RSS Feed for the unit The origins of the wars of the three kingdoms

Introduction

The Open University — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:06:48 GMT

This unit focuses on the seventeenth-century crises in the British Isles that led, in the 1640s, to the Civil Wars between parliamentarians and royalists in England. In the so-called Whig interpretation of British history, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 is the fountainhead of orderly progress. But this is a very English view. Scotland experienced both wars against England and a protracted religious civil war. Ireland saw a Catholic rebellion in 1641 turn into a concerted campaign to render Catholics economically and politically impotent.

To complete this unit fully you will need to buy Exploring History 1400–1900: An Anthology of Primary Sources edited by Rachel C. Gibbons, ISBN 978-0719075889. This book will be referred to as the ‘Anthology Document’ throughout this unit.

This unit is an adapted extract from the Open University course Exploring history: medieval to modern 1400-1900 (A200).

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Learning outcomes

The Open University — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:06:48 GMT

By the end of this unit you should be able to:

describe the developments in the British Isles that led to the outbreak of war;
assess the debates between historians about the cause of the wars;
understand how to use evidence from church records to learn about changes in religion and society.

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1 Overview

The Open University — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:06:48 GMT

On 22 August 1642, King Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham and effectively initiated war. This curiously archaic event was to feature in the depositions taken from witnesses at his trial (see Anthology Document 3.17, ‘The trial of Charles first, 1649’, part (b) ‘Depositions taken against the king’.) It came as the culmination of a series of events and developing ideas that involved far more than the king's relations with the parliament at Westminster and his English and Welsh subjects’ objections to the devices he had used to govern for eleven years without parliament. As we shall be dealing with a series of complex events across the three kingdoms, you will find it useful to have the chronology to hand.

Click below to view the chronology of the wars of the three kingdoms

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So, in this unit we shall concentrate on the following subjects:

the developments in the British Isles that led to the outbreak of war
the debates between historians about the causes of the wars
how to use evidence from church records to learn about changes in religion and society.

A civil war poses particular challenges to the idea of the state; indeed, it would seem to suggest that the state had broken down, since the monopoly of rule-making is contested. Yet for a civil war to continue, many of the institutions of a state have to be sustained. Wars need money, so the revenue-raising functions of the state are essential, as are the means of violence and coercion. So financial functions and administrative functions need to persist. It will become clear to you that beliefs were at the very core of the reasons why people went to war: differing visions of the church inflamed passions to the point that people were prepared to kill each other. At the same time, the king, fixed to a single ideology of rule (that he held his power from God alone and that no earthly power might restrict it), found that his subjects were developing other ideas. We shall see how the economic interests of a particular set of producers (lead miners) influenced their political allegiances.

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2.1 Identifying causes

The Open University — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:06:48 GMT

Historians are in the habit of referring to ‘pre-Civil War England’ as if everyone in the 1630s knew what was about to happen. There were certainly signs that the relations between the king and a significant number of his most influential subjects had deteriorated. But to what extent did events of King Charles's reign and, in particular, the period 1629–40 when he governed without parliament – or, indeed, earlier developments – point inexorably to the breakdown of relations between ruler and ruled? Identifying the inevitability of civil war is not the same thing as identifying long-term causes, for how do we distinguish between a pre-existing event (i.e. something that simply happened to occur earlier) and a cause (i.e. something that materially contributed to a later event)?

We need to do an exercise in common sense. Here is a list of events that preceded Charles I raising his standard at Nottingham in 1642:

1536–39: dissolution of the religious houses (monasteries and nunneries) and appropriation of their property by the king
1558: accession of Queen Elizabeth to the throne of England
1588: defeat of the Spanish Armada
1603: accession of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England as King James I
1625: accession of Charles I.

Can we say that these events caused war to break out in 1642? To do this we have to explain how they did so. Let us take the example of the dissolution of the religious houses following the Reformation. Some historians have argued that, because this led to a free land market, the old monopoly of access to government by an aristocracy whose power arose from their territorial holdings was broken. Men who had done well as lawyers, civil servants and MPs acquired landed estates and were hungry for power. The consistent refusal of successive monarchs to give them political influence by offering them the prestigious offices that they felt their wealth and property warranted created a class of people disposed to challenge the monarch's powers. This argument has been put in a variety of different ways by different historians and has some strengths. But let us look more closely at what we would have to do to establish that the dissolution of the religious houses actually was a cause.

Note the time difference. Over 100 years elapsed between the dissolution and the outbreak of civil war, so the individuals who received the lands were long dead; possibly the grandchildren of the original recipients of the former monastic lands might be involved. So we need to establish whether the land market continued to be fluid or whether there was a flurry of activity for a period (it would be useful to establish what period) with the market then settling down.
What evidence is there that the increase in the amount of land for sale (which is incontrovertible) led to it being acquired by a different kind of person? In other words, how do we know that existing landowners did not simply use the market as a means of consolidating their already large land-holdings?
For what purpose did Henry VIII use the monastic lands? Was this a case of privatising a national asset for cash or services?
Were these new men excluded from office and were they aggrieved? And if so, did they continue to be aggrieved for eighty years?

The historian Lawrence Stone (1919–1999), one of the exponents of the idea that the causes of the Civil Wars lay in the distant past, believed that there was a shift of wealth away from church, crown and the old aristocracy and towards people he describes as ‘upper middle and middle classes’. He suggested that the reasons for this shift were the improvidence of the old rich and the entrepreneurial activities of the new rich. But he also argued that the rise of Puritanism and the spread of education encouraged the rising middle class to challenge the traditional wielders of power (Stone, 1972, pp. 75–6). To establish all these things suggests a formidable research programme and one to which Stone was more than equal. His work on the composition and wealth of the gentry and aristocracy showed how the aristocracy was declining, while his work on education showed how the rising men of the middling sort equipped themselves for challenging the traditional elite (Stone, 1965, 1974; Stone and Stone, 1984).

Looking at the rest of my list, it would be difficult to argue that Elizabeth's accession by itself could be the cause of a civil war eighty years later; it did have important consequences, though, particularly in guaranteeing a Protestant monarchy (a problem for Ireland). And Elizabeth's reign as a whole, once she proved to be childless, assured the union of crowns with Scotland since her heir was its Protestant king, James VI. The settlement that she agreed, when the church was re-protestantised following the death of the Catholic Queen Mary Tudor, left much unfinished business for those members of the Church of England who believed that further reform in a Protestant direction was important. A good deal of this unfinished business surfaced under the pressure of Charles I's attempts to reform the church in what seemed to be a less Protestant direction.

We could make similar comments about the other events, but I hope that you can see that ascribing causes involves establishing a direct association between one event and another. That one event or idea precedes another does not necessarily create a causal connection. I emphasise the need to explain why one thing caused another.

It is very much easier to see direct connections between events more closely related in time to the outbreak of war but merely being proximate in time still does not create a direct causal connection. So, if we want to say that the accession of Charles I in 1625 was a cause of civil war breaking out in 1642, we would need to explain how it contributed. In the next section we shall look at the events of Charles's reign and at their contribution to the breakdown of relations between the king and his subjects.

Charles I, second son of James VI of Scotland and I of England, was born in Scotland in 1600. His elder glamorous, learned and athletic brother, Henry, had died in 1612. James, anxious to cut a dash in European politics, wanted to negotiate a marriage for Charles, now the heir, with the king of Spain's daughter. When negotiations collapsed, Charles looked to France and, shortly after his accession to the throne in 1625, married Henrietta Maria, daughter of the French king, Henri IV. Her devout Catholicism and her strong influence over her husband led to suspicions that the king himself was moving towards Catholicism.

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3.1 Charles I and the eleven years’ personal rule in England and Wales

The Open University — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:06:48 GMT

Charles I succeeded as king on James I's death in 1625. James had resented parliament's demands for power over royal policy, but realised that he could not govern, even in peacetime, on the income he had. The monarch was expected to pay for the conduct of government from a variety of sources, which included both income from lands she or he held personally and taxes granted by parliament. So masques, mistresses, secretarial expenses, pensions for clients, bribes to foreign princes, wages for court officials and soldiers, the purchase of arms and equipment, and salaries for spies all came out of the same account. But James had learnt political skills during the difficult years when, as king of Scotland in place of his deposed mother Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots), he had had to negotiate with competing factions. Temperamentally, Charles was a very different character: inflexible, uncompromising, brooking no criticism, conscious of his dignity, decorous, uxorious, religious and a great collector of Renaissance art. Even his loyal subject Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, said of him:

His kingly virtues had some mixture and allay that hindered them from shining in full lustre, and from producing those fruits they should have been attended with …
He was very fearless in his person, but not enterprising; and had an excellent understanding, but was not confident enough of it; which made him oftentimes change his own opinion for a worse, and follow the advice of a man that did not judge so well as himself.
(Clarendon, 1888, vol. 4, p. 490)

As king, he had three main concerns in England and Wales: how to fund his government, how to limit parliament's interference in his rule and how to reform the church. He showed remarkably little interest in his other two kingdoms, Scotland and Ireland.

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3.2 Financing government

The Open University — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:06:48 GMT

As was usual for a new monarch, Charles called a parliament, expecting that it would, as parliaments had previously done, grant him for life the income from tonnage and poundage (customs dues whose rate could be set by the monarch). His expenses were high. Apart from the usual costs of administration, he had funded an unsuccessful expedition to defend the Palatinate in 1625 and was committed to spending £20,000 a month supporting the Danes in the Thirty Years War. But parliament, fearful of his war strategy and unhappy about his proposal to take a Catholic wife, granted the king tonnage and poundage for one year only, though they also granted two subsidies (a form of direct tax, about £100,000). Customs dues (of which tonnage and poundage were a substantial part) typically formed about 30 per cent of government income. These sources of finance, together with the king's other revenues, came to far less than he needed to run the government in peacetime, let alone one which was engaged on foreign military ventures. Not content with his intervention in Germany, he allowed his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, to lead one expedition against Spain and another to support the French Protestant Huguenot rebels at La Rochelle, both of which were military disasters for the English.

So, from the earliest days of his reign, Charles was looking for ways to raise revenue. Each of the parliaments of 1625, 1626 and 1628 tried to exact concessions from him in exchange for grants of money, but he was utterly opposed to the idea of bargaining with his subjects. In 1629, he dissolved his third parliament and looked for alternative sources of income. In the ensuing eleven years without parliament he proved surprisingly successful by, as the historian John Kenyon put it, ‘probing the wall of law and custom that protected his subjects’ purses, hoping to find a gap through which he could press’ (Kenyon, 1986, p. 52). In the absence of parliament, his subjects had to find other ways of expressing their opposition to his personal rule.

Exercise 1

0 hours 15 minutes

Click below to view Table 1.

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Look at Table 1. The left-hand column lists the king's chief revenue-raising activities. The right-hand column lists challenges to the king.

What common features do you notice about the sources of revenue?
How did the king's subjects challenges his policies?

Answer

They were all existing measures. The king did not introduce new taxes, but adapted ancient ways of raising revenue.
Without parliament sitting, the king's opponents had to use the law courts to challenge his policies, especially to contest his right to levy extra-parliamentary taxation.

Discussion

This antiquarianism was quite self-conscious. Sir John Borough, Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London, was commissioned to research methods used by earlier monarchs to raise money. Many of the devices he came up with exploited rights that had fallen into disuse. Knighthood fines proved to be one of the largest sources of revenue in the period 1625–35. Michael Braddick describes them as, on the one hand, ‘fiscal feudalism’ (forest and knighthood fines, wardship, monopolies) – that is to say rights that derived from the king's historic position as tenant-in-chief at the summit of the feudal system – and, on the other, prerogative taxes (Ship Money, purveyance, forced loans), the right to levy which arose as a consequence of the personal powers of the monarch (Braddick, 1996, pp. 72–88).

Exercise 2

0 hours 10 minutes

Read Anthology Document 3.4, ‘Resistance to Ship Money’. What do you notice about the people who refused to pay Ship Money in the parish of Harrow?

Answer

The poverty of some of those required to pay is striking – Mrs Miller had a single piece of cloth seized.

Discussion

This document shows how widespread and violent the opposition to Ship Money could be. Forty people in a single parish seems a large number of objectors (though we do not know how large the parish was). It is striking how poor some of the tax-paying public was. Women could be householders (they were usually widows, occasionally spinsters) and were liable for taxes, but had none of the political rights of a householder.

John Hampden (1594–1643), a Buckinghamshire MP, in 1627 refused to pay a forced loan and in 1635 refused to pay Ship Money. A leading member of the Short and Long Parliaments, he was one of the five MPs the king attempted to arrest in 1642. He raised a regiment of foot for parliament in 1642 and was killed at the battle of Chalgrove.

While the objections of poorer people might have been an irritation to the king and his officials, a more significant challenge was mounted in the law courts when the Buckinghamshire gentleman and former MP, John Hampden, refused to pay and was prosecuted for debt. Of twelve judges, seven found for the crown. One of the dissenting judges, Sir Robert Berkeley, extended his consideration far beyond the simple matter of a country gentleman's unpaid bill and used the occasion to declare that the king's subjects ‘have a birthright in the laws of the kingdom. No new laws can be put upon them, none of their laws can be altered or abrogated, without common consent in parliament’ (quoted in Kenyon, 1986, p. 100).

Cases challenging the king's right to levy extra-parliamentary taxation brought up such broad constitutional issues as the king's right to order a subject's imprisonment and the distinction between the king's ordinary and emergency powers. In turn this led to conflict between the king and the judiciary, and Lord Justice Crew was dismissed in 1626 for refusing to admit the legality of the forced loan.

As well finding new sources of income, royal officials tried to make tax collection more efficient – a policy especially promoted under the name of ‘the policy of thorough’ by Charles's close allies the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, and the president of the Council of the North, Thomas Wentworth. ‘Nowadays the uttermost that all his Majesty's ministers can do scarcely restrains the people within the bounds of respect and obedience’ claimed Wentworth, setting himself the mission to reverse this (Sharpe, 1992, p. 135).

Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (1593–1641), a Yorkshire gentleman and MP, had been a leading opponent of the king's policies in the 1620s. Appointed lord president of the Council of the North by the king in 1628, he went to Ireland in 1633 as deputy lieutenant, where he tried to reform both the Church of Ireland and the government's finances. He was created Earl of Strafford and promoted to lord lieutenant (a change of title rather than of role) in 1640. He was tried by parliament for his part in encouraging the king to use an army against his subjects and executed in 1641.

William Laud (1573–1645) was president of St John's College, Oxford, and vice-chancellor of the university. Appointed successively Bishop of St David's, Bath and Wells, and London, he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1632. He wanted to make Anglican worship more reverential, to reinstate ceremony and to emphasise the sanctity of the sacraments. To improve the quality of the clergy, he tried to raise clerical incomes by recovering ecclesiastical property and revenues that had passed to lay people. He aspired to extend English forms of worship to Scotland. As one of the king's most influential advisers in the 1630s, he was impeached and executed in 1645.

The unpopularity both of the fiscal devices used by the king and of his counsellors consolidated opposition to the king. Many of his subjects, forced now to use the law courts to challenge royal policy in the absence of parliament, began to seriously question whether a state in which all powers flowed from the king was sustainable. Yet the king's opponents shared many of his values and attitudes.

Exercise 3

0 hours 5 minutes

Turn now to Plates 1(a) to (d), and look at the portraits by Van Dyck.

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Plate 1(a)

Click below to view Plate 1(b): Anthony Van Dyck, Archbishop William Laud, c. 1635–37, oil on canvas, 121.6 x 97.1 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. Photo: Bridgeman Art Library (PDF, 1 page, 18 MB)

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Plate 1(b)

Click below to view Plate 1(c): Anthony Van Dyck, Robert Rich, Second Earl of Warwick, c.1634, oil on canvas, 208 x 128 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Jules Bache Collection, 1949 (49.7.26). Photo: ©1998 The Metropolitan Museum of Art (PDF, 1 page, 16.6 MB)

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Plate 1(c)

Click below to view Plate 1(d): Anthony Van Dyck, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford and his Secretary, Sir Philip Mainwaring, c.1634, oil on canvas, 123.2 x 139.7 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Bridgeman Art Library / Peter Willi (PDF, 1 page, 13.1 MB)

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Plate 1(d)

You already have some biographical information about the king, Laud and Wentworth. Robert Rich, second Earl of Warwick (1587–1658) had been a courtier, but during the 1620s distanced himself from the royal court and allied himself with the Puritan opposition. He opposed the forced loans, Ship Money and extension of the forest laws. How might historians use paintings such as these?

Answer

The paintings suggest that all the subjects shared a common culture. Their attitudes, clothing and props suggest men of authority and culture. Yet the Earl of Warwick was from the 1620s a significant opponent of the king and his ministers. We cannot deduce from someone's appearance which side they supported.

Anthony Van Dyke (1599–1641), a Flemish painter, was the king's favourite portraitist (he was knighted in 1638); he painted many members of the court and nobility. Most of his non-royal portraits were of people who supported the king in the Civil Wars, but he also painted aristocratic opponents of the king, such as the Earl of Warwick.

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3.3 The king and the church

The Open University — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:06:48 GMT

Apart from concerns about the propriety of the king governing without parliament and conducting a foreign policy allying him with the Catholic powers of Europe, his subjects harboured deep suspicions about his attitude to the Church of England, of which he was head. Many of them, clerical and lay, believed that the Elizabethan church settlement had not created a sufficiently Protestant church, and that the Church of England was in urgent need of reform. Attendance at church services was compulsory and non-attenders could be fined; it was illegal to hold or attend services outside the church. Reformers faced a king who believed that his kingship was derived from God, that Anglican (Church of England) bishops were the direct spiritual descendants of Christ's apostles, and that dissent from the beliefs and ceremonies of the church amounted to treason. Even to question these beliefs and practices was to arouse the king's displeasure, and there was a formidable array of devices at his command to enforce conformity. In particular, there were the prerogative courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, which were able to impose severe penalties on dissidents such as William Prynne, Henry Burton and John Bastwick who, in 1637, were branded with hot irons and had their ears cropped for publishing pamphlets against the government of the church by bishops (episcopacy). There was something noble about the men, and they became popular heroes, but they were, in their own ways, just as unmoving as the king.

If the king's subjects were unhappy with his religious views at the start of his reign, his policies did nothing to win them over. In 1632, he appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, who owed his rapid career advancement to the king's confidence in him. Laud, like the king, was not a convinced predestinarian; both men inclined to the views of the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius, who argued that individual believers' salvation was not foreordained); this made his appointment extremely controversial. But Laud's primary concern was with the decorous conduct of religious services in surroundings that would inspire congregations with the presence of God. As archbishop, he extended the programme of rebuilding churches (many of which were in a considerable state of disrepair); most noteworthy was the restoration of old St Paul's Cathedral (see Figure 1) under the direction of the king's surveyor, Inigo Jones. This concern with the externals of worship convinced those who wanted reform in a more Protestant direction that the king and his archbishop were leading the church in the opposite direction, towards a form of Catholicism.

Laud himself believed that he was enforcing existing measures that had long been flouted. The rules governing the church, the canons, last revised in 1604, specified in some detail how churches were to be furnished and equipped. Laud set about ensuring that every church conformed to the canons, and parish officials were authorised to acquire missing items, such as prayer books or coverings for the communion table. During the 1630s, he reported to the king, for example, that ‘the greatest part of Wiltshire [is] overgrown with the humours of those men that do not conform’ and that religious radicals in Ashford, Kent ‘put a great many simple people, especially women, into great distemper against the church’ (Laud, 1847–60, vol. 5, part 2, pp. 324, 347). To carry out his reforms, however, the archbishop needed an effective episcopate. He believed in the apostolic succession of bishops (that they were descended by the laying on of hands in a continuous line from Christ's apostles) and the spiritual authority that this descent conferred, but he also saw them as the church's executive arm, through whom any changes might be effected and lax observance of existing regulations tightened up.

Wenceslaus Hollar, Old St Paul's from the East after Restoration. Photo: Guildhall Library, City of London

Figure 1 Wenceslaus Hollar, Old St Paul's from the East after Restoration. Photo: Guildhall Library, City of London

Long description

The real change came with Laud's injunctions of 1637. Since the early days of Elizabeth's reign, the communion table had been positioned in the centre of the chancel in such a way that communicants could gather round it (as you can see at Hailes church).

Click below to view Hailes Church.

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Instead, the injunctions now required that the communion table be removed to the upper end of the chancel, placed along the east wall, and railed off. Plate 2 shows the communion table (4) set against the east wall and raised up on steps, behind rails (5).

Click below to view Plate 2: Plan of the altar and rails from William Laud’s chapel when bishop of St David’s. Illustrated in William Prynne, Canterburies Doome; or the first part of a compleat history of the commitment, charge, tryall, condemnation, execution of Willliam Laud, late Arch-bishop of Canterbury, London, 1646, p.122. Photo: The British Library (PDF, 1 page, 16.3 MB)

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Plate 2

The two positions represented fundamental differences of attitude to the place of the sacraments in Christian worship. For Puritans, following the practice of the Elizabethan church, the bread and the wine of the communion service commemorated Christ's last supper and were to be treated respectfully, but were to be taken communally as a symbol of Christ's role as saviour. For the king, Archbishop Laud and their supporters, the sacraments were to be revered, to be received by kneeling communicants before the altar representing Christ's sacrifice, a symbolic position that horrified Puritans.

Laud used his powers as archbishop to try to secure uniformity of practice in the church. In particular, he used visitations, the periodic enquiries ordered by the archbishops, bishops and their subordinate archdeacons about what was going on each parish. The questions (articles of enquiry) were based on the Anglican canons, but each bishop interpreted the canons in his own way in a list of instructions, which (since the canons did not comprehensively lay down the law about every single aspect of church life) left a good deal of room for manoeuvre. The lay churchwardens of each parish (whose responsibilities were similar to those of the elders/churchwardens in the church in Strasburg in the 1530s) were summoned by the archdeacon to answer the questions. On the face of it, these surveys seem to be rather limited, but they do provide us with a surprising amount of information about the activities of ordinary people.

Exercise 4

0 hours 20 minutes

Turn now to Anthology Document 3.5, ‘Episcopal visitation articles and returns,1630s’, and look at extract (a). This is an extract from the 122 questions asked in the visitation of the parishes in the diocese of Hereford in 1635.

Looking at the headings (numbered 1–9) what do you notice about the range of activity encompassed?
Looking at the content of some of the sections, what can you tell about the relationship between church and state?
How might we use a document such as this to learn more about parish life?

Answer

These questions are not just about worship, or even about religious belief, they are about the behaviour and morality of everyone in the parish. There are special questions about medical practitioners, schoolmasters and midwives (who had to be licensed by the bishop).
The two are very closely connected. In point 1.1, parishioners are required to observe the king's declaration about settling religious differences, and in point 4, the clergy are required to ‘teach and declare the lawful authority which the king hath over the state, both ecclesiastical and civil’. The idea of loyalty to the state was inextricably tied up with subscribing to a single ecclesiastical regime.
The headings and the questions themselves tell us what the authorities (the archbishops and bishops appointed by the king) considered to be important and what matters they considered to be disruptive of society. They cannot tell us about the king's subjects’ private beliefs.

Discussion

By comparing questions from visitations over a period of years, we can discover how the authorities’ priorities changed. You might, for example, expect that a visitation taking place during the reign of Henry VIII would ask different questions about church furnishings from those asked by a visitation in Elizabeth's reign. Compare the details of the placing of the communion table (‘conveniently’) in 1635 (Anthology Document 3.5(a), question 3.2) with Bishop Wren's orders of 1636 (Anthology Document 3.5(b)) in which parishes were instructed to place the table ‘close under the wall of the chancel’. And in 1638, the visitation articles (Anthology Document 3.5(c)) contain a direct question about whether the altar is at the east end and railed off. But, as well as details of furnishings, the articles implicitly tell us something about the state and its ideology: its theory of rule. In Anthology Document 3.5(a), question 4, ‘the just abolishing of all foreign power’ is a reference to the widely held belief that Roman Catholics owed allegiance to the papacy (a foreign ruler) rather than to the king of England.

Matthew Wren (1585–1667) was Bishop of Hereford (1634), Bishop of Norwich (1635) and Bishop of Ely (1638–67). A close associate of Archbishop Laud, he was an enthusiastic exponent of his church reforms and was much hated by the numerous Puritans in his two East Anglian dioceses. He was held in the Tower of London for much of the Civil War and Interregnum and returned to his diocese at the Restoration.

To understand life in the parishes (and remember that most people lived in small rural settlements and not in towns) we need the answers to the questions provided by the churchwardens.

Exercise 5

0 hours 10 minutes

Turn again to Anthology Document 3.5, ‘Episcopal visitation articles and returns, 1630s’, and look at extract (d). The churchwardens of the parish of Shepreth were replying to the questions set out in Wren's visitation of 1638 (some of which are given extract (c) – the other questions were very similar to those in extracts (a) and (b)).

What offences were noted?
How compliant was the parish to the requirements?

Answer

One parishioner refused to pay the parish rate and another abused the minister.
The parishioners seem to have been most compliant and obedient to the requirements for baptism, marriage and taking Holy Communion, with an exemplary, politically loyal and conformist minister. The church had been rearranged with the communion table at the east end and steps up to it.

Discussion

The performance of the parishioners seems almost too good to be true. Bishop Wren was subsequently charged with employing clerks to fabricate visitation returns for his diocese. However, very few actual returns survive. The matters that these questions dealt with might nowadays seem to be of little significance, but, as you may already know, the furnishings of a church carried important doctrinal messages, which the government used to display ecclesiastical changes in a manner evident to the meanest parishioner. The state actively used the beliefs of the church as a test of the loyalty of its subjects.

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3.4 Personal rule or tyranny 1629–40?

The Open University — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:06:48 GMT

What I hope you have seen from this section so far, is how Charles I managed to alienate both his ordinary subjects and those whom we might call members of the political nation – MPs and peers, and the kinds of men (for they were only men) who were local government officers, such as justices of the peace, sheriffs and members of urban corporations. The issues that most antagonised them were his attempts to raise money in ways not authorised by parliament and to introduce religious changes that seemed to represent a return to a religious regime that was associated in many people's minds with tyranny. But, resistant though the population was to both Charles's financial expedients and the religious changes, he managed to govern perfectly satisfactorily on the income he had, especially after the country was extricated from foreign military enterprises in 1628.

Historians have long debated the significance of this period of royal government by prerogative, without parliament. Some take the view that this was a period of tyranny when Charles was fuelling fears about his absolutist political ambitions and his popish religious policies. Others take the view that Charles's policies, however unpopular, were not sufficient to cause a war. So what happened to turn a period of domestic peace into a civil war? Here we need to look beyond England.

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3.5 Scotland, the prayer book and the bishops’ wars

The Open University — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:06:48 GMT

James VI had managed to make himself the most powerful king of Scotland since Robert the Bruce. He replaced the medieval idea of personal monarchy with the divine right of kings and bought the acquiescence of his more powerful subjects with grants of former church lands. James's accession to the English throne in 1603 did not diminish his power in Scotland, but Charles, succeeding to the throne in 1625, cared little for his northern kingdom and left its government to other bodies: the Privy Council in Edinburgh, comprising prominent laymen and lawyers and Scottish bishops (whose ecclesiastical powers were much less than those of English bishops); royal officials and judges; and the unicameral Scottish parliament (see Figure 2). Parliament met for the first time in Charles's reign when he visited the country in 1633 for his coronation. He had already ruffled feathers in 1625 when, to improve church revenues, he had attempted to recover church lands granted to laymen, chiefly members of the Scottish nobility. In 1632, he commissioned a new building to provide a permanent home for the Scottish parliament and for the court of session (Figure 2). The following year (1633) he visited Scotland for his coronation and insisted that the English Book of Common Prayer be used instead of the Book of Common Order used in Scotland since the Reformation. He also asked the Scottish bishops to draw up a new liturgy based on that used in England.

James Gordon of Rothiemay/F. de Wit, The Parliament House, Edinburgh (designed by Sir James Murray of Killaberton), c. 1646, engraving. Photo: Reproduced courtesy of RCAHMS. http://www.rcahms.gov.uk

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Figure 2 James Gordon of Rothiemay/F. de Wit, The Parliament House, Edinburgh (designed by Sir James Murray of Killaberton), c. 1646, engraving. Photo: Reproduced courtesy of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical of Scotland

Long description

Charles's desire, supported by Archbishop Laud, to impose greater religious uniformity between England and Scotland was prefigured in his father's attempts to give bishops in the Church of Scotland greater powers (there were no claims to apostolic succession as there were in England – bishops were seen as senior royal officials). The measure embodying this, the Five Articles of Perth (1618), required that the congregation receive the sacraments kneeling (we have already seen that this was a contentious matter in England), and was met with great opposition. A minister wrote in 1619 ‘every honest minister in all our east parts will rather leave their ministry or they yield one jot to the bishops’ (Foster, 1975, p. 187). And the governing body of the Church of Scotland, the General Assembly of the Kirk, was given no opportunity to comment. In 1636, new church canons were published incorporating the Five Articles of Perth as well as elements of the English canons of 1604 and requiring the use of the liturgy still being composed by the Scottish bishops.

This new liturgy, published in 1637, was an amalgam of Scottish and English practice and was prefaced with a royal proclamation commanding its use. It provided for the communion table to be set altar-wise with its back to the east wall; the universal Scottish practice had been for communicants to sit on forms around the communion table and for communion to be administered no more than once a year after considerable preparation of fasting, sermons and examination of communicants. At its first major public airing, at St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh on 23 July 1637, a riot broke out (see Figure 3). This was described by Henry Guthrie, a Church of Scotland minister:

No sooner was the service begun, but a multitude of wives and serving women in the several churches, rose in a tumultuous way, and having prefaced awhile with despiteful [contemptuous] exclamations, threw the stools they sat on at the preachers and thereafter invaded them more nearly, and strove to pull them from their pulpits, whereby they had much ado to escape their hands, and retire to their houses. And for the bishop (against whom their wrath was most bent) the magistrates found difficulty enough to rescue him.
(Fyfe, 1928, p. 137)

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Figure 3 Jenny Geddes’ Stool, St Giles, 1882, engraving, from James Grant, Cassell's Old and New Edinburgh, vol. 1 London, Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co., 1882, p. 146. Geddes, a poor market woman, allegedly initiated the stool throwing in St Giles's cathedral, but the first reference to her participation dates from 1670

Long description

More significant was the large number of petitions against the new liturgy and against ‘the pride and avarice of the prelates seeking to overrule the whole kingdom’ (Donaldson, 1978, p. 311). There followed a period of riots and disturbances in Edinburgh interspersed with royal proclamations against the petitioners, while the Scottish Privy Council tried to maintain order despite popular demands for the removal of bishops from the council. In November 1637, the petitioners elected their own delegates and forced the Privy Council to recognise them as a body with whom to negotiate.

Archibald Johnston of Wariston (1611–1663) was lawyer, clerk of the General Assembly of 1638, a leading Covenanter and judge. He rejected the Engagement between the Scots and the king of 1647 and reluctantly accepted office during the Cromwellian occupation of Scotland in the 1650s. After the restoration of Charles II in 1660, he was sentenced to death and hanged for his part in the opposition to the king.

Meanwhile, Alexander Henderson and Archibald Johnston of Wariston, respectively a minister and lawyer, drew up a National Covenant stating that changes in the church required the approval of the General Assembly of the Kirk and parliament, and could not simply be decreed by the king; it said nothing about what innovations were acceptable. In February 1638, residents of Edinburgh signed it; it was then circulated to every burgh and parish for subscription and note was taken of anyone who refused to sign. In response, the king appointed the Marquis of Hamilton to negotiate with the Covenanters but only to allow a General Assembly of the Kirk and a meeting of parliament if the Covenant was repudiated. By this time most nobles and lawyers had signed the Covenant and had already started to make military preparations. In September 1638, the king agreed to revoke the new prayer book and canons and to call a General Assembly in Glasgow in November 1638, the first to meet since 1618. The General Assembly pronounced on both the prayer book and the canons.

Exercise 6

0 hours 15 minutes

Read Anthology Documents 3.6, ‘The National Covenant, 1638’, and 3.7, ‘Acts of the General Assembly at Glasgow, 1638’. What differences do you notice between the two document extracts?

Answer

The extract from the Covenant is concerned with securing as wide agreement as ‘possible that ecclesiastical innovations must be approved by ‘free assemblies’ and parliaments. Note the profession of obedience to religion and the desire not to diminish the king's authority. The General Assembly, by contrast, not only condemned the innovations and those who promulgated them [‘pretended prelates’ refers to the bishops; ‘pretended’ here means so-called rather than false], but threatened penalties against anyone using the new prayer book, so abhorrent were the doctrines it contained. It asserted the supreme jurisdiction of the General Assembly over any changes in the Church of Scotland and simply abolished bishops.

The radical steps taken by the General Assembly led to the Marquis of Hamilton, the king's commissioner, trying to dissolve the meeting, but defiantly it sat on. Meanwhile, the Covenanters, who now included a number of aristocrats who had served in continental armies fighting the Thirty Years War, carried on arming. In March 1639, the king set forth for Scotland with an ill-equipped and poorly disciplined army, with the promise of troops to be sent from Ireland by Wentworth. Those Scots who had rallied to him (some of the Scottish nobility and many Highlanders, for example), rather than joining the Covenanters, had more success than the English forces, but not enough to prevent the English from being turned back at Berwick-on-Tweed by the Covenanting army under General Alexander Leslie. The agreement made at Berwick to end this First Bishops’ War (more of a truce than a peace treaty since there had been no military engagement) required both sides to disband their armies while the king undertook to come to Scotland for meetings of parliament and the General Assembly of the Kirk.

Alexander Leslie (?1580–1661) had served with English forces in the Netherlands and as marshal in the Swedish forces in Germany. Returning to Scotland in August 1638, he led the Covenanting army in the First and Second Bishops' Wars, and the Scots army that joined the parliamentary forces in 1644. When the Scots declared for the king in 1647, Leslie (now Lord Leven) was relieved of his command. He reluctantly led a Scots army against Cromwell and was defeated at Dunbar (1650). He was held prisoner for a time in London, but was released and spent the rest of the Interregnum at home in Fife.

It soon became apparent that neither side was sincere. The Covenanters did not disband their army and Charles insisted on the inclusion of bishops in the forthcoming General Assembly. In August 1639, despite the fact that the king had returned to London, a new General Assembly met in Edinburgh, re-enacted the acts of the Glasgow Assembly and declared bishops not merely to be contrary to the laws of the church, but contrary to the law of God (a direct challenge to the king who appointed them). The parliament that met in Edinburgh later in the month confirmed the General Assembly's acts and, when the king ordered its prorogation, argued that it could not be prorogued without its own consent. It did, however, cease meeting and appointed representatives to carry on business until it should next meet.

The king was taken up with matters in England while the Covenanters mustered their forces and, in August 1640, the Scots army crossed the River Tweed and headed towards Newcastle. The English army was commanded by the Earl of Northumberland, Lord High Admiral of England, a man with little naval expertise let alone the military experience of the Scots Thirty Years War veterans. Violent scenes took place between his mutinous troops and English civilians. The English forces were routed at Newburn, while citizens of nearby Newcastle (who had already displayed their opposition to the king's policies) welcomed the Scots army. Even the citizens of London greeted the Scots’ victory with joy. The king's forces in Scotland proved unable to defend Edinburgh, and in October 1640 negotiations between king and Covenanters opened in Ripon, Yorkshire. The settlement they agreed required the king to pay the Scots army £850 a day as long as it remained on English soil, a sum which Charles certainly could not find from his ordinary revenues.

Exercise 7

Think now about these events in the light of our themes: state formation and beliefs and ideologies. It has been suggested that Scotland could not claim to be a fully fledged state, but the actions of the Scots suggest that they regarded themselves as sovereign over such matters as the control of the church. Were ideas about the state driving religious changes or was religion the motive for demands about secular power?

Spend just a few minutes on this exercise.

Answer

It is very hard to say which came first. Charles felt entitled to govern the Scottish church without either the intervention of the ecclesiastical power (the General Assembly) or the secular power (the Scottish parliament). For many Scots, however, especially the most ardent supporters of the Covenant, the idea of the church being governed by a secular power was abhorrent (hence the declaration that bishops, appointed by the king, were against the law of God). For them, the proper government of the church was through the Presbyterian parish assemblies representing the sum of believers. But this was not a democratic ideology, it was a theocratic one.

Discussion

Apart from the difficulty of disentangling religious and secular motivations, we might want to ask whether the First and Second Bishops’ Wars could be construed as wars of self-determination. They were certainly inspired by a violent reaction against the imposition of English religious innovations. The Scots then limited the king's power by statute, placing him under the law. So the National Covenant is sometimes regarded as a nationalist declaration, for the movement it inspired was not solely religious.

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3.6 The Short Parliament and the early months of the Long Parliament

The Open University — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:06:48 GMT

We left Charles in England governing without parliament, with an income raised by a variety of contrivances and Archbishop Laud embarking on church reforms that roused popular opposition and encouraged sympathy for the Scots. But what impact did the Scots rebellion have on the fragile balance of Charles's relations with his English subjects? (We are retracing our steps to before the First Bishops' War, so look at the chronology to see how these events fit together.)

Click below to view the chronology of the wars of the three kingdoms.

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The Scots mobilisation for the First Bishops’ War, in the spring of 1639, required the king immediately to raise an army; with no money to pay it he was forced to conclude the pacification of Berwick. In the autumn of 1639, his close ally Thomas Wentworth returned to London from Dublin and, in anticipation of further trouble in Scotland, advised him to call the English parliament, which, Wentworth believed, could be managed to fund an effective campaign against the Scots.

MPs who met in April 1640 lost no time in reviewing the wrongs. As the Earl of Clarendon (an MP in this parliament) wrote many years later:

Mr Pym, a man of good reputation … brake the ice; and, in a set discourse of above two hours, after mention of the King with the most profound reverence and commendation of his wisdom and justice, he observed that by the long intermission of Parliaments many unwarrantable things had been practised, notwithstanding the great virtue of his majesty: and then enumerated all the projects which had been set on foot, all the illegal proclamations which had been published and the proceedings which had been upon those proclamations, the judgment upon ship-money, and many grievances which related to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction; summing up shortly and sharply all that most reflected upon the prudence and justice of the government; concluding, that he had only laid that scheme before them that they might see how much work they had to do to satisfy their country.
(Clarendon, 1888, vol. 1, pp. 174–5)

John Pym (1584–1643) first sat as an MP in 1614 and emerged in the 1620s as an opponent of the king. He was unofficial leader of the House of Commons in the Short Parliament and remained a leading figure in the early years of the Long Parliament. He was one of the five MPs the king attempted to arrest in January 1642. After the outbreak of war he advocated outright military victory for parliament and fostering the Scots alliance.

Charles required £100,000 a month to fund the army, but he received little sympathy from parliament. The House of Commons wanted consideration of its grievances and announced that ‘Till the liberties of the House and kingdom were cleared, they knew not whether they had anything to give or no’ (quoted in Woolrych, 2002, p. 136). While Wentworth (now Earl of Strafford) attempted to persuade the House of Lords to support the king, Lord Saye and Sele argued strongly for the right of the House of Commons to initiate votes of taxation. Strafford's strategy divided the Lords and sowed dissention between the two houses.

The Commons also questioned the king's right to commission Convocation (the governing body of the Church of England) to prepare new ecclesiastical canons embodying the changes intended ‘to expel irreverence and profaneness’ and to return the church ‘unto the former splendour of uniformity, devotion and holy order, the lustre whereof for some years bypast hath been much obscured’ (Bray, 1998, p. 556). In short, the canons were to do away with the practices beloved of Puritans who wanted more preaching and less ceremony and to make law the reforms that Archbishop Laud had started. Debates in parliament established the strength of the opposition to the proposed reforms and there were sympathetic exchanges between some MPs and the rebellious Scots. A further royal demand for supply was followed by parliamentary procrastination, so the king dissolved parliament after three weeks without a single measure being agreed.

Strafford advised Charles that a forced loan raised from the City of London and improved collection of Ship Money would support a short, sharp war to crush the Scots. The earl then uttered the fateful words ‘You have an army in Ireland you may employ here to reduce this kingdom’, words which were almost certainly intended to mean reducing Scotland but which were understood by the king's opponents, to whom they were leaked, to mean his English subjects.

As we have seen, war with the Scots recommenced in the summer of 1640 and it soon became obvious that there was insufficient money to pay an army. A peace settlement was concluded with the Scots at Ripon in October 1640, and a new parliament met in London in November. The elections caused considerable excitement. In many constituencies several candidates contested each seat (earlier in the century it was quite usual for there to be only one candidate). The franchise consisted of men of property, a minority of the adult population. Throughout England and Wales, public petitions presented to parliamentary candidates alluded to the threat to true religion, the long intervals between parliaments, and infractions of the rule of law during the personal rule.

The new parliament awakened high hopes in England and Wales, while the Scots hoped to see the reforms they had pushed through the Edinburgh parliament replicated in Westminster. Thomas Knyvett, a Norfolk gentleman, wrote home from London that ‘reformation goes on again as hot as toast’ (quoted in Coward, 1994, p. 189). Members were intent upon dismantling the hated changes of the last eleven years and they turned first against the man regarded as the chief architect, the Earl of Strafford, adopting the expedient formula that it was not the king but the ‘evil counsels’ of his ministers that were responsible for the assaults on ancient liberties. John Pym, who had opened the Short Parliament with a lengthy and measured account of grievances, four days into the new parliament, exclaimed ‘ [There is] a design to alter the kingdom both in religion and government. This is the highest of treason’ (Kenyon, 1986, p. 189).

In the packed months that followed, the judges who had ruled in favour of Ship Money were impeached, Archbishop Laud was imprisoned and Strafford's trial began, the principal charges against him being that he had sowed discord between king and people, had erected ‘arbitrary and tyrannical government’ in the north of England and in Ireland, and provoked the Second Bishops’ War (Kenyon, 1986, p. 178). The prosecution found it impossible to convince an overall majority of Commons or Lords that Strafford was guilty of treason. But news of a plot by the English army in the north of England to seize the Tower of London and release Strafford fortified parliament's resolve. Eventually the Commons passed an Act of Attainder asserting Strafford's guilt and sentencing him to death. Under the threat of violence, the king signed the Act, agreeing at the same time that parliament could not be dissolved without its own consent. He went on to sign: an Act abolishing the hated prerogative courts of High Commission and Star Chamber (which had been used to effect against his opponents); an Act against Ship Money; and a Triennial Act requiring a meeting of parliament for at least fifty days in every three-year period. Parliament discussed whether they should insist that royal counsellors be men in whom parliament had confidence (they stopped short of the Scots position under which the Scottish parliament could control the appointment of ministers).

At the same time, parliament condemned the newly issued English ecclesiastical canons and, in December 1640, a petition from London was presented to the House of Commons declaring that:

whereas the government of archbishops and lord bishops, deans and archdeacons, etc., with their courts and ministrations in them, have proved prejudicial and very dangerous both to the Church and Commonwealth … And whereas the said government is found by woeful experience to be a main cause and occasion of many foul evils …
We therefore most humbly pray and beseech this honourable assembly … that the said government, with all its dependencies, roots and branches, may be abolished.
(Kenyon, 1986, p. 154)

Several counties produced similar petitions and, in May 1641, a Bill to remove bishops ‘root and branch’ was moved in parliament. But by this time, it had become clear that MPs were deeply divided about how to settle the church, and counter-petitions in favour of bishops began to arrive. Strafford's trial had also split parliament and a party supporting the king had started to emerge. It was at this moment that news reached London of the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland.

Exercise 8

How would you characterise the development in parliament of opposition to the king?

Spend just a few minutes on this exercise.

Answer

At the first meeting of the Short Parliament, MPs were unified by their demand for the redress of grievances, notably stopping the king from raising taxation without parliament's consent and reforming the church. But Strafford's policy of trying to divide parliament was successful, and by the time he was put on trial there was a considerable body of support for the king from MPs and lords who feared that matters were going too far. By the time the new parliament met, a party in support of the king, bishops and Strafford had started to emerge.

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3.7 Ireland and 1641

The Open University — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:06:48 GMT

Despite its proximity to England and the familiarity of Irish people to the English, Ireland was an object of almost anthropological curiosity. English rulers had, since Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland in 1541, considered the place to be the haunt of barbarians. Rebellions by Gaelic lords in the late sixteenth century had established in many English minds that the Catholic Irish were not to be trusted. The government expropriated rebels’ land and instituted schemes to grant it to Protestant English and Scots settlers (planters), extending the region of Protestant settlement from the area surrounding Dublin to King's and Queen's counties (Counties Laois and Offaly), parts of the province of Munster, and substantial tracts of Ulster.

Much of the writing about the country either expatiated on the quaintness of the Irish (in the hopes of encouraging English families to settle there) or on their lack of civility (providing authors with opportunities to describe Irish lasciviousness and the dirt in which they lived for the amusement of an English audience and justifying the seizure of land from rebel leaders). A characteristic description is that of Barnaby Rich.

Exercise 9

0 hours 15 minutes

Read Anthology Document 3.8, ‘The nature of the Irish, 1610 (Barnaby Rich)’. What impression does Rich convey of the Irish?

Answer

Rich starts by saying how similar the English, Scots and Irish were, and how superior to other races. But he quickly remarks on the uncivilised dress of the Irish from the remote parts and on the undesirable qualities of character that he attributed to their Catholicism or, rather, their adherence to the pope in preference to the government of the King of England.

Ireland was a complex, multicultural society of Gaelic Irish, Old English, New English and Scots. There were three communities there, each of which regarded itself as culturally distinct. There were the Gaelic Irish–Catholic and Gaelic-speaking, with a clan-based society cut into by Henry VIII's land reforms. There were the descendants of the Anglo-Norman settlers of the twelfth century – mainly Catholic, sometimes married into Gaelic Irish families so often Gaelic-speaking, but who regarded themselves as preservers of English language, law and custom. These Old English, as they were known, had traditionally been loyal supporters of the English crown against the native Irish, though since the Reformation they had been considered by the English to be untrustworthy because of their religion. And there were the New English and Scots – Protestant settlers who had come to Ireland to take up land grants offered to Protestants from land confiscated from rebellious Catholic Irish families in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

In 1628, Charles I recognised the loyal protestations of the Old English by assuring them, in a document known as the Graces, of titles to land they had occupied undisputed for more than sixty years and by no longer requiring of heirs that they take the Oath of Supremacy, which was unacceptable to Catholics because it declared the monarch to be head of the Church of England/Ireland. It was agreed that, in return, the Irish parliament (which was traditionally dominated by the Old English) would grant the king revenue.

Charles I had little knowledge of Ireland. In 1633, he sent Thomas Wentworth to Dublin as lord deputy, knowing that Wentworth would wish to carry out the ‘policy of thorough’ to improve the administrative efficiency of the government and, more important, to increase tax revenues. Wentworth wanted also to reform the church and improve the position of Church of Ireland bishops, but his reference in a letter to his friend Archbishop Laud to ‘reducing this kingdom to a conformity in religion with the church in England’ reveals that this was not to be achieved by negotiation (Knowler, 1740, vol. 1, p. 187).

In 1634, Wentworth called a parliament in Dublin. The Old English members wanted to grant him subsidies in return for the ratification of the Graces; the New English, however, believed that a better way of raising money would be stricter enforcement of fines levied from Catholics for not attending Protestant Church of Ireland services. Wentworth's administrative reforms removed the financial attractions of holding office in the Dublin government (antagonising the New English), while his attempts to restore to the Church of Ireland church lands that had passed to the hands of laypeople, antagonised the Old English, especially when it became apparent that parliament would not ratify those sections of the Graces that guaranteed their land titles. He also alienated those of the New English who occupied former church lands.

Had it been obvious to the inhabitants of Ireland that Wentworth was incorruptible, he might have found some support, but he appeared to be taking advantage of his position to obtain for himself nearly 60,000 acres of land and to build a magnificent palace at Naas, some twenty miles outside Dublin. Subsequent investigation, however, proved that Wentworth's acquisitions were honestly obtained. Wentworth's particular crime, in the eyes of the inhabitants of Ireland, was to regard the country as a source of men and money to help the king out of his troubles in his other kingdoms.

In October 1641, unanticipated by the governments in either Dublin or London, the Catholic Irish in Ulster erupted in rebellion (see Figure 4). ‘The uprising in Ulster was not the response to some specific English act or policy, but rather an outburst against immemorial grievances …. [The conspirators’] motives were as vague as their plans’ (Bottigheimer, 1971, pp. 30–1). Parliament in London prepared to ask the City of London for a loan of £50,000 to fund an army to be sent to Ireland.

Illustrations from The Teares of Ireland wherein is lively presented as in a map, a list of the unheard off cruelties and perfidious treacheries of bloud-thirsty Jesuits and the Popish faction, London, A. N. for John Rothwell, 1642, p. 23. Photo: The British Library (C.21.b.42) ©

Figure 4 Illustrations from The Teares of Ireland wherein is lively presented as in a map, a list of the unheard off cruelties and perfidious treacheries of bloud-thirsty Jesuits and the Popish faction, London, A. N. for John Rothwell, 1642, p. 23. Photo: The British Library. This is one of the more luridly illustrated of the many accounts of the Catholic assaults on Protestants in the early months of the rising

Long description

Had the rising been confined to Ulster, matters would have been relatively straightforward, but in December 1641 the Old English (a group traditionally loyal to the crown, though largely Catholic) joined the rebels. The historian Nicholas Canny characterises the change as ‘nothing short of a revolution’ – but one which was out of the control of the original leaders, who were unable to restrain the outburst of popular fury by native Irish against the Protestant settler communities of Ulster, Munster and Leinster (Canny, 1987, p. 208). The violence of the rising was branded on everyone's consciousnesses: estimates of the number of Protestants killed range from 4,000 (by historians) to 200,000 (by propagandists). Undoubtedly many more people died from famine and pestilence, and from the theft and destruction of livestock and crops.

This episode looms large in the consciousness of Ulster Protestants to this day and it is one whose history is difficult to write dispassionately, since virtually all the surviving testimony comes from Protestants’ sworn depositions about the injury and loss they had suffered, often taken some years after the event.

Exercise 10

0 hours 20 minutes

Read Anthology Document 3.9, ‘Protestant depositions in Ireland, 1641’, parts (a) and (b).

What can we tell about the deponents themselves?
Are these accounts likely to be accurate in all particulars?

Answer

We know that these deponents were women and were all unable to write their names (from which we may deduce that the accounts were written down by clerks). One deponent was the widow of an inn-keeper and evidently quite prosperous.
Both accounts contain a good deal of hearsay evidence and the similarities in the accounts, given that the women had not written them down themselves, might give rise to the suspicion that the clerks who recorded the depositions used stock phrases. But both accounts are extremely specific, naming Catholic rebels, people who were neighbours and known to the deponents, and providing details about places. Nevertheless, bearing in mind Rich's account of the Irish, it is difficult not to suspect some stereotyping of what the rebellious Irish were expected to do.

Discussion

These depositions, despite their one-sided view of the events of 1641, are an extremely important source for the history of the rising because there is so little other material. Although they contain a great deal of hearsay evidence, they identify by name many of the rebels, they provide some eye-witness accounts, and they tell us about the mentality of the Protestant settlers, many of them people of humble circumstances.

The spread of the rebellion beyond Ulster increased the urgency of defeating the insurgents and to do this the king had to have an army. In November 1641, parliament at Westminster resolved to send 12,000 men from England and to ask the Scots to send 10,000 more. Some troops arrived in Ireland in January 1642 and 2500 Scots finally arrived in Ireland in April. It was not until February that parliament in London passed, and the king signed, an Act for Reducing Ireland under which individuals would advance money to suppress the rebellion and in exchange be guaranteed lands in Ireland from those yet to be confiscated from the undefeated rebels. Slowly, an army was gathered in England under the command of Philip Lord Wharton, but in July 1642 his officers were ordered by parliament to remain in England to serve against the king and it was not until 1649 that a serious attempt was made from England to defeat the Irish rebels.

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3.8 Back to England

The Open University — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:06:48 GMT

How was it that since the autumn of 1641 matters had deteriorated to such a point that parliament required an army with which to confront the king? Parliament had already shown itself susceptible to the idea of a popish conspiracy, and the rising in Ireland fulfilled MPs’ worst fears. In December 1641, despite the concessions already made by Charles, parliament presented him with their Grand Remonstrance (passed by eleven votes) setting out their demands (Anthology Document 3.10, ‘The Grand Remonstrance, 1641’, provides an extract). The Grand Remonstrance listed those who were considered responsible for ‘subverting the fundamental laws and principles of government’: Jesuits and papists, bishops and the corrupt part of the clergy, courtiers who had ‘engaged themselves to foreign princes’. It called for a synod of divines from England and other Protestant countries to advise on settling the church, for the effective execution of the laws against papists and for the king to appoint only such ministers as parliament might have confidence in ‘without which we cannot give his majesty such supplies for support of its own estate, nor such assistance to the Protestant party beyond the sea, as is desired’ (Gardiner, 1906, pp. 202–32).

Rioting in London and the gathering of soldiers to join Wharton's force for Ireland increased tension and Charles, in one of his most unwise moves, attempted in January 1642 to seize and impeach five MPs and one peer on the grounds that they (repeating the words of the Grand Remonstrance) had attempted to subvert the laws of the kingdom. Forewarned, the men had absented themselves from parliament. Meanwhile, parliament was working on a Bill to allow parliament to nominate the lords lieutenant (the royal official in each county responsible for levying the militia). Charles refused to sign the Bill and retreated to York. Parliament passed the Bill as an Ordinance (a law without royal assent) and nominated new lords lieutenant. Further negotiations took place, culminating in the Nineteen Propositions, in which parliament increased its demands beyond those of the Grand Remonstrance, calling on the king to place his children's upbringing and marriages in the hands of parliament. Shortly after, the king issued his own commissions of array to gentlemen in the shires, implicitly setting aside the Militia Ordinance and ordering the mustering of forces to create his own army.

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4 Taking sides

The Open University — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:06:48 GMT

So far, we have looked at the events leading up to the outbreak of war and we might discern in them some of the causes of war. But we have already seen that finding a direct causal connection between one event and another is by no means straightforward. The king, by depriving his subjects of the usual means of challenging his actions through parliament, did a great deal to alienate them. But actually taking up arms, not just against your ruler, but also against your fellow citizens, is a far cry from objecting to unjust exactions. These were not just tax riots or popular demonstrations; this was a substantial part of the political nation, the people in whose hands the government of the country rested, mobilising an army against similar people.

What persuaded people to join one side or the other? Just as the English population at the time of the Wars of the Roses found it difficult to take sides, so did the English population in 1642. The allegiances of men such as John Pym and John Hampden were not in doubt, nor were those closely connected with the royal court. The ironworkers of Birmingham, ‘then a small town noted for its Puritanism and its ironwork’, made up their minds quickly and supplied the Earl of Essex, commander-in-chief of the parliament's forces, with 15,000 sword blades and imprisoned the messengers who brought royal orders to make weapons for the king (Gardiner, 1893, vol. 1, p. 107). But for the vast majority of people, the decision was not so straightforward. Conrad Russell makes the important point that confessional allegiance was not identical to political allegiance; that is to say, that not everyone who disapproved of the king's religious policies necessarily felt that it was legitimate to take up arms against the divinely ordained monarch, while not everyone who objected to the king's bending of the constitution revolted against his religious policies (Russell, 1990, p. 20). Many people took a long time to decide for one side or the other and it has become evident, through the excellent county histories that have been published for many English (though few Welsh or Scots) counties, that local politics could influence allegiances.

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Conclusion

The Open University — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:06:48 GMT

The causes of the Civil War have been a subject for debate virtually since the war began. Rushworth and Nalson were writing about them in the seventeenth century. You may remember that both wrote their accounts, as they saw it, to set the record straight. And such differences continue to the present day.

The Civil Wars began as a result of a series of complicated events driven by irreconcilable attitudes to religion and royal power. Opposition concentrated around the king's ideology of rule and the organisation and practices of the church. There seems to have been little disagreement about the existence of a monarchical state; even in 1642, no one expected much more than modest reforms. The idea of a revolution and the overthrow of the monarchy was far from their minds.

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References

The Open University — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:06:48 GMT

Bottigheimer, K.S. (1971) English Money and Irish Land, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Braddick, M. (1996) The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558–1714, Manchester, Manchester University Press.

Bray, G. (ed.) (1998) The Anglican Canons 1529–1947, Church of England Record Society, vol. 6, Woodbridge, Boydell Press.

Canny, N. (1987) From Reformation to Restoration: Ireland, 1534–1660, Dublin, Helicon Press.

Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of (1888) The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray, 6 vols, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Coward, B. (1994) The Stuart Age, 2nd edn, Harlow, Longman.

Donaldson, G. (1978) Scotland: James V- James VII, Edinburgh History of Scotland, vol. 3, Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd.

Foster, W.R. (1975) The Church before the Covenants: The Church of Scotland 1596–1638, Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press.

Fyfe, J.G. (ed.) (1928) Scottish Diaries and Memoirs 1550–1746, Stirling, Eneas Mackay.

Gardiner, S.R. (1893) History of the Great Civil War, new edn, 4 vols, London, Longman Green.

Gardiner, S.R. (1906) Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660, 3rd edn, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Kenyon, J.P. (1986) The Stuart Constitution 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary, 2nd edn, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Knowler, W. (ed) (1740) The Earl of Strafford: Letters and Dispatches, 2 vols, Dublin.

Laud, W. (1847–60) The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, 9 vols, Oxford.

Russell, C. (1990) The Causes of the English Civil War, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Sharpe, K. (1992) The Personal Rule of Charles I, New Haven and London, Yale University Press.

Stone, L. (1965) The Crisis of the Aristocracy, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Stone, L. (1972) Causes of the English Revolution, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Stone, L. (ed.) (1974) The University in Society, 2 vols, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Stone, L. and Stone, J.F. (1984) An Open Elite?, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Tawney, R.H. (1928) English Constitutional Conflicts of the Seventeenth Century 1603–89, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Woolrych, A. (2002) Britain in Revolution 1625–60, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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Acknowledgements

The Open University — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:06:48 GMT

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Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit:

Figures

Figure 1 Wenceslaus Hollar, Old St Paul's from the East after Restoration. Photo: Guildhall Library, City of London;

Figure 2 James Gordon of Rothiemay/F. de Wit, The Parliament House, Edinburgh (designed by Sir James Murray of Killaberton), c. 1646, engraving. Photo: Reproduced courtesy of RCAHMS. http://www.rcahms.gov.uk;

Plates

Plate 1(b)Anthony Van Dyck, Archbishop William Laud, c.1635-37, oil on canvas, 121.6 x 97.1 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. Photo: Bridgeman Art Library;

Plate 1(c) Anthony Van Dyck, Robert Rich, Second Earl of Warwick, c.1634, oil on canvas, 208 x 128 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Jules Bache Collection, 1949 (49.7.26). Photo: © 1998 The Metropolitan Museum of Art;

Plate 1(d) Anthony Van Dyck, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford and his Secretary, Sir Philip Mainwaring, c.1634, oil on canvas, 123.2 x 139.7 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Bridgeman Art Library / Peter Willi;

Plate 2 Illustrated in William Prynne, Canterburies Doome; or the first part of a compleat history of the commitment, charge, tryall, condemnation, execution of William Laud, late Arch-bishop of Canterbury, London, 1646, p.122. Photo: The British Library (491.i.4.(3.)).

Unit image

seriykotik1970: hhttp://www.flickr.com/ photos/ seriykotik/ 338276743/ [Details correct as of 31st January 2008]

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