parliament was different, however. MPs who wanted to re-examine the whole subject of the king’s revenue, including the controversial ‘impositions’ that had been added onto the customs duties back in King James’s reign, produced a bill that would have permitted Charles to collect tonnage and poundage for just one year, thereby allowing time and room for negotiation over royal finances rather than throwing away this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But this bill did not pass the Lords before dissolution. That left Charles with no formal authorisation to collect tonnage and poundage, although out of stark necessity he continued to do so, naively believing that a later Parliament would understand he had no choice.

The Parliament of 1626

After the Parliament of 1625, Charles concluded an alliance with the Dutch and succeeded in setting out the fleet. These actions - if they had been crowned by success - might have radically shifted public opinion behind the war effort. When the fleet sailed, it still had no specific destination. Eventually it chased a small Spanish fleet out of Cadiz harbour; troops were put ashore, but they marched around, got drunk, and reboarded the ships without accomplishing anything. The fleet then sat off the coast of Spain for a while hoping to intercept the treasure fleet from Mexico which, however, had secretly sailed into Cadiz bay two days after the English left. As the English fleet straggled back home through the winter, it was obvious that it had been no less a debacle than Mansfeld’s expedition. 49

Meanwhile the effort to enlist France as an ally was unravelling. Charles was increasingly exasperated with Henrietta Maria’s attendants, whom he blamed for ‘making and fomenting discontentments

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in my wife’. 50 The French were, in turn, upset by the way Charles tried to minimise the influence of these attendants. They were also upset by the seizure of several of their ships accused of carrying contraband or ‘prize goods’ destined for Spain. They retaliated by placing an embargo on English wine shipments from French ports. Another source of friction was the resumption of persecution against English Catholics. The more Charles did in this respect to mollify domestic opinion, the more he alienated the French by breaking the terms of his marriage treaty. 51 Far worse than any of these other strains on Anglo-French relations was the affair of the loan ships. Charles and Buckingham loaned seven ships to the French as part of the inducement to an alliance. There was a spreading Huguenot (Protestant) rebellion in France, however, and the French government ended up using the English ships in their effort to conquer the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle. Charles and Buckingham were now in the untenable position of appearing to be aiding a Catholic monarch in the suppression of his Protestant subjects. The king and Lord Admiral were so horrified by this turn of events and exasperated with the French that they contemplated sending a fleet to France to retrieve the loan ships and free La Rochelle. In other words, Charles and Buckingham were drifting perilously close to war with Lrance! 52 Thomas Cogswell, who has most closely studied these events, attributed them to ‘an unprecdented run of bad luck’ rather than incompetence. But it seems fair to say, at the very least, that Charles and Buckingham were no match for Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu.

Charles summoned the Parliament of 1626 because he was desperate for money. In addition to the unpaid bills for the previous fleet and the cost of the new fleet that was being planned, he was particularly concerned to satisfy the demands of the King of Denmark who was threatening to withdraw from the war if he was not paid. Charles’s spokesman in the Commons announced that unpaid bills from the Cadiz fleet and anticipated costs for the next eight months totalled £1,067,221. 53 MPs were cognisant of the need to provide something toward the nation’s defence now that Spain had been provoked, so they offered a grant amounting to £320,000. They conditioned this offer, however, on the king’s satisfactory redress of their grievances. They would not repeat the mistake of 1625 when supply was voted before grievances were redressed. As Christopher Wandesford explained, the ‘cause of these great wants is that parliaments have of late met, saluted, given money, and so departed’. To

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avoid repeating that mistake, it was necessary to ‘give advice and counsel to the King as well as money’. 54 The Commons’ paramount grievance was Buckingham, and their advice to Charles was to get rid of him. 55 What was the point, MPs reasoned, of giving Charles any more money if it would be placed in the same hands to be spent as badly as their previous grants? The Cadiz fleet, Sir John Strangways observed, ‘gives us no great encouragement to give more monies’. And no man, said Sir John Savile, ‘will be willing to give his money into a bottomless gulf. 16

The Parliament of 1626 intensified the bad qualities we have already seen in Charles and brought out worse. He was still intransigent, still insisting that Parliament was obliged to finance his £1 million-per-annum war without any concessions on his part. He was beginning to understand that Parliament had him in a compromising position, but he was still unwilling to compromise. ‘Now ... that you have things according to your own wishes, and that I am so far engaged that you think there is no retreat’, he told Parliament, ‘now you begin to set the dice and make your own prize.’ 57 As those words suggest, Charles adopted a resentful and vindictive attitude, not a conciliatory one. He was convinced that he could bend Parliament to his will by removing a handful of trouble-makers or intimidating the whole body. He tried again to prevent the Earl of Bristol from taking his seat in the House of Lords, but Bristol defiantly showed up, and Charles subsequently charged him with treason and imprisoned him. Likewise, he kept the Earl of Arundel out of the Lords for several months by imprisoning him and keeping him under house arrest. 18 To quiet the House of Commons, he selected six of the most vocal critics from 1625 and appointed them sheriffs, which technically barred them from sitting in the new Parliament. 59

‘The King and Kingdom must not be divided’, Wandesford warned. But his very words suggested that this process was already under way. 60 The Commons were so disaffected that the removal of leaders like Coke, Phelips, and Seymour made no difference whatsoever in the tenor of their proceedings. They picked up precisely where they had left off the preceding year, attacking the Crown’s war policy and Buckingham’s leadership by interrogating the Council of War, hoping to show that subsidy money had been misappropriated and that the Lord Admiral was responsible for the catastrophes of Mansfeld and Cadiz. MPs were either disingenuous or deluding themselves to maintain that these attacks on Buckingham

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and the Crown’s war policy did not reflect on the king himself /’ 1 Charles had no such illusions. When a member of the Council of War told Charles that he was willing to risk imprisonment at the hands of the Commons rather than jeopardise a further grant of supply, the king replied: ’It is not you that they aim at, but it is me upon whom they make inquisition.’ Charles was determined to stand his ground, even if that meant losing the new subsidies he desperately needed. ‘Gold’, said Charles, ‘may be bought too dear .’ 1 ’ 2 He commanded members of the Council of War not to give any testimony in Parliament divulging the nature of their counsels; their lips were sealed. This action succeeded in cutting off one line of attack on the Crown’s war policy, but it also drove the Commons into a more direct confrontation. Later that very same day, Doctor Turner read the list of accusations in the Commons that would become impeachment charges against Buckingham . 1 ’ 3

Charles took the attack on Buckingham very personally. As Charles viewed it, Turner had made ‘an inquiry upon articles against the Duke of Buckingham as he pretends, but indeed against the honor and government of himself and his blessed father ’. 64 The impeachment charges were formally presented to the House of Lords by Sir John Eliot and Sir Dudley Digges. Both men used extravagant language. Earlier, when Clement Coke had said that ‘it is better to suffer by a foreign hand than at home’, Charles had branded this ‘a seditious speech’, but he left the punishment to the Commons, who did nothing. 6 ’ This time Charles acted, arresting Eliot and Digges. ‘I have been too remiss heretofore in punishing those insolent speeches that concerned myself, Charles explained . 66 One of the things that angered Charles was the comparison Eliot had drawn between the Duke of Buckingham and Sejanus, who was a notorious favourite of the Roman Emperor Tiberius. ‘If the Duke is Sejanus’, Charles concluded, ‘I must be Tiberius.’ 6/ Another feature of these speeches that upset Charles was the insinuation that Buckingham had poisoned King James. Here, too, Charles felt that he was being implicated, especially in the words used by Digges. Despite the offensive content of these speeches, Charles eventually relented, releasing both Eliot and Digges. In the final event, however, the only way he could protect Buckingham from the judgement of the Lords was to dissolve Parliament, even though it cost him the badly needed subsidies . 68

The reader should not be too quick to judge Charles by modern expectations. For example, it was standard practice for monarchs to

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intimidate Parliament, even to arrest members (though usually after Parliament was adjourned). This was Charles’s principal means of leverage over Parliament, and we cannot blame him for exercising it. Of course such measures could backfire. As one member said in 1626, ‘monies should not be gotten from us by threats as we have had divers this parliament’/’ 9 These measures did not succeed in getting Charles the money he wanted, but they had an effect none the less by putting MPs on guard about what they said and did. It is no accident that MPs in this Parliament threw one of their own members into the Tower for speaking words that were no more offensive than those spoken by Coke, Eliot, or Digges. /0 This latter incident illustrates not only the efficacy of the king’s interventions but also the fact that MPs themselves displayed a frightening readiness to interrogate, persecute, and imprison anyone they disliked (most notably, Roman Catholics, Arminians, and ‘evil counsellors’). Nor should we be too quick to judge Charles’s steadfast refusal to sacrifice Buckingham. Today, no matter how unjust the accusations, it is commonplace for a Prime Minister or President to dump a subordinate who has become a political liability. Charles was more resolute in the face of what amounted to a political vendetta. On this point Roger Lockyer is absolutely right: Buckingham was no criminal. The impeachment charges against him were of dubious merit and ‘essentially political’/ 1 In reality, as the Venetian ambassador expressed it, ‘what weighs upon them [MPs] most of all is that everything depends upon a person, every one of whose operations has turned out unlucky and unsuccessful’/ 2

What was wrong with Charles’s conduct in 1626? While any one of his actions taken by itself might be excused, the pattern of all those actions taken together was deeply disturbing. It was becoming clear that Charles was a stubborn, imperious, and dangerous man. Moreover, what Charles did do was all the more alarming in view of what he did not do. He threatened, intimidated, issued ultimata; but he did not show a willingness to bargain. The challenge, as he saw it, was not to reach a mutual understanding with Parliament but to make them yield to his demands.' ’ The message he sent to the Commons on 20 April was typical: if MPs did not quickly vote further supply, ‘his Majesty will give you no longer time, he will endure no longer delay, nor recede from what he now sends unto you’. 74 Charles was convinced of his own rightness and blindly indifferent to the political process. During this Parliament, at the very time Buckingham was being impeached for holding too many

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offices, Charles secured another prestigious office for him, the Chancellorship of Cambridge University. What Charles considered a demonstration of support for the Duke, we can only judge an act of stupefying insensitivity. The king’s deharrt refusal to work within the political process drove him outside that process. There were disturbing intimations in 1626 that Charles was contemplating ‘new counsels’, and he himself declared: ‘Remember that parliaments are altogether in my power for the calling, sitting, and continuance of them.’ 75 Charles did not inspire respect or trust; he inspired fear. And the underlying fear he raised was that, since he showed no ability to rule with Parliaments, he would try ruling without them. In the summer of 1626, the Reverend Joseph Mead wrote, ‘It is generally thought ... that the last parliament of King Charles his reign will end within this week.’ 76

The Forced Loan

In the aftermath of the 1626 Parliament, Charles did resort to different if not entirely ‘new’ counsels. He levied a forced loan and enforced its collection by imprisoning resisters. Richard Cust’s study of The Forced Loan and English Politics 1626-1628 provided an eyeopening portrait of Charles in this period. Cust emphasised that Charles was ‘a difficult man to advise, particularly if the advice was unwelcome’/' Through tact and persistence, a faction of moderates on the Privy Council managed to dissuade Charles from taking harsher action against men who resisted paying the forced loan. In the main, however, it was the king who decided policy, refused to summon a new Parliament, and pursued the project of the loan relentlessly. He put pressure on the judges to endorse the legality of the loan; when they refused, he summarily dismissed the chief justice of the Court of King’s Bench/ 8 He threatened to deal with loan resisters by forcing them into military service and shipping them off to fight on the continent. 79 One courtier reported that no one dared intervene on behalf of any loan resister because the king’s ‘heart is so inflamed in this business as he vows a perpetual remembrance, as well as present punishment’. 80

More than money was at stake here. Charles had become ‘almost obsessively concerned with the loyalty of his subjects’. 81 As we saw

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above, Charles thought in 1626 that he could obtain a more cooperative Parliament by excluding a few key members, but he discovered that it was still disrupted by ‘the irregular humors of some particular persons’. 8 ~ Cust found the same sentiments amplified in the declaration Charles published afterward to justify his dissolution of Parliament. Charles continued to insist that he had been drawn into war by the Parliament of 1624 and that subsequent Parliaments had reneged on their promise of support. He also continued to believe that this failure resulted from ‘the violent and ill-advised Passions of a few Members of the House’, the malevolent spirit of ‘such as are ill-affected to the State’. 83 Charles was deeply hurt by this turn of events and took it as an aspersion on his honour. When his uncle, the King of Denmark, suffered a crushing defeat, in part at least for lack of England's promised assistance, Charles felt further humiliated and betrayed by his own subjects. When his appeal to the nation for a voluntary benevolence failed to raise money, he became all the more convinced that the spirit of subversion was spreading. He came to abhor the very idea of a Parliament and to doubt the loyalty of his subjects. The forced loan became a test of his subjects’ loyalty. When Charles behaved this way, of course, it fostered the very sort of attitude he feared. As people observed his high-handed methods, they did indeed begin to question his judgement and trustworthiness.

Gust’s work on the forced loan demolished the revisionist picture of politics in the 1620s. Revisionism had emphasised shared assumptions, harmony instead of conflict, the absence of adversarial politics, and the non-existence of opposition. Where conflict occurred, it was reduced to petty motives, localist interests, or factionalism. And the root cause of trouble was alleged to be war, not the king. By contrast, Cust showed that the contemporary stress on consensus and harmony should not be taken at face value. 84 It was more a symptom of disorder, an expression of what people wished to be the case, than a description of what was in fact the case. More importantly, Cust showed that war was a superficial explanation for the disorders of the period; ideological division was a ‘more profound cause’. 83 Cust believed in the existence not only of opposition but of a ‘principled opposition’. 86 He found a great deal of news circulating in England, linking localities to the centre, creating a widespread political consciousness that emphasised conflict, criticised the king, and even tended to re-establish the impression that there were two ‘sides’ in early Stuart politics. 8 ' Cust came to agree with ‘the Whig view, that news contributed to a process of political polarization’, and he noted

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that ‘in this, as in many other aspects of the period, the instincts and judgements of S. R. Gardiner remain a reliable guide ’. 88 Cust went even further. Although he did not wish to rebuild the ‘high road to Civil War’ with its familiar milestones, he came very close to doing precisely that. He saw a continuous pattern of conflict from the forced loan to the Grand Remonstrance; and he concluded more generally that there was ‘a measure of continuity and thematic unity in much of the ideological conflict of the early seventeenth century ’. 89

Cust’s most significant achievement was to restore Charles to centre stage> He showed that although Charles was a difficult man to advise, he did receive good counsel. He showed that Charles was not an unfortunate victim of circumstances beyond his control but a vindictive and inflexible ruler who had a knack for making circumstances worse. He showed that Charles had come, in the words of contemporaries, to ‘abominate’ the very name of Parliament and had vowed not to summon another until he was ‘reduced to extremity and pulled by the hairs of his head ’. 90 He showed that Charles interpreted criticism as disloyalty. Indeed, he showed that Charles was ‘in the grip of something approaching paranoia ’. 91 And he showed that Charles’s fierce determination to collect the forced loan led many of his subjects to question their ‘trust and faith in the King himself . 92

Another historian who refocused attention on Charles was J. A. Guy, who unearthed one episode in the history of the forced loan that was particularly instrumental in undermining faith in the king . 9 ’ The legality of the loan was never tested in a court of law. The famous case associated with the loan was the five knights’ case, so named because it involved five imprisoned loan resisters who sought relief in King’s Bench. The royal strategy in the five knights’ case was clever. The Attorney-General, Sir Robert Heath, entirely avoided the issue of the loan and simply argued instead that the plaintiffs had been imprisoned ‘by his majesty’s special commandment’ and were therefore not eligible for bail. The judges on King’s Bench concurred. The prisoners were denied bail, and that would have been the end of the affair if not for the epilogue to the story uncovered by Guy. The court had made a mere procedural ruling denying bail. They had not made a substantive judgement on the issue of the king’s discretionary power to imprison his subjects for unspecified reasons of state. Heath subsequently tried to change the way in which the case was recorded in the official records of King’s Bench,

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however, to make it appear as if they had rendered a judgement establishing a binding precedent for the monarch’s power to imprison without showing cause. Heath's attempt to pervert the legal record was a felony in English law, and to their credit, both the clerk and the judges refused to cooperate. Unfortunately for Heath, one of the lawyers who opposed him in the case, John Selden, sat in the Commons in 1628. When Selden stumbled upon evidence of Heath’s effort to falsify the record, this shocking revelation helped strengthen resolve to curb the king’s power of imprisonment. Heath's conduct contributed to the growing impression that Charles could not be trusted to rule within the established law of the land. Of course it was possible that Heath acted entirely on his own, a point that has been made in the king’s defence by Kevin Sharpe. Unfortunately for that interpretation, Buckingham made the astounding admission that Charles had reprimanded Heath for failing! 94

Did the military exigencies of the time justify Charles’s actions? Here it is well to remember Conrad Russell’s argument: ‘Charles had an attachment to the rule of law, yet he believed that the law must be compatible with his obligation to defend his kingdom.’ Early modern monarchs preferred to rule within the law, but ‘when a legal right came into conflict with an urgent necessity of defence, they gave priority to the urgent necessity’. Unlike his stingy and myopic subjects, the ‘king could be presumed to know about military necessities'. 9;> What were the military necessities that justified the extreme measures taken by Charles in this period? Charles managed to continue the war for nearly eighteen months without parliamentary assistance. In the fall of 1626 he launched a second fleet against Spain, a fleet that was even less effectual than the previous one against Cadiz. Badly damaged by a storm in the Bay of Biscay, it limped back to England without so much as encountering the enemy. 96 Since this fleet produced no tangible results, except to drive Charles more deeply into debt, it is hard to see how it could be considered a military necessity. Far more costly, of course, was the opening of war on a second front - France. 9 '

Rational explanations can be found for Charles and Buckingham provoking another major enemy. Relations with France had continued to deteriorate. Despite the concessions Charles made to lure the French into a military alliance, it became increasingly clear that the alliance was a dream. When France actually allied with Spain instead of England, Charles felt duped by the French just as he had

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previously been duped by the Spanish. This was an especially bitter disappointment for Buckingham, who had been outmanoeuvred by Richelieu. Indeed, one historian has called the war with France ‘Buckingham’s private war with Richelieu’. 98 No less infuriating to Charles were Henrietta Maria’s meddling French attendants. His patience exhausted, Charles forcibly removed these irritants and sent them back to France. Drive them away ‘like so many wild beasts’, Charles ordered, ‘and so the devil go with them!’ 99 Moreover, there was still the important matter of honour to be vindicated after the affair of the loan ships. If France refused to be an ally, then the most direct way to restore English honour was to make common cause with the French Protestants and relieve La Rochelle. As Charles himself later explained, Louis XIII’s ‘intentions were always false and feigned ... [and] I deemed it a lesser evil to have him for an open enemy than to have him for a false friend’. 100 Nevertheless, despite all these rational explanations, when one considers how miserably the king’s military enterprises had fared up to this point and how completely his resources were already depleted, it is hard to avoid the consensus among historians that war with France was lunacy. 101

In the war with France (as indeed in the war with Spain) there was only one battle of any consequence: in the summer of 1627 Buckingham personally led an attack against the French fort on the Isle of Rhe located just off the coast from La Rochelle. The English were bogged down for more than three months and lost at least 5000 men before retreating. 109 The assault on Rhe, like its predecessors, was not a military necessity; it was a gamble. If Charles had understood that even kings must work within the limitations of reality, if he had been less quick to stand upon his honour, if he had been less prone to make enemies, and if he had not felt the need to prove his mettle by vanquishing an enemy, he would never have taken that gamble.

As Gardiner rightly observed, ‘Charles and Buckingham were ruining the sources of their influence by forcing the nation to support unwillingly an extravagant and ill-conducted war’. 103 The forced loan raised nearly £270,000, but it was the proverbial drop in the bucket. 104 A minor official at court described how desperate the Crown’s predicament had become by the autumn of 1627: ‘his Majesty’s revenue of all kinds is now exhausted, we are upon the third year’s anticipation beforehand, land much sold of the principal, credit lost, and at the utmost shift with the Commonwealth.’ 105 Yet Buckingham was contemplating several new military efforts,

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including an attack on Calais; and Charles, undaunted by reality, blithely promised to provide the necessary resources. 101 ’ In the end it was decided to take another stab at lifting the siege of La Rochelle, but the only way to pay for this undertaking was to summon a new Parliament.

The Parliament of 1628

Charles’s inability to learn from experience, generate goodwill, or inspire confidence was all too evident in the short speech he made at the opening of the 1628 Parliament. If this new assembly failed to provide the necessary supply, Charles warned, ‘I must, according to my conscience, take those other courses, which God hath put into mine hands’. Thus Charles, instead of laying the spectre of ‘new counsels’ to rest, actually breathed new life into it. Worse still, he told his listeners, ‘take not this as a threatening, for I scorn to threaten any but mine equals, but as an admonition’. 10 ' A threat by any other name was still a threat, which set precisely the wrong tone and made the more conciliatory language in the king’s speech ring hollow. By his ‘studied rudeness’, as Gardiner characterised it, Charles had managed to throw away a critical opportunity to improve his situation. 108 The Lord Keeper next spoke at greater length, describing the state of war on the continent in a way that was calculated to frighten members with the menace of Rome and the Habsburgs. Yet he, too, ended on a sour note with the hackneyed argument that Parliament had made an engagement to support the war, and he repeated the worst themes of Charles’s speech. If kings find their subjects loving and eager to vote supply, he explained, then they ‘may the better forbear the use of their prerogative, and moderate the rigor of their laws towards their subjects’. If not, then: ‘Remember his Majesty’s admonition, I say remember it.’ 109

Charles’s politics of fear - his constant threats, his readiness to employ new courses, his elevation of the royal prerogative over the common law, and his harsh treatment of those who disagreed with him - bore their natural fruit in the Parliament of 1628. Charles had succeeded in frightening and alienating a sizeable number of his most influential subjects. For refusing to pay the forced loan 76 men had been committed to prison or held under house arrest; 23 of

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those now sat in the House of Commons (nearly one in twenty members). 110 One of these, Sir John Eliot, told the House that he and other prisoners had been threatened that if they did not pay the loan, they would be sent abroad against their will. Now he looked to his fellow MPs for help ‘that it may be cleared here that the subject ought to be freed from that fear’. 111 Sir Robert Phelips admitted that there was cause to fear foreign dangers but, he added, ‘let not these fears so work on us as to weaken our resolutions against our fears at home’. 112 The overriding concern of Parliament in 1628 was to banish fear by re-establishing the rule of law, to balance the subjects’ liberties against the king’s prerogative, ‘to vindicate the fundamental liberties of the kingdom’. 113 In Eliot’s words, it was ‘our ancient laws, our liberties, our lives, that call to us for protection’. The normal bulwark of the law had been swept aside, leaving Eliot to ask: ‘Where is law? Where is meum et tuum [mine and thine]? It is fallen into the chaos of a higher power.’ 114 Without the law to protect them, the English were little more than slaves, a comparison that came naturally to several speakers in 1628. Sir Dudley Digges, for example, declared that any ‘king that is not tied to the laws is a king of slaves’. 110 It was Digges who stated the dilemma most precisely: ‘We are now upon this question whether the king may be above the law, or the law above the king. It is our unhappiness, but it is put upon us.’ 110 He need only have added - if it had been safe to do so - that this question was put upon them by King Charles. 11 '

Discontent in the Parliament of 1628 crystallised around four issues: unparliamentary taxation, imprisonment without showing cause, billeting in private homes, and martial law. Charles reacted predictably to this discontent. At first he promised that he would accept any solution that Parliament agreed upon ‘by way of bill or otherwise’, but then he began to wriggle out of this promise and force a confrontation. 113 He sent a message to the Commons assuring them that a bill was not necessary. In the words of the Lord Keeper, the king ‘assures you that he will maintain all his subjects in the just freedom of their persons and safety of their estates, and that he will govern according to the laws and statutes of this realm, and that you shall find as much security in his Majesty’s royal word and promise as in the strength of any law you can make’. 119 For some MPs this assurance was enough, but most (no matter what they said publicly to the contrary) put no stock in Charles’s ‘royal word and promise’. Charles should have let the issue die, but he insisted on sending another message to the Commons asking ‘whether we will

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rest on his royal word or no’. 120 As J. A. Guy observed, this message ‘poisoned the atmosphere completely’. 121 MPs actually sat for a while in stunned silence. It was obvious that Charles was trying to renege on the promise he had made at the outset to let the Commons proceed ‘by way of bill or otherwise’. He could hardly expect MPs to rely on his royal word now when he was, in the very act of making that request, breaking his previous royal word. When the Commons persisted in drafting a bill to vindicate their liberties, Charles tried to evade his promise another way. He conceded that he would accept a bill, as he had originally promised, but now he specified that this bill must only confirm existing laws ‘without straining them or enlarging them by new explanations, interpretations, expositions, or additions in any sort, which he clearly tells us he will not give way unto’. 122 Sir Nathaniel Rich summed up the emptiness of the king’s promises: ‘We have nothing thereby but shells and shadows.’ 12 .

When it became obvious that Charles would not accept a bill with any teeth in it, the Commons hit upon their own alternative in the Petition of Right. Charles’s behaviour toward the Petition reveals much about his character. First he tried to limit the scope of the Petition by writing a personal letter to the House of Lords, appealing to them to preserve his right to imprison without showing cause. The Lords produced a ‘saving clause’ which would have been added to the Petition, declaring that there was no intention to limit ‘that sovereign power wherewith your Majesty is trusted’. Of course the Commons refused to attach this clause. John Glanville, representing the position of the Commons to the Lords, described it as a ‘clause specious in show and smooth in words, but in effect and consequence most dangerous’. Glanville warned the Lords not to put their blind trust in the king: ‘The word “trust” is of a great latitude and large extent, and therefore need be well and warily applied and restrained, especially in the case of a king .’ 121 The Lords knew what Glanville was talking about. They had made their own inquiry into Heath’s effort to distort the record of the five knights’ case. More importantly, several individual Lords had suffered directly at the hands of the king. Roughly 15 peers had refused to acknowledge the legality of the forced loan (chief among these were Warwick, Essex, Saye, Lincoln, and Clare). The most radically outspoken of these, Lincoln, was imprisoned in the Tower. Essex, who had performed valiantly in the expedition to Cadiz, was mortified to be deprived of his Lord Lieutenancy. Others experienced the shame of being removed from their positions as Justices of the Peace. ‘No English