‘THE WHOLE WORLD IS SHAKING . . .’
The Thirty Years War was Europe’s central preoccupation in the years before the mid-seventeenth century. Its impact – considerable on all those parties directly engaged – was only part of a broader tumult which afflicted Europe in the mid-century, a tumult felt beyond Europe in the wider world as well. ‘. . . There is great shaking and the people are troubled.’ This was the reaction of an inhabitant of Moscow in June 1648 to the momentous events that were then convulsing the Russian capital. During the ‘Salt Riot’ (or ‘Moscow Uprising’) crowds of angry insurgents, abetted by the tsar’s sharp-shooters (streltsy) who had been sent to disperse them, invaded the Kremlin and ransacked the quarters of leading ministers, murdering several of them. That triggered other riots and rebellions. Over a hundred merchant and noble houses in Moscow were set alight and, within hours, half the capital (according to the horrified Swedish ambassador) had been burned down. Other uprisings broke out in sympathy, especially in the fortress towns on the steppe frontier in the Ukraine. With fears of a return of Russia’s ‘Time of Troubles’ (smuta) – the twenty years of war, devastation and famine in the early seventeenth century – the Romanov dynasty’s rule was openly thrown into doubt. Only with widespread concessions, coupled with hard-line repression, did the tsar and his adherents gradually over the following five years recover their authority.
Meanwhile, seismic events were occurring in another capital to Europe’s east. In June 1648, an earthquake struck Constantinople, demolishing the aqueduct which supplied the city with its water, severely damaging the Hagia Sophia and other mosques and killing several thousands of worshippers at Friday prayers. A Venetian source reported that preachers blamed the natural disaster on the failure of the Ottoman state to follow the teachings of the Prophet. Two months later, at the beginning of August, the return of a janissary officer from the war front in Crete to demand reinforcements sparked off a palace revolution. Conspirators strangled the chief minister (Ahmed Pasha), whose body was thrown into the street, where it was dismembered by the crowd – hence his nickname ‘Thousand Pieces’, Hezarpare. In the subsequent janissary revolt, Sultan Ibrahim was deposed. Following a sentence of doom (fatwa) from the Chief Mufti, pronounced on 18 August, he was strangled by the public executioner. His eldest son, the seven-year-old Mehmed, was proclaimed sultan in his place and his grandmother, Kösem Sultan, manipulated power in his name. Widespread rioting broke out in the capital and protesters gathered in the Hippodrome to make their voice heard. But the janissaries surrounded and killed them in their thousands, in cold blood. As in Moscow, the events in Constantinople called into question the sultan’s rule, and the regime struggled over the next decade to recover its stability.
Much in the individual backgrounds of these events explains why they occurred: in Muscovy, the emerging tsarist autocracy following the Time of Troubles; in the Ottoman empire, its geo-strategic problems, coupled with its structures of rule. But there were common elements too, which reinforce the conclusion that the contemporaneous mid-century turbulence in Europe was neither coincidental, nor limited to Europe alone. Both Moscow and Constantinople were capitals of large composite empires, ruling diverse regions. Each political system felt the competitive demands of war, and the need to modernize and finance the state. Each responded in ways which made it seem more out of touch with its subjects.
In addition, extreme climatic events rendered already vulnerable sections of the population even more fragile. Severe drought afflicted the usually fertile steppe-lands of the Ukraine in 1639, 1640 and 1645. There were exceptionally early frosts, followed by poor summers and harvests in 1647 and 1648. Population levels, said government commissioners in 1645–6, had shrunk from two decades previously. Similar droughts, coupled with early frosts, ruined the harvests of upland Anatolia and in the Balkans, while the Nile floodwaters (which irrigated its huge delta, feeding much of the Ottoman empire) were at their lowest ebb for the century in 1641–3, and again in 1650. Taking place in a grim climatic, economic and social context, the upheavals in Russia and the Ottoman empire destabilized Europe’s steppe frontier, and especially the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
POLAND-LITHUANIA: BEFORE THE DELUGE
By the early seventeenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a huge landmass. In 1618, troops under the command of the Polish Crown Prince Władysław Vasa stood before the gates of Moscow and tried to seize the city. Faced with no choice after the Time of Troubles, Michael Romanov (acclaimed tsar in 1613) ceded all the lands conquered over the preceding decade by the Commonwealth. Smolensk, the heavily fortified city on the Dnieper, only 200 miles from Moscow, fell, despite its newly constructed stone kremlin, to the Polish-Lithuanian forces, in 1611. Although this success made the Commonwealth over twice the size of France, it also increased the vulnerability of its frontiers. The Muscovites launched an assault on Smolensk in 1632, but failed to recapture it. Meanwhile, although the Commonwealth did not become directly involved in the Thirty Years War to the west, it was influenced by it.
Its bruising encounters with Sweden (1600–11, 1617–18, 1621–5, 1626–9) resulted from dynastic conflict, religious division and commercial-strategic rivalries. In the last phase, Gustav Adolf launched an amphibious invasion of Polish Prussia in May 1626, overrunning it with passive support from its mainly Protestant urban populations and threatening the port of Gdansk. Polish forces, their cavalry among the best in Europe but their infantry and artillery no match for the Swedes, held on with detachments from Wallenstein’s army in 1629. The resulting truce at Altmark (26 October 1629) gave the Swedes control of most of Livonia and the port of Riga, and the right to tax Polish trade through its cities on the Baltic. The Poles held on to Gdansk and prevented themselves being dragged into the escalating German conflict. The Commonwealth concentrated on its other vulnerable frontiers to the east and south, but its weaknesses were exposed.
Those internal problems were the result of a composite monarchy, whose union was superficial and whose asymmetry created dilemmas which could not be resolved. It prided itself on being a Christian commonwealth whose political heart lay in its three Estates: king, Senate and Chamber of Envoys (Sejm). In the latter, Poles, Lithuanians, Livonians and Prussians all had a voice. The Senate (150 members) included Catholic senior clergy, Palatine nobles, appointees to castellans and government ministers. The kingship was elective and, ever since the death in 1572 of King Sigismund Augustus, and in answer to demands from the lower and middle nobility, it had been agreed that not just the Diet but the whole nobility enjoyed the right to participate in royal elections. Nobles would turn up in their thousands to the Wola Field outside Warsaw where the Convocation Diet organized elections. The Diet also negotiated the new monarch’s electoral agreement (Pacta Conventa) to which he was obliged to swear before being crowned.
In addition, every Polish king was required to bind himself to the eighteen Henrician Articles (Articuli Henriciani), which had first been adopted at the election of King Sigismund’s successor, Henry de Valois, in 1573. They guaranteed the elective and non-hereditary nature of the Polish monarchy. The king’s marriage had to be approved by the Senate. The monarch was required to summon a Diet once every two years for six weeks, and its approval was required for all new taxes. Between meetings of the Diet, sixteen resident senators were elected to serve in rotation on a royal council. Kings could not declare war or summon the levée en masse (pospolite ruszenie – levies of nobles) without the Diet’s approval. Monarchs swore to abide by the Warsaw Confederation’s guarantees of religious freedoms. Finally, if the Polish king infringed the laws and privileges of the nobility, the Articles authorized the right to disobey, legitimating noble confederations against the king (Rokosz). Every Polish king from 1573 onwards swore that ‘if anything has been done by us against laws, liberties, privileges or customs, we declare all the inhabitants of the kingdom freed from obedience to us’.
Among the Christian commonwealths of the later sixteenth century such restrictions did not seem extraordinary. Polish contemporaries did not think that their monarchy was weak. They had differing views about the merits of mixed government, but many of them would have subscribed to the ideals expressed by Łukasz Opalinski on the eve of the Deluge that a strong state was not inimical to virtuous Poles protecting their liberties. On the contrary, they understood that their kings had considerable latitude for initiative. Ordinary Diets only lasted six weeks every two years. The king set the agenda. Most of the time was spent on petitions and local issues. Polish monarchs manipulated the Senate council such that ordinary nobles came to suspect that it was acting in magnate or monarchical interests rather than their own. Their mistrust of their kings was increased by the election of Jagiellon-descended foreign dynasts to the throne – a reflection of the prevailing dignity of royal blood and a reluctance to elevate a native magnate family over its peers. Foreigners were suspected of pursuing their own interests at the expense of the Polish Commonwealth.
This was particularly so in the case of the Polish Vasa kings (Sigismund III, Władysław IV and John II Casimir), who maintained their claim to the Swedish throne. Equally Sigismund III’s pro-Austrian affiliations and the influence of Jesuits at the Polish court figured largely in the Sandomierz Rebellion (the Zebrzydowski Rokosz, 1606–9) with its demands that Jesuits be expelled from the Commonwealth, royal office-holders elected and King Sigismund deposed. There was a negative sentiment that the best way to protect the Commonwealth was to block initiatives, and especially foreign adventures. ‘Our happiness is remaining within our borders, guaranteeing health and wellbeing,’ wrote the bishop of Płock in 1634.
What Opalinski called ‘non-government’ (nierzad) became a hostage to fortune, however, towards the middle of the seventeenth century. The Polish fiscal-state was weak and unreformed, its revenue base inadequate and undermined by monetary instability. The efforts to raise taxes through trade tariffs and exploiting domain revenues merely increased noble suspicions of its intentions. Its military state depended on magnate levies which had no regular training. Fiscal weakness meant that fortresses were limited and poorly maintained. The nobility refused to pay for military forces contracted outside the Commonwealth. The Polish-Lithuanian state was the more dangerously exposed for not having responded to changes in European warfare – as Prince Władysław Vasa appreciated during his European tour of 1626–7 which took in visits to the Flanders Army as well as the Venetian dockyards. In his Pacta Conventa he pledged to build a military academy for the Commonwealth, found a navy, and reform its infantry and artillery. Yet by 1647 the Polish royal guards totalled 1,200 and just 4,200 troops garrisoned the Ukraine.
The one military component which the Commonwealth could deploy was the Cossack host. Originally adventurers and freebooters, the Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Sich (along the lower Dnieper river) had become a substantial military force. But they were independent and difficult to manage. King Stefan Batory attempted to do so by registering those – mainly in the frontier towns of the Ukraine – whom they regarded as capable of bearing arms for the Commonwealth. The numbers of those registered increased in wartime, but declined in the subsequent peace; and there were always far more unregistered Cossacks who felt aggrieved that they had been excluded. In 1630, they rebelled and appealed to the clergy and laity of the Orthodox Church. The Commonwealth appeased the rebels by increasing the number of registered Cossacks to 8,000. Meanwhile, however, Polish settlers continued to flood into the Dnieper valley and, in 1635, the federal Diet unilaterally reduced the number of registered Cossacks to 7,000, and instigated the building of a new fort at Kodak on the lower Dnieper, garrisoned with contingents from the federal army. These measures provoked another uprising by the Cossacks, who sacked Kodak, murdered the new garrison and appealed to the Orthodox faithful. As a contemporary chronicle from Lvov said, the Cossacks ‘treated the Poles contemptuously, killed the Germans like flies, burned towns, and slaughtered the Jews like chickens’. Adam Kysil, a government commissioner sent to negotiate with the rebels, conceded that whatever was agreed could only be a truce since the Cossack problem was a ‘boil endlessly on the verge of bursting’.
Cossack brutality succeeded in the short term in alienating its own supporters. A Polish show of force coaxed the Cossack Sich into an agreement in 1638. They agreed a reduction in the number of registered Cossacks to 6,000, promised not to attack the Tatars (or Ottomans) without royal permission and agreed to take their orders from federal agents, appointed by the crown. Those agents, however, quickly became yet another avenue for Polish-Lithuanian settlements and land-grants in the Ukraine, the stationing of Polish troops in the major towns and the fostering of further unrest. Far from a truce, the result was another major uprising (the Ostrzanin Uprising, after its leader Hetman Yakiv Ostrzanin), in which ordinary Cossacks, outraged by a decision of the federal Diet making them the equivalent of peasants and therefore subject to enserfment, spread their grievances by leaflets, distributed by Orthodox monks, Cossack elders and sympathizers across the Ukraine. Although this was suppressed by the magnates, it was a symptom of a wider simmering social and religious malaise in the region.
Polish Ukraine – the lands on the left bank of the river Dnieper – had originally been part of the grand duchy of Lithuania. With the formation of the Commonwealth it fell under Polish hegemony – Polish law, officers and Catholic faith. The under-populated region attracted immigrants from all quarters, who settled in new towns or expanded the old ones, a frontier society which lacked the social solidarities of old-settled lands. To compensate for that, and to provide for frontier defences and reward its servants, the Polish crown made massive grants of land in the Ukraine to a small number of magnates of Polish origins. Their estates grew spectacularly as Polish landowners exploited the black-earth riches of the steppe with serf-based domains. Their estate managers tended to come from just one group of immigrants – the expanding Jewish population which, by 1648, numbered at least 45,000. By 1640, some 10 per cent of the Ukraine’s landowners controlled two thirds of its population and landmass. The 1638 uprising was suppressed by two of them: Jeremi Wisniowiecki and Mikołaj (‘Bearpaw’) Potocki. Wisniowiecki’s estates were made up of some 616 Ukrainian settlements in 1630. By 1640 that figure had risen to 7,600. In 1645, it was 38,000 and he had over 200,000 subjects. Potocki had similarly large holdings which were further increased as a reward for his loyalty in 1638. As their estates grew, so did their influence over the indigenous middle nobility and largely Orthodox non-Polish population, both groups disaffected, alienated and resentful.
The election of King Władysław IV in 1632 brought to the throne a reformer with international ambitions. He forged alliances with the emperor (marrying the sister of the future Ferdinand III in 1637), Spain and Denmark and made enemies among the nobility for promoting fiscal and military change. Then, making capital from the Cretan War and with backing from Rome, Venice and Muscovy, he planned a military intervention against the Ottomans in 1646, hoping to consolidate an unstable frontier and solve Cossack unrest by launching a campaign in which they had a stake. He recruited Cossacks, only to have the federal Diet demand he dismiss them. In 1647 and in poor health, he resurrected the plan under the auspices of a 25,000-strong army organized privately by Wisniowiecki. But he died in May 1648 just as the Khmelnytsky Cossack rebellion gathered force.
Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the leader of the uprising, was the son of a middle-ranking Ukraine nobleman. He was educated by the Jesuits (though he remained Orthodox), read and spoke several languages, and knew the wider world. Entering service as a registered Cossack, he served in the Polish war of 1619 against Moldavia and, captured by the Turks, spent two years in Constantinople. In the 1630s, he led Cossack contingents against the Ottomans in naval assignments in the Black Sea and acted as a negotiator on behalf of the Cossack Sich on the eve of the 1638 revolt. His own experience of magnate oppression occurred in 1645 when his estates were seized without redress by Aleksander Koniecpolski. When Khmelnytsky failed to win satisfaction from the king, he took his cause around Cossack regiments, and then to the Sich. At the end of January 1648, he was elected Cossack Hetman, issued demands which amounted to an independent Ukraine, made common cause with the Crimean Tatars, and then inflicted two crushing defeats on the Polish forces (Zhovti Vody, 16 May 1648; Korsun, 26 May 1648). Entering Kiev at the head of a large Cossack army at the end of 1648, he declared his objective as to ‘liberate all Ruthenians from Polish misery . . . to fight for the Orthodox faith’. The people (by which he meant the Rus) are ‘our right hand’. ‘The main reason for the war between us and the Cossacks is the difference over the Ruthenian religion,’ wrote the Polish Parliament-man Andrzej Fredro. The Commonwealth faced a civil war with social, religious and ethnic overtones.
The latter were particularly evident in the victims of Cossack rage. A ‘Victory March’ sung by the rebels celebrated how ‘Crook-Nose’, a Cossack captain, ‘chops the soldiers’ heads off their shoulders’, leaving ‘Polacks, hanging like a black cloud/Now Polish glory’s sore and shattered’. They also massacred Jews in their thousands. Rabbi Nathan Nata Hannover described the slaughter in his The Abyss of Despair, a chronicle of the rising. At Nemyriv in June 1648, the local populace abetted the Cossacks to enter the stronghold where the Jews had taken refuge. They slaughtered everyone they could in the next two days (6,000, according to his estimate). Women jumped over the walls and drowned rather than be molested or murdered. At least 10,000 Jews (a quarter of their overall number) were probably killed, with perhaps 8,000 more taking up refuge elsewhere and 3,000 being sold to the Tatars as slaves.
Behind the migrations southwards, and the rage and despair of the rebellion itself, lay the unpredictable weather patterns which had prevailed in the region since the later 1630s. Cold summers accompanied by late spring heavy snow and frosts disrupted the short growing seasons and harvests in 1641–3 and 1646. Plagues of locusts attacked the crops in 1645–6, and the horrible winter of 1646–7 was followed by torrential rains and flooding in the autumn and winter of 1647. As the uprising began, it was unseasonably hot and dry, with locusts again destroying the harvest. An inscription in the church of St John the Baptist at Sambir from that year read simply: ‘There was great hunger throughout the Christian world.’
Khmelnytsky claimed that he had King Władysław’s authorization for the revolt, although the letter has never been found, and was probably forged. Nevertheless it was one of the ways by which, over the following three years, Khmelnytsky made good his ambitions to rally the Ukraine and Belarus against the Polish Commonwealth. He placed armies in the field as large as those which fought in the Thirty Years War and looked for allies abroad. The Crimean Tatars played a decisive role in an increasingly bloody conflict. In return for their participation they were granted licence to raid in the Ukraine and seize Catholic Christians and Jews for sale as slaves in Ottoman markets – Orthodox Catholics treating both (even Uniates) as legitimate targets. At the battle of Berestechko (on the Styr river, 28–30 June 1651) over 60,000 Polish troops confronted a Cossack and Tatar host of over 100,000 and eventually overwhelmed them. The Tatars withdrew, taking Khmelnytsky with them as a hostage. He managed to negotiate his release, making further promises to reward them for their services, and reassembled a Cossack host, confronting the Poles once more, this time successfully, at the battle of Bila Tserkva (24–5 September 1651), leading to a truce which was not ratified by the Sejm.
As Khmelnytsky marched towards Moldavia in the early summer of 1652 in order to cement his alliance with its rulers against the Poles, the Polish crown’s forces, mostly magnate levies, gave battle at Batih (1–2 June 1652) on the river Boh. Khmelnytsky commanded at least 40,000 Cossacks and Tatars. The Polish army was not more than 15,000 strong, but it was well entrenched in a defensive camp. Internal divisions in the Polish forces enabled Khmelnytsky to overcome them, and 8,000 Polish soldiers were captured and slaughtered. The treaty which Khmelnytsky signed with Muscovy in January 1654 established (in Muscovy’s eyes) its hegemony over the Kievan Rus and became the prelude to its, and Sweden’s, invasion of Poland, which the Commonwealth was, by then, in no position to repulse.
THE ‘FALLING OUT IN THESE THREE KINGDOMS’
In 1662, James Heath published his Brief Chronicle of all the Chief Actions so fatally Falling Out in these Three Kingdoms emphasizing the interrelatedness of what remained distinctive struggles in the British Isles – the Bishops’ War (1639–40) and following Scottish Civil Wars (1644–5), the Irish Confederate Wars (1641–53) and the English Civil Wars (1642–6, 1648–9 and 1650–51). Superficially, there are parallels to be drawn between how things transpired in the east and in the west in the years approaching the mid-century. Like Poland-Lithuania, the British Isles had been only tangentially involved in the Thirty Years War. Its disengagement occurred after token support for the Palatinate in 1621–2, a disastrous Anglo-Dutch naval expedition to Cádiz (November 1625), a failed Anglo-Dutch coalition with Denmark in support of its intervention in the empire, and a dismal effort to relieve French Protestants (1627–9).
Like Poland’s, British commerce suffered from the severe economic dislocation in the Baltic, the Channel and across central Europe. Contingents of Polish volunteers – as their Scottish equivalents in the Swedish armies – served in European armies, just as Protestant exiles from Bohemia and Germany turned up in Poland and London. London merchants and English gentry reassured themselves that, in comparison with Germany, they were living ‘halcyon days’ (‘What though the German drum/ Bellow for freedom and revenge? The noise/ Concerns us not, nor should divert our joys’ ran an English elegy). The times of troubles in the British Isles happened as the Thirty Years War and its aftermath preoccupied others.
The British state, like the Polish Commonwealth, was a composite monarchy whose union was superficial, and whose asymmetries created dilemmas which could not be resolved. The dominant group in England, as in Poland, was a middling nobility (‘gentry’, szlachta), which felt itself alienated from the magnate class whose wealth and power could be manipulated by monarchs, and could in turn divide the nobility as well. The gentry’s preoccupation became that their kings’ concerns were different from theirs, and that their rulers were not to be trusted because they threatened the laws, traditions and liberties of the commonwealth. As in Poland, the union in the British Isles involved an asymmetry in which one element (Scotland) became the neglected junior partner. In addition, the English fiscal-state was weak, with powers of granting taxation vested in Parliaments whose willingness to do so grew less the more their monarchs exploited prerogative sources of revenue for objectives which were alien to their own. In the British Isles, too, there was a third element (Ireland) where the problems involved a toxic mix of discontented resident landlordism, ethnicity and religion which resulted in uprisings of singular brutality.
In England and Scotland, the Churches were by law established. Debates about their uniformity, structure, ceremonies and worship reflected and fed into wider divisions, especially when the drive for uniformity in the Church came from the monarchy. The Puritans in England and the Presbyterians in Scotland were implanted within lay and clerical society north and south of the border. Both were convinced that they stood for the fundamental laws and liberties of their country as embodied in Church and state, and which were imperilled by the Stuarts. But the problems emerged first in Scotland, where the Covenanting movement took root among those who refused to conform to the Perth Articles (1618). Charles I’s more extensive plans for accomplishing a uniformity of worship, in line with those spearheaded by William Laud south of the border, were highlighted in the year of Laud’s inauguration as archbishop of Canterbury (1633), when Charles went north of the border for the first time, and a proposal for a new Scottish liturgy was placed before the Scottish Parliament. Bishops were required to wear their vestments and clergy their surplices while ministering holy communion. New Church Canons (1636) tightened the conformity of Scottish Presbyterians to Protestant practices south of the border and were silent about the Kirk, its general assemblies, Sessions and Presbyteries. The following year a new Prayer Book was imposed by royal authority, a guide to worship to be followed by every parish in the Kirk, and the standard by which nonconformity would be judged.
By announcing its intentions the government allowed time for the Kirk to mobilize and its organization furnished the means to do so. On 23 July 1637, a premeditated protest against the new book occurred at St Giles in Edinburgh. As the unrest spread, the authority of the bishops and the Privy Council north of the border was paralysed by an organized opposition (‘the Supplicants’). Their cause married opposition to religious innovations with a defence of vernacular laws and customs. It enjoyed the support of the nobility and the Estates (‘Tables’) of the Scottish Parliament. The fifth Table, coordinating the nobility and representatives of the other three Estates became a Directorate of Operations through which a National Covenant was distributed for signature. Drafted by a Presbyterian minister, Alexander Henderson, and a Scottish lawyer, Archibald Johnston of Wariston, it was signed by individuals from almost every part of the country. Royal efforts to overawe the Covenanters were outmanoeuvred and Charles decided to put the revolt down by military force, using a combined English and Irish army but resourced on prerogative revenues, without calling an English Parliament.
That initiative came apart in 1639. Charles’s efforts to rally a minority of Scottish opponents to the Covenanters under George Gordon, marquess of Huntly, petered out. So did the attempt to raise a force in Ireland. The levying of militia in English counties on prerogative powers was bitterly contested, not least because the Covenanting cause mirrored widespread English grievances against Laudian innovations in their Church. One man in Newcastle stood up for the Covenanters because they ‘did but defend themselves against those that would have brought in Popery and idolatry’. He refused to fight, ‘for unless his conscience moved him to it, he would not fight for any prince in Christendom’. When the king reviewed the troops at his disposal at York in April 1639, two peers refused to take the oath of service – William Fiennes, Viscount Say and Sele, and Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, both members of the Providence Island Company and backers of the Hampden case. Before the year was out, the conflict was already known as the ‘Bishops’ War’. But with his army too feeble to risk a fight, Charles negotiated in order to buy time. He summoned an English Parliament to do the job properly in 1640.
The Short Parliament, meeting on 13 April 1640, sat for only three weeks. Unlike the Polish Sejm, the English Parliament had the possibility of elections in two-member county constituencies where freeholders (whose numbers had grown as inflation and a diffusion of wealth lowered the threshold) had the right to vote. An unprecedented number of MPs in the Short Parliament took their seats after contested elections. As far as the king was concerned, it had only one piece of business to transact: the granting of supply to put down a revolt. To MPs, the redress of grievances took precedence, and their list (after eleven years without a Session) was long. Harbottle Grimston, MP for Essex, put it bluntly: the dangers at home were as great as those ‘abroad’ (that is, in Scotland). ‘The Commonwealth has been miserably torn and massacred and all property and liberty shaken, the Church distracted, the gospel and professors of it persecuted and the whole nation is overrun with multitudes and swarms of projecting cankerworms and caterpillars, the worst of all the Egyptian plagues.’ Grimston was among a minority of veterans from the fractious Parliaments of the 1620s. So too was John Pym, MP for Tavistock, a Providence Island Company member and trusted operator for Lord Brooke, Lord Saye and John Hampden. On 17 April 1640, Pym delivered a speech that turned specific grievances into a common cause without making it sound like an attack on the king. Charles, out of time and patience, dissolved the Parliament without gaining resources or answering grievances, and with a war still to fight.
Military mobilization in English counties in the aftermath of the Short Parliament was even more sluggish than the previous year, while the payment of Ship Money collapsed. The English state was a pediment whose pillars rested on subcontracted power to self-governing local entities. If the latter voted with their feet, there were limits to what the Privy Council, Lords Lieutenants or judges on Assize could do to command their obedience. The efforts to force men to serve in the army were resented, especially when it was for a cause that many of those impressed did not believe in. The Covenanting army, aided by contingents of Scots who had seen service in the Thirty Years War, seized the initiative and moved across the Tweed from Berwick, bearing a Bible ‘with a mourning cover’, its drummers beating a funeral march to indicate that their cause was God’s truth. When the English forces gave battle at Newburn on 28 August 1640 to stop the advance, they lost, and the Scots entered Newcastle unopposed. Charles agreed a ceasefire which involved monthly payments to the Covenanter forces for its duration. The only way that the king could persuade the City of London to release a loan with which to pay for the truce was to hold another Parliament. This, the Long Parliament, met in November 1640 after new elections (even more contested than those of its predecessor). It convened in an atmosphere of national crisis in the aftermath of a Parliament which had been summarily dismissed, its grievances unheard, to pay for a war which the king had lost, and for a cause which the majority of the Commons did not believe in, and which they associated with a king and regime in which they had no trust.
MPs queued up in the opening sessions to present petitions that voiced their accumulated resentments against the Personal Rule and those most identified with it. They emphasized their fears of Catholic influence at court – epitomized by Charles I’s French wife, Queen Henrietta Maria. Popular demonstrations accompanied the release of three prominent victims of opposition to Laudianism. William Prynne, a Puritan lawyer and virulent anti-episcopal polemicist lost his fortune, his freedom and his ears in two separate proceedings against him in Star Chamber (1634, 1637). His companions in the second proceedings were Henry Burton, a Puritan preacher, and John Bastwick, a physician. Burton’s attack on Laudian bishops was unrelenting, culminating in sermons which accused their innovations of amounting to a popish plot. For his part, Bastwick accused them of being the tail of the Beast. Like Prynne, Burton and Bastwick were fined, mutilated and imprisoned after a hearing at Star Chamber. Freed in November 1640, they were escorted in triumphal London processions as martyrs to the cause.
Initially, the Long Parliament had difficulty determining what that cause was. Burton, Bastwick and Prynne stood for virulent opposition to Archbishop Laud, popery, episcopacy and Personal Rule. Those were different issues, one of them (episcopacy) more divisive than the rest. But initially those potential divisions were subsumed into attacks upon William Laud and Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, and those most associated with Charles’s rule. Laud was impeached on a charge of high treason, and imprisoned in the Tower of London on 1 March 1641 to await trial. John Finch, the chief justice who had presided over Hampden’s Ship Money case, was also impeached and fled abroad. In April 1641, the case for Strafford’s impeachment failed and the Commons resorted to a Bill of Attainder, which was passed although the majority of MPs abstained from the vote. The king reluctantly signed the warrant for his execution on 10 May after threats from a London mob and an unpaid army. Under pressure from his London creditors he also agreed to the Triennial Act (February 1641), which required the summoning of a Parliament every three years and outlawed the raising of prerogative revenues like Ship Money without Parliament’s consent.
The Westminster Court of Star Chamber, the strong arm of the Privy Council, which had sentenced Burton, Bastwick and Prynne, was abolished. So too was the Court of High Commission, its equivalent in the Church, a familiar target of Puritan rage. Behind the scenes, the leading lights in the Long Parliament (the informal ‘Junto’) had their work cut out to keep the Commons and Lords in step, and to focus MPs on what most expected would be a resolution of the crisis. John Pym – his ability to mobilize a common cause with a veneer of moderation once more in evidence – emerged as a key player in negotiations with a minority of Puritan-minded peers to marginalize the potential divisiveness of what was to happen in the Church in favour of a deal with the king which he could not wriggle out of.
A CONFUSION OF TONGUES
‘When will you agree among yourselves? it seems you are erecting the Babel you so much talk of.’ That was how the prelate and Stoic Joseph Hall criticized the ‘Protestation’, Pym’s equivalent of an English National Covenant in May 1641. The Protestation required MPs, and then the whole country, to sign up to an oath to uphold the ‘doctrine’ of the Church, the ‘honour and estate’ of the king, the ‘power and privilege of Parliament’, and the ‘lawful rights and liberties of subjects’. It was an effort to secure national unity around a moderate solution to the fundamental differences in the nation. But, though it sought to defend the Church from popery, it had nothing to say about the governance, worship and destiny of the English Church. That failure opened the door to a coalescence of royalist opinion around the defence of the Prayer Book and Church. On the other side, radical doubts emerged about the trustworthiness of the king, with the possibility of equally radical changes in the Church in the offing.
Those disagreements were hidden by general opposition to the imprisoned William Laud. His critics described him as an Arminian, an exponent of the Dutch theologian’s critique of Calvinist views of grace and salvation. Arminius’s views had already demonstrated their capacity to divide the Dutch Republic, where they became associated with those willing to conclude a truce with the Spanish. That Arminianism had become an English issue was evident from the religious conference held at York House, the London residence of the king’s favourite, the duke of Buckingham, at the beginning of Charles I’s reign in 1625. The subject of the debate was the writings of the English prelate and Arminian promoter, Richard Montagu, bishop of Chichester. Both sides claimed they had the better of the arguments. In reality, the anti-Calvinists won where it mattered, in the heart and mind of Charles I. His Church and court increasingly favoured Arminians. Their critics, excluded from both, were forced to consider other ways of protecting what they held dear: to contemplate emigration, to go to law, to publish and to make a nuisance of themselves
Laudianism, however, was not centrally about Arminianism. William Laud preached the opening sermon at the Parliament in February 1626. His text was ‘Jerusalem is builded as a citie that is at unitie in itself’ (Psalm 122). His point was that the king’s governance and that of the Church were as one: ‘So the Church, and the Commonwealth, Gods house, the Temple, and the Kings house, the house of David, are met in my text.’ His aim was to link the Church in England to the Universal Church, whose historic roots lay in sacred Hebraic antiquity. The Temple was its model. To depart from that was to put what was left of the unity of Christendom in jeopardy. For Laud, that unity relied on its priests. Episcopal government guaranteed stability in Church and kingdom, just as patterns of worship which acknowledged and taught respect for sacral power reflected how one should behave towards divinely ordained royal power. His almost paranoid obsession with Puritan subversion was already evident: ‘They, whoever they be, that would overthrow sedes Ecclesiae, the seats of ecclesiastical government, will not spare, if they ever get power, to have a pluck at the throne of David. And there is not a man that is for parity – all fellows in the Church – but he is not for monarchy in the state.’
Laud was determined to unify the Church in opposition to the Puritans whom he saw as attacking the remnants of Christendom at its core. It inspired his efforts to rebuild St Paul’s in London, insert senior clergy into the Privy Council and local commissions of the peace, change the position of the communion table to be an altar, enforce the injunctions on bowing and kneeling before it, and limit lay influence over the appointment of ministers. Such innovations, introduced without Parliamentary approval, involved ordinary people in parishes. They divided them and, since the English Church was, like its state, dependent on local self-government, that blunted their implementation and increased the controversy surrounding them. At the heart of local opposition to Laudianism was the belief that it was closet popery.
Anti-popery tapped into the wellsprings of the English Reformation and the anxieties concerning its survival. It united Laud’s critics, playing a disproportionate role in the avalanche of pamphlets from 1641. Popish plots became the preferred instrument for Pym and the Junto to focus political loyalties and mobilize suspicions about the king’s objectives. Unity was all the more important because it was lacking in the Commons debates over the future governance, rituals and worship in the Church. On 11 December 1640, the ‘Root and Branch’ petition – it attracted thousands of signatures – was presented at the Commons by radical London parishioners. The text attacked the bishops, claiming that they undermined preaching and encouraged ‘lewd and dissolute, ignorant and erroneous men in the ministry, which swarm like the locusts of Egypt over the whole kingdom’. As a result, ‘only Papists, Jesuits, priests and such others as propagate Popery or Arminianism had prospered’.
The issues the petition raised were divisive. The English Reformation had been enacted in Parliament. So too had the powers of its Church, which Laudianism had perverted. What Parliament had created, Parliament could change. But should those changes be (as Scottish Presbyterians and radical English Puritans argued) in the direction of a Church without bishops, devoted to a godly reformation of the social order, established according to the Word of God and the example of the earliest Christian Churches? If not, what sort of Church should replace the collapsing episcopal authority (after Laud’s imprisonment and the abolition of High Commission)? The answers to these questions were, as Hall said, confused.
As the Long Parliament reconvened on 20 October 1641 after its harvest recess, populist anti-popery and Puritan anti-episcopal populism were evenly balanced. There was a drift of opinion to the king, especially in the House of Lords, where the legal status of the bishops in their midst was an immediate and pressing issue. That direction was reversed, however, on 1 November, when privy councillors announced to the Commons ‘certain intelligences . . . of a great treason, and general rebellion, of the Irish Papists’. Less than two months later, the anxieties which this raised in England set a course irreversibly towards armed conflict. On the one hand, Charles wanted to raise an army to repress the Irish rebellion. On the other, Parliament-men feared that such a force would be deployed against them.
Increasingly politics was taking place outside Westminster – in the London Guildhall and on the capital’s streets, and in provincial towns and communities where the rumours of papal plots multiplied, and in the corridors of Charles I’s attenuated court, where royalists sought a mise en scène which would break the deadlock. The Grand Remonstrance (8 November 1641), presented by Pym from the ‘committee on the state of the kingdom’, put forward the case for Charles I’s government being a long-running plot to subvert religion and liberty. The remonstrance passed through the Commons with a narrow margin, and then was printed and distributed. Meanwhile, a municipal revolution took place in the City of London which swept away the royalist-orientated aldermen and replaced them with their opponents, whose first action was (in concert with the Parliament-men) to elect a Committee of Safety and put themselves in charge of the London militia. Fearing a loss of control in the city, Charles I entered Parliament on 4 January with a posse of soldiers to arrest five members of the Commons and one peer, ringleaders of the opposition. But they had been tipped off and were nowhere to be found. The king’s mise en scène turned into a mise en catastrophe which proved that he was as incompetently untrustworthy as he was painted. In March 1642, Parliament published an ordinance, taking over the country’s trained bands of militia. In July, it voted to raise an army and put the earl of Essex in command of it. With the king also raising forces in counties loyal to him, and despite local attempts to avoid taking sides, the Civil War gradually took shape.
IRISH REBELLION AND THE CONFEDERATE CAUSE
On 22 October 1641, the native Irish of Ulster under the leadership of Sir Phelim O’Neill set out to capture the country from the representatives of the king in alliance with the Old English settlers of the Pale. Their motives were mixed, powerful and opportunistic. The Ulster conspirators resented their exclusion from royal service, especially under the government of Charles I’s Lord Deputy in Ireland from 1632, Thomas Wentworth (later the earl of Strafford). Wentworth had learned his politics in a tough school, serving as president of the Council of the North. His correspondence talked of being ‘thorough’, by which he meant restoring the fortunes of King and Church (and advancing his own). His general idea was that the fractiousness of the 1620s (in which he had played his part) needed time to subside. After a decade or so of a firm royal touch, with reformed finances and Church, Charles I could then summon an English Parliament whose loyalties he could command. Ireland became the experiment for that approach.
Wentworth went out of his way to be ruthless, and not merely with the native Irish Catholics who were the usual targets of English neo-colonialism and who had been disenfranchised, their lands confiscated, their last stronghold (in Ulster) overrun with Scottish and English settlers, and their principal leaders in exile. He played off the ‘Old English’ (the main landholders of the kingdom, mostly Catholic, excluded from office by successive English governments, but retaining a powerful influence in the Irish Parliament) against the ‘New English’ (more recent Protestant settlers, including the Scottish Presbyterian planters in Ulster, their interests aggressively pursued by law and force). Manipulating the 1634 Irish Parliament, he achieved a lavish grant of subsidies and the power to vet titles to property. Due legal process was bent by ‘a little violence and extraordinary means’ (as he put it) to uphold the crown’s claims to determine landed titles and recover former Church lands which had been incorporated into the estates of the Old English landowners. Wentworth’s support for the pursuit of Laudianism in Ireland was a way of countering the growth of Scottish Presbyterianism in Ulster through its planters. But it was dangerous because it divided the narrowly based English governing ascendancy at its weakest point – the Irish Protestant Church, shorn of resources and enfeebled in its mission to the Catholic majority population.
Wentworth’s recall to England in September 1639 left an administration in Ireland internally divided and leaderless, a vacuum which allowed the native Irish, particularly in Ulster, an opportunity to regain their fortunes. Like the Old English, they reacted with alarm to the triumph of Presbyterian Covenanters in Scotland and the shrill anti-papal tone of the politics in Westminster. As Charles’s basis for support in England ebbed, so he looked elsewhere in his kingdoms for those whose loyalties he could count on. They included the Old English, who were led to believe (through the prospect of concessions) that they had royal acquiescence in resistance to the new Protestant settlers and Ulster planters, even royal blessing for a revolt which, in its timing, was the very reverse of a blessing for Charles I in England.
The October 1641 revolt failed to take the seat of English administration in Ireland at Dublin. Instead, it acquired the loyalties of all those who, over the generations, had suffered at its hands. Initially they concentrated on theft and property, but then the insurgents and their supporters turned to more murderous extremes. Thousands of English colonists were massacred, many deliberately assassinated. Thousands more were chased from their homes, despoiled of their belongings and clothes, and forced to take refuge wherever they might. On 20 December 1641, Charles I nominated commissioners to collect testimonies from English refugees sheltering in Dublin. Other affidavits were collected from those at Cork. Their accounts – over 19,000 pages of depositions under oath from witnesses who were far from unbiased – provide a picture of what happened in the early months of the Irish rebellion that was very different from that which was reported in England and on the continent thereafter.
In the over 300 surviving pamphlets from English presses the events were described as a pogrom of Protestants, a ‘barbarous butchery’, depicted in terms which evoked the reported ‘savagery’ of American Indians, and the massacre of St Bartholomew. One Irish minister was reported at the end of 1641 to have declared that 154,000 Protestants had been massacred in Ulster alone. That became the official figure, referred to in the Commons during debates and multiplied fourfold by John Milton among other pamphleteers from 1646 onwards. The depositions, however, reflect the more complex and varied reality of Irish grievances. In Ulster, victims told of armed insurgents bent on vengeance against the brutal colonialism of English planters, supported by troops. In Connaught and Clare, by contrast, the dislike of plantations was clear, but ethnic divisions were less in evidence. In Leinster, to the south, where there were no plantations, the uprising took the form of a peasant revolt. In Munster to the southwest, there were fewer massacres because the Old English nobility rapidly had things in hand.
The rebels established their sway over the middle and west of the island. They framed an oath, like the Scottish Covenant, pledging their loyalty to the English monarchy, to Ireland and to the Catholic faith. Faced with an English Parliament which, on 19 March, forced the king to sign the Adventurers Act, pledging Irish land in return for loans in order to send forces to Ireland, and prohibiting the king from issuing pardons to the rebels, they formed their own provisional government. The latter was conjured into existence through the organization of Catholic bishops, and steered by Ulick Bourke, earl of Clanricarde, a leading Catholic lord from County Galway. Based on a General Assembly (to strengthen their loyalist credentials it was never termed a Parliament) and an executive (called the Supreme Council), the Catholic Confederates ran most of Ireland from 1642 until they were defeated by Oliver Cromwell in 1649. They had agents in European capitals and raised their own finances and military forces.
The Confederates successfully opposed the English Parliament and Scots Covenanters, an independent government in all but name. While proclaiming their loyalty to Charles I, they negotiated with him, demanding that any agreement be ratified by a post-war Irish Parliament. Their aims were to achieve full rights of worship and participation in government of Irish Catholics and self-government. More radical Confederates wanted plantations in Ulster and elsewhere reversed, the establishment of Catholicism as the state religion in Ireland, and an alliance with Spain or France (who had supported them with modest subsidies from the beginning) in pursuit of their objectives.
Such demands placed Charles I on the horns of a dilemma. Horrified by the massacres of 1641, he had committed himself to seeking redress for Protestants who had suffered in the uprising and made other promises. Yet, as his military position in England weakened in 1643, so he became more willing to entertain concessions to the Confederate cause, ones which sought to tempt them into helping him without compromising him with English Protestant royalists. In September 1643, the Confederates negotiated a ceasefire with James Butler, duke of Ormonde and commander of the royalist army in Ireland. In 1644, a beleaguered Charles despatched Edward Somerset, earl of Glamorgan, with secret orders to agree to the Confederate demands in return for Irish Catholic armies to fight for him in England and Scotland. A copy of Glamorgan’s secret orders fell into the hands of the Long Parliament, for whom they were a propaganda coup – further proof of the king’s perfidy.
Faced with embarrassing questions from his own supporters, Charles was compelled to proclaim Glamorgan a traitor. To deter any effort to use Confederate soldiers in England the Long Parliament passed the ‘Ordinance of No Quarter’ in October 1644, giving localities carte blanche to ill-treat Irish (and, increasingly, any suspect royalists). In the end, the only military effort Charles extracted from the Confederates was a small force sent to Scotland under James Gordon, marquess of Montrose, enough to start another civil war there in 1644 by exploiting the Catholic loyalties among Highland clans and their hatred of the Covenanting duke of Argyll. In England, however, the Confederates, increasingly under the hard-line influence of the papal envoy Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, who had arrived in early 1645, merely encouraged Charles I to entertain false hopes of help from across the Irish Sea and to imagine that he could manoeuvre himself out of his increasingly hopeless position by manipulating all sides in whatever way seemed most convenient to him, compromising him with his own supporters and those with whom he would eventually have to negotiate a peace.
‘THIS BLOODY AND UNNATURAL WAR’
Charles I could have won the English Civil War. Loyalty to a legitimate king counted for a great deal. Twice as many peers fought for the king as for Parliament, recognition of the significance of the hierarchy of order, inherited privilege and obedience. They had their retainers in local society, even though many aristocrats had become courtiers, rendering their local networks remote. Their wealth gave Charles the initial resources with which to pay his troops. The earl of Worcester reportedly contributed over £300,000 to the king’s coffers. Charles I was the crowned head of the monarchy in the British Isles, with whom foreign princes expected to do business. Through his wife he had privileged access to the French court and was entitled to think that it would help him in return for promises of support in the future. He also had supplies of cavalry and horses through his princely relatives in the Netherlands and a corps of officers, many of whom had recent experience of service on the continent. He could draw on thirteen years of governing the kingdom. Most people feared the prospect of open conflict and shied away from committing themselves until they were forced to do so. His concern to remain true to his principles – a rejection of the mischievous propaganda against him and a projection of a defence of the Church and the obedience due ‘unto the natural person of the prince’ – emphasized the unity of his cause. His opponents could readily be presented as opportunistic and divided.
Yet, despite the superficial unity of a monarchical cause, competitive honour and wounded pride often set cavaliers against each other. The royalist heartland – in the West Midlands and Welsh marches – was threatened by Parliamentarian raids, exposing their supply-lines and administrative base. The latter was weakened by a failure to regulate the relations between royalist commanders and local authorities – leading to a sense of arbitrary exactions upon people. The result was that the royalist cause eventually became vulnerable to reprisals from local populations and divided from within between those who were prepared to consider a negotiated settlement (and therefore concessions) with the Parliament, and others (especially around Queen Henrietta Maria and Prince Rupert) who saw a fight to the finish as the only possible outcome. Charles I’s access to credit in support of his campaign was limited to the confiscation of plate and valuables from royalist towns, the mortgaging of assets (principally his wife’s) and promises.
The Parliamentarians gained control of the fleet (vital in securing the neutrality of other European powers) and some coastal garrisons, and could count on the City of London and loyalties in the wealthy Home Counties. Yet Parliament’s divisions over episcopacy, which had barely been patched over in 1641–2, resurfaced over other issues: the prosecution of the war as a defensive or offensive campaign; if the latter, how it was to be supplied and paid for; in what way a peace could be negotiated with (or forced on) the king. These issues, taken separately and together, raised questions about the legality of Parliamentary actions and the divisive social consequences of what they were about.
The Parliamentary way of doing business was hardly conducive to running a war. Even after the defection of royalists from the Parliament, attendance was still not far short of 200 MPs (with about thirty peers in the Lords). The predilection for establishing committees to handle specific business multiplied delays and opportunities for division. But, unwieldy though it undoubtedly was, Parliament also provided an avenue for the local grievances created by the prosecution of the war. Had that not existed, it is difficult to imagine that (even in extreme necessity and with all the persuasive skills of Pym and leading Parliament-men) they would have succeeded in gaining consent for extraordinary fiscal impositions and military impressments. The transformations in the Parliamentary war-effort in 1643 were the key to its eventual success.
The greatest chance of a royalist victory occurred early in the war. In the first major battle (Edgehill, 23 October 1642) the earl of Essex’s Parliamentary forces, barely managing a draw, beat a hasty retreat towards London to protect the capital. Prince Rupert pressed home the advantage and, on 12 November, attacked Brentford. The possibility of a royalist encirclement of the city was real. But Essex rallied the London militia and faced down the royalists at Turnham Green. Then, as royalists consolidated their grip on northeast England, captured Bristol (July 1643), made gains in the southwest and pressed on through Lincolnshire into East Anglia, they sought to exploit Parliamentary divisions with offers of negotiation. Pym used the emerging sense of desperation to gain assent for compulsory assessments across all Parliamentary territory, the introduction of an excise (farmed out to professional tax-collectors) and compulsory impressments of soldiers. In the autumn of 1643 the Parliamentarians held on to Gloucester and concluded a treaty with the Scots for a 20,000-strong Covenanter army to re-enter the northern shires which they had vacated two years earlier.
The Covenanter intervention changed the balance of forces. At the same time, the treaty with the Scots opened up simmering divisions in Westminster between the wavering bands of Parliament-men who sought a peace, and those who wanted to prosecute the war with greater determination. The Covenanters were prepared to intervene because Charles planned to use Irish Confederate forces to invade the west coast of Scotland. But they wanted commitments from the Westminster Parliament to a Presbyterian Church order to rebuild the now shattered foundations of the English Church. On 12 June 1643, the Westminster Assembly was established: 120 hand-picked Calvinist-minded English ministers with thirty lay assessors from both Houses of Parliament and eight Scottish commissioners. Their brief was to provide a blueprint for a new English Church – which turned out to be a Presbyterian one.
Henceforth, those in Westminster seeking peace began to coalesce with those opposed to the Scots and dismissive of their scriptural claims to Presbyterianism being a divinely sanctioned form of Church government. John Pym died on 8 December 1643 – the state funeral readily accorded him by MPs a testimony to his contribution to their cause. Before the end of the year important Parliamentary defections were rebuffed by Charles and the news of his understanding with the Irish Confederates held other waverers to the Parliamentary cause. In 1644, Parliament’s military victories turned the tide of the war – especially that at Marston Moor (2 July 1644) in North Yorkshire, weakening the royalist grip on the north and setting the scene for a gradual collapse of royalist positions more generally. The king was eventually forced to surrender to the Covenanter army at Southwell, Nottinghamshire on 5 May 1646.
The victors at Marston Moor included the MP and commander Ferdinando Fairfax, the Major-General of the Eastern Counties Parliamentary Association, Edward Montagu, earl of Manchester, and his second-in-command, Oliver Cromwell. As Westminster tensions grew, they spread to the City of London, the Parliamentary army and more broadly. In London, nonconformist congregations took advantage of the collapse of Church authority to establish their presence and to voice their opposition to a Presbyterian Church settlement. Called ‘Independents’ by their critics, they found an echo among those fighting in the armies on the Parliamentary side.
Both royalists and Parliamentarians had taken to grouping shires together into associations for military purposes. The Parliamentary Eastern Association, faced with persistent royalist attacks into Lincolnshire, reformed its forces into what became known as the ‘New Model Army’. Cromwell, in particular, was content to accept, and promote up the ranks, those whose religious views were nonconformist and who, socially speaking, came from below the upper crust. The division between those in the Parliamentary army who were anxious for a settlement and those who wanted to go on and win the war at whatever cost was laid bare. It resulted in the Self-denying Ordinance (eventually agreed to by Parliament on 3 April 1645), which was a thinly disguised purge of Parliament’s senior officers and the emergence of Independents in the army as well. By the time of the king’s surrender, the divisions in the country after ‘this bloody and unnatural war’ were as much within the Parliamentary cause as between Cavaliers and Roundheads.
As elsewhere in Europe, climate irregularities contributed to the perception of uniquely harsh years during the 1640s in the British Isles. The Irish rebellion of 1641 had coincided with a hard winter (with heavy snowfalls and severe frosts) resulting in deaths attributed by observers to cold and starvation, especially among those trying to flee the massacres. Later that same decade (as also in Ireland) failed harvests and an epidemic of plague brought famine in Scotland ‘the lyke of which had never beine seine in this kingdome heretofor, since it was a natione’.
Meanwhile, the material destruction from the first Civil War in England was colossal. To fund its armies, the Parliamentary administration raised over £30 million in taxes and penalties, although still more was requisitioned locally. That unprecedented burden became still heavier in the aftermath of the king’s surrender. Disastrous weather ruined the grain and hay harvests for the next six years in a row. The Essex clergyman Ralph Josselin noted in his diary in May 1648: ‘such terrible frosts that the ear [on rye] was frozen and died’, followed (in June) by the report: ‘corn laid, pulled down with weeds; we never had the like in my memory’. That same year James Howell, one-time clerk to the Privy Council, told a correspondent from London that a ‘famine doth insensibly creep upon us’. ‘’Tis true,’ he added, ‘we have had many such black days in England in former ages, but those paralleled to the present are as the shadow of a mountain compared to the eclipse of the moon.’
THE EXECUTION OF A KING
In such worsening economic circumstances, winning the war changed nothing. A peace still had to be negotiated with the king on terms that would protect the Parliamentarians and yet preserve the monarchy. The Covenanters had to be rewarded for their intervention, and they expected the Presbyterian Church government proposed by the Westminster Assembly to be implemented. The Parliamentary army had done the fighting but it had not been paid. The costs of its arrears amounted to £3 million. Parliamentary exactions, especially in the circumstances of the terrible harvests of 1647–9, caused widespread grievances against politicians whose legitimacy rested on elections which went back to November 1640. When by-elections were held from 1645 onwards, those returned to the Long Parliament were Independents, committed to further radical reforms of the judiciary and against the fragile and readily contested Presbyterian leading lights among its MPs and in the City of London. Presbyterian hopes rested on a negotiation with the king and the disbandment of the army with promises of arrears of pay based on realizing episcopal assets.
Meanwhile, as the prospects of being rewarded with what they saw as their just deserts receded in the spring of 1647, the rank and file of the Parliamentary army became restive, appointing ‘agitators’ to present their case to their commanding officers and commissioners from the Parliament. On 3 June 1647, they seized the king, transferring him to army custody as a bargaining counter. Two days later, regiments signed up at a general rendezvous to the Solemn Engagement of the army, a declaration that they were not a ‘mercenary army’ but a force raised to fight for the rights of ‘freeborn Englishmen’. Those rights were equated with liberty of conscience, fixed-term Parliaments and hostility to arbitrary rule. The latter now included that of a Parliament whose financial apparatus and membership were accused of corruption and wanting to preserve its authority for ever. The inspiration for this programme came from London Independents and radicals, called ‘Levellers’ by Presbyterians, who believed that they were a threat to property and order. The Presbyterian minister Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena (1646) offered a ‘Catalogue and Discovery’ of ‘Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices of the sectaries of this time’. Calling on others to report the threats to the established order from the pullulating profusion of sects, he collated the evidence into a laborious exposition which revealed the widespread fears of the equivalent of a disease in the social body.
In 1648, there were risings in the name of the king in Wales and Cornwall, a revolt against the Presbyterian-dominated Parliament in Kent, Essex and Lincolnshire, and a defection of part of the navy from Parliamentary control. With the Confederates in Ireland, Stuart loyalists active in the west of Scotland, and open divisions among and between the Parliamentary army, Parliament and the City of London, it is not surprising that Charles I felt that he could yet recover what he had lost in military defeat. He refused to discuss abdication and let it be known that he was prepared to be a martyr in defence of sacred royal authority – a power he demonstrated by healing people with scrofula (the ‘Royal Touch’) when given the opportunity.
The paradox at the heart of the execution of Charles Stuart on 30 January 1649 was that the majority of the fifty-nine signatories to the death warrant were not republicans. A minority of convinced anti-monarchists had surfaced in the wake of the Civil Wars, especially among army radicals and in the press, but they played almost no role either in the king’s death or in the subsequent establishment of the Commonwealth. The central arguments for the regicide came from the Bible, texts instrumentalized by events to prove that the king was a ‘man of blood’, an inveterate violator of the public peace, whose crimes against his people could not go unpunished. In the Theatre of God’s Judgments (its fourth edition appearing in 1648), Cromwell’s teacher Thomas Beard explained (in relation to the massacre of St Bartholomew) that mass murderers could not escape retribution. In a sermon preached before Parliament in the aftermath of the battle of Marston Moor, Henry Scudder called, on the basis of Old Testament texts, for those who had spilled so much blood to be brought to book. In The Just Man’s Justification (1647) the Leveller John Lilburne called for Charles I to pay the price with his blood for that which he had caused to be shed by others. Those arguments were deployed in the debates of the House of Commons and at the Council of the Army between October 1647 and 6 December 1648. Cromwell was among those who were convinced that Charles I was indeed a ‘man of blood’, his guilt evident from his devious actions and from the judgements of divine providence in battle against him. But he was not sure that he, or others in the army, had the authority from God to intervene. In similar circumstances, King David had refused to punish Joab for the murder of Abner. Other solutions lay to hand – perhaps a legal trial, leading to Charles’s replacement by one of his two sons.
But then a crisis occurred which overwhelmed Cromwell’s caution and that of the army council in general. On 6 December, a military coup, organized by Colonel Pride, commander of the regiment which guarded the capital, purged the Long Parliament of those whom they suspected of being Presbyterians and favourable to a peace deal with the king: forty-five MPs were arrested, 186 were excluded and eighty-six others refused to take part in any further proceedings as a protest. Seventy MPs were left as a ‘Rump’ Parliament. For Cromwell, Fairfax and the leading figures in the army, this complicated the question of their legitimacy. It called into doubt their capacity to launch the legal trial against the king in the High Court of Parliament. They now faced concentrated and vocal opposition from Presbyterian preachers in London and the remaining members of the House of Lords, who accused the army of acting as an instrument of tyranny. Then, on 18 December, the generals received intelligence that the Dutch States General had signed an agreement with the Irish Confederates. The possibility of a naval blockade of London was real, as was the launching of a royalist-inspired invasion of England from Ireland in the spring of 1649. Charles I’s rejection of the army’s eleventh-hour attempt to reach a negotiated settlement with him sealed the metamorphosis of Charles Stuart from ‘man of blood’ to public enemy, charged with ‘traitorously and maliciously’ levying ‘war against the present Parliament and the people therein represented’, the principal accusation which he faced in the sham trial (albeit one which preserved the formalities of a real one) which took place in the week of 20–27 January 1649.
Charles’s path to the scaffold, erected against the north wall of the Banqueting Hall in the palace of Whitehall, took him past the paintings which he had commissioned from Peter Paul Rubens in 1635 to commemorate his father, James I. The latter was depicted as King Solomon. The Hall was turned into Solomon’s Temple. The king was shown in majesty, distributing equitable justice; bringing peace and prosperity to the land; and obliging war and rebellion to go on bended knee before him. The day of his execution, a printing press in London distributed the first copies of the retrospective apotheosis of his monarchy, the Eikon Basilike (The Royal Portrait). The image of the frontispiece, the portrait referred to in the title, depicted the king on bended knee in prayer, his eyes fixed upon an eternal crown, in his hand a crown of thorns and at his feet a terrestrial crown, inscribed with the word ‘vanity’. The ‘man of blood’ became, on the day of his death, transfigured into a martyr, a man of suffering, and the basis for a restored royalism.
The results of the troubles in the west were therefore very different from those in the east. The levels of material destruction may even have been greater in England than in many parts of the European continent. A quarter of a million men and women are estimated to have died in the Civil Wars – 7 per cent of the population (as compared with less than 2 per cent in the First World War). The political fallout was also entirely distinct because the Parliamentarians had won the military battle decisively. It was Charles I’s unwillingness to understand the consequences of defeat, his persistence in playing off the different struggles to his advantage and seeking outside help, which lost him his head.
The king’s execution unleashed a revolution. It was followed by the abolition of the monarchy (17 March 1649), the House of Lords (19 March) and the Privy Council. The Act Declaring England to be a Commonwealth (19 May 1649) constituted England ‘a Commonwealth and Free State . . . by the supreme authority of this nation’, its affairs vested in the officers of a Council of State. The office of bishop had already been abolished by Parliamentary ordinance (9 October 1646) and many clergy purged and ejected. Royalist aristocrats took up exile, their wealth confiscated. The English Republic consolidated the transformations in the English fiscal and military state which the Civil Wars had instigated. But, with the resurgence of Protestant sects and radical groups in the Parliamentary New Model Army in the wake of the Civil Wars, there was no agreement about how Parliaments should be elected, about what should happen to Church lands and tithes and other fundamental issues in the Church, and about turning the Republic into a Puritan ‘godly commonwealth’. Those divisions, coupled with a persistent royalism and a monarch in exile to which it could turn, set a term to the English revolution.
In the meantime, the revolution was exported to other parts of the British Isles, rewriting the union which the Stuarts had instigated. Cromwell conquered Ireland (1649–53), defeating the Confederate-Royalist coalition and occupying the country. Penal laws against Catholics provided the basis for the confiscation of large amounts of land and its assignment to army veterans who were owed back-pay, and Protestant adventurers. The latter were those merchants and Anglo-Irish speculators who under the Adventurers Act (March 1642) agreed to lend money to Parliament for the subjugation of the Irish rebellion. The Scottish Covenanters, despite their conflicts with the Scottish royalists, signed a treaty with the exiled Charles II Stuart at Breda (1 May 1650). With nothing to lose, Charles agreed to everything they asked for – most significantly an independent Presbyterian Scotland, free from English interference. Cromwell hastily left the remains of the Irish campaign in the hands of lieutenants and arrived in Scotland in July 1650 with an army which defeated the Scots at the battle of Dunbar (3 September 1650). When the Scottish Covenanters and royalists joined forces and regrouped against the English, a further army (under General John Lambert) crossed the Firth of Forth and defeated the Scots at the battle of Inverkeithing (20 July 1651). The remnants of the Scottish army went south of the border to link up with the English royalist rearguard, to be finally defeated in 1653. By the Tender of Union (‘Declaration . . . concerning the Settlement of Scotland’, 28 October 1651) the English Parliament proposed that Scotland be ‘incorporated into, and become one Common-wealth with this England’. The Scottish Parliament was dissolved and Scotland was given thirty seats in the Westminster Parliament. Although several acts and ordinances for the ‘incorporating’ and ‘uniting’ of Scotland and England were put forward, it was finally approved only in 1657. So, although the union was a de facto reality, persistent royalist insurgency in the Highlands and the delay in legitimating what both sides regarded with suspicion compromised its implementation. That, in turn, placed the survival of the English revolution further in jeopardy.