Chapter IV
The Prelude to the Civil War
And the Wars of the Three Kingdoms
The civil war in the seventeenth century under the Stuart Dynasty is perhaps the single most important event in English History. Somehow, it has not captured people’s imagination as much as, say, Henry VIII’s wives or Victoria’s reign have done. There are hardly any memorials to mark the events, and where there may be, they have become areas dotted with picnickers. No Fourth of July, no Bastille Day, and no legendary figures to commemorate in the heroic struggle to define for the world freedom. Unfortunately, the English have a way of downplaying their achievements; perhaps they are too good at covering them up, so much so that they become objects of forgetting. Battle lines of Marston Moor or Naseby, Sedgehill at Newbury, Brentford, and the siege of Gloucester make no impression. Hardly anyone knows that Oxford Town, at some stage, became the royalist Capital of the Kingdom of England, standing in opposition to London, the republican capital.
In this chapter, I take you through the causes of the civil war, the religious wars in the hearts and minds of the people, and the stubbornness of the king. The resistance to attempts to unite and uniform religion of the three kingdoms, England, Scotland and Ireland and the growing divide between the Catholic Popery and the Presbyterian and hard-core Calvinists, the Puritans at times called the Godly. These were the primary factors that gave rise to mistrust among people, friends, neighbours, and families. Some were killing and shedding their blood for their God, while others were for a cause, and still others for the King or Country. Charles was the designer of his own fate and caused the deaths of approximately 800,000 people. One in four of the able-bodied men fought in the Civil War, which caused the country to violently tear itself apart. For years afterwards, London streets were full of one-legged beggars. People’s lives were changed forever. People questioned aspects of life and the purpose of their existence; their answers still govern our lives today.
Nevertheless, the civil war was the making of England, the Nation, and the making of the English People. It set the horizon of the English people’s expectations and understanding of the people who fought in that war and who they are today. It also inspired the American and French Revolutions, influencing the causes against a king’s tyranny and changing the course of world history forever.
It was Charles, who had a difficult and painful childhood, who had to think differently about the state. The King’s small and bow-legged body, caused by having rickets early in life, wanted a new kind of kingdom. It was an angry response to what he felt was intolerable bullying. In 1628, Parliament attempted to assert its demands over him, and, failing to comply with his commands, he believed Parliament had failed him and compromised his honour. So, why summon parliament? To take a leaf out of the Bourbons in France and the Spanish, who do without a Parliament, Charles opted for personal rule instead, defying Parliament. The events that ultimately led to the Civil War were set in motion by a royal tantrum. It can be argued that King Charles was, in many ways, the architect of his own misfortune. Parliament was there to generate revenue, and without it, Charles could only use his privileged prerogatives, as it was called. Mainly by using ‘ship money, an unparliamentary and archaic form of collecting taxes. For many, this meant extraction of money without representation, as the American revolutionaries called it, a hundred and fifty years later. People at first grumbled, but they paid up. Complaints became louder as the taxes became more routine. Discontent grew more substantial, and criticism of the King's prerogatives was at the core of the grievances. This system was a subversion of the entire state, and it was a man with so much power who used none of it to help his people. After a court ruled against the prerogative to collect Ship Money, more people refused to pay, giving a brief voice to resentment. We are, however, still far away from revolution at this stage, but it was expected that if Charles were to ever recall Parliament, he could expect trouble.
Parliamentarians were not the only enemy, but with the help of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, and the King’s wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, they created more enemies as differences and fears over religion and beliefs took centre stage. Mixed with Parliamentarians' discontent, it proved a lethal combination. The majority of the religious were Protestants who feared Popery. Some wanted complete reform of the Presbyterian with no bishops (anti-episcopacy), while others were conservatives who supported the Anglican Church of Elizabethan England. Archbishop Laud wanted to bring back altar rails and reverence to the Eucharist, and suppress the Puritans or the Godly, in an effort to dismantle their ideas on Calvinistic predestination, where every person was already bound to either heaven or hell. To the Godly, the Laudian interference meant that the Church of England was being run by an emissary from hell. Apprehension also became widespread that Charles' personal rule risked running the kingdom into the arms of Rome. The hanging of crosses and icons is becoming widespread. While personal rule might be forgotten, Laud’s reforms were on constant display in every church. Interlacing politics and religion becomes obvious when divisions within church areas occur, led by bishops who represent a hierarchical artificiality that signifies that the priest is sacred and, in broad terms, that other hierarchies are open to question.
The other problem Charles brought on himself was marrying the Catholic French Princess Henrietta Maria in 1625. As soon as she arrived at the English court, she began what she had promised her mother, Marie de Medici, to do. To spread Catholicism. The new queen had her own Chapel at St James’s Palace, and a Jesuit Chaplain, and went on a spectacular wave of conversion among the aristocracy. While such conversions were going on, crosses, icons, and rosaries were still being imported. She acquired the habit of walking along in St. James’s Park with a rosary in her hand all the way to the gallows (Marble Arch) along the route of the Tyburn tree. Neither she nor her followers were content to keep their religion private. Many resented such an exhibition, viewing it as an outrage to Christendom and an affront to royal dignity. Besides, the laws of England, at the time, allowed people to be hanged for being Catholic, for doing less than what Henrietta’s marriage treaty allowed her to do. The Godly who feared and detested popery were alarmed at such flagrant visibility by this ‘shameless emissary of the whore of Babylon’, and her great wit and beauty made matters worse. All this aestacisation of religion had gone too far, even for Charles. Wherever possible, both he and Archbishop Laud were horrified by the rate of conversions; they discouraged their subjects from attending Mass.
But outside the court, people became suspicious of Catholic subversion. What this amounted to was that England, an elect Protestant nation, was believed to be in danger from its own sovereign. But this discontent was about to change into something more substantial. The combination of the ship money method of collecting taxes, the religious Romanised Reformation, and the toleration of Catholicism was too much for the Godly and the Presbyterians to bear, given a situation bound to spark agitation. This eventually took the form of John Hampden and John Pym, both solid, godly individuals, who argued that suspicion is not enough; rather, they confronted the king with their grievances. The increase of Catholic affairs is tantamount to the subversion of the whole state. Their speech called Ship money into question and refused to pay such an unparliamentary tax. This led to Ship Money trials questioning the king's right and powers to raise money through the hated prerogatives. The court found in favour of John Hampden.
Things were taking a bad turn not only against the King but also against his wife, Henrietta, and Archbishop Laud. Many were taking a free hand in campaigning against the King’s personal rule, and as many were suspecting his Catholic leanings. Loud dissenters were jailed and had their ears clipped, much to his dismay; such cruelty only increased their popularity amongst the Londoners who saw them as living martyrs.
Laud was eventually charged with high treason, which was part of the anti-popery campaign, which eventually would generate a national crisis whipped up mainly by the Godly, who viewed his Arminian doctrines as dangerously close to the Roman Catholicism they hated so much. He was removed to the Tower and remained a prisoner for three years before finally being brought to trial before the House of Lords in March 1644 and executed the following year. Arminianism is essentially Anglicanism, the Church of England today. It was the belief that men and women could be saved by their own works and goodness, and by their own repentance; the way to heaven was a slow and steady walk, lined with kindness to others. This harmless-sounding idea flew in the face of Calvinism, which held that every person was destined by God to be either saved or damned and could moreover be saved by his grace alone. Laudian, Arminianism was seen as a menace. As a result of heightened anxieties of this kind, becoming an MP came to involve a declaration of religious allegiance. The target here was also Queen Henrietta and her entourage; “going to mass” became their everyday language, further fueling people’s fears that the court was succumbing to the Jesuits' influence. They spread the ideas that catholic conspirators are everywhere, representing a terrible danger.
As if that was not trouble enough, fears grew further from numerous write-ups by people. Prominent among them were John Milton, John Fox, and other Protestant anti-monarchists who haunted the Protestant imagination, spreading the dread of Catholicism, fanning the memory of the Fifth of November, the Catholic Gunpowder Plot, and presenting constant reminders that the Jesuits were the enemies of Parliament. Great emphasis on conspiracy theories that Queen Henrietta was plotting a French invasion. The man most responsible for spreading those fears was the MP John Pym, a red-hot Puritan. Anti-Spanish, Anti-French, and fervent Anti-Catholic, his principal aim is to save the great eye of the Kingdom, the Parliament, from Popery. He was the chief opponent of Arminianism, whom he considered to be devil worshippers and had persuaded many MPs that a popish conspiracy was on the way, and the leniency shown by the King and his ministers posed an immediate threat to this kingdom. He further proclaimed that we ought to obey God rather than Man, a clear sign of the politicisation of religion. The Papists had become a menace in politics as well as in matters of religion, and were, so far as he was concerned, a conspiracy to alter the Kingdom, while the King seemed oblivious to such a growing danger.
Colouring the Anti-Charles Mosaic even further, the English and the Scots were increasingly developing their ideas of individual identity within rigid ideologies of opposition to Rome. Writers and pamphleteers further popularised such ideas that cast a shadow over King Charles' condescension to the suspected Catholics, casting him as a traitor to his own people. This was further emphasised when he allowed the spread of Spanish and French Catholic foreign influence instead of defending the true Protestant religion of England. Worse was to come. News emanating from Ireland following the Irish rebellion, the Catholic Irish were massacring Protestants. For many, it seemed, news of barbarity was coming across to the mainland. For many, that was the key factor driving the country to civil war. People viewed their king as an ally of the Irish rebels; they also believed that the notion of the king as a secret Catholic supporter was a key factor in dividing the nation.
Pym demanded reform on a grand scale, blaming Catholicism for all the diseases affecting parliament. He was now obliging the king to address grievances in a credo of the Grand Remonstrance outlining every grievance of personal rule, listing suspicions of the spread of Catholicism, finding a place for anti-Popish, anti-Laudian, and more besides. This was the principal cause to precipitate the English Civil War. Such demands brought the divisions between royalists and parliamentarians into the open. It showed more than anything that representatives of the nation were dividing. So too would the nation. Having learned of this rebellious behaviour, the king was adamant that he would regain his authority. On the 4th of January, 1642, accompanied by a contingent of soldiers, armed with pistols and swords, he set out to Parliament to arrest his chief opponents. It is suspected the rebels were forewarned, Charles was too late, “the birds had flown”. Charles, realising the state was losing his prestige and that his dignity and authority were diminished in parliament, left London with Queen Henrietta and retreated to Hampton Court.
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