The English Civil War: A People’s History

The celebration of some Rites, done to the Goddess Chloris, who in a general counsel of the Gods, was proclaimed Goddess of the flowers, according to that of Ovid, in the Fasti. The Curtain being drawn up, the Scene is discovered, consisting of pleasant hills, planted with young trees, and all the lower banks adorned with flowers. And from some hollow parts of those Hills, Fountains come gliding down, which, in the far-off Landshape, seemed all to be converted to a River. Over all, a serene sky, with transparent cloudes, giving a great lustre to the whole work, which did imitate the pleasant Spring. When the spectators had enough fed their eyes, with the delights of the Scene, in a part of the air, a bright Cloud begins to break forth; and in it is sitting a plump Boy, in a changeable garment, richly adorned, representing the mild Zephyrus. On the other side of the Scene, in a purplish Cloud, appeareth the Spring, a beautiful Maid, her upper garment green, under it, a white robe wrought with flowers.

The resemblance to a mythological painting by an Italian or Flemish master is clear. Inigo Jones, the creator of its visual aspects, carefully borrowed books about continental wedding pageants from the Cotton library. He suggested a costume for Henrietta herself, ‘several fresh greens mixed with gold and silver will be most proper’. This was Ben Jonson’s last court masque, and he made the most of it. Attendance was by invitation, and those not among the called and chosen had little hope of getting in; boxes were overflowing with richly dressed ladies as it was. They wore shockingly low-cut dresses, too, thought the Venetian embassy chaplain: ‘those who are plump and buxom show their bosoms very openly, and the lean go muffled to the throat’. There were feathers, and jewels, and brightly coloured dresses. One of the scantily-clad dancers was Lucy Hay. The masque began at about 6 p.m., and afterwards the king attended a special buffet supper for the cast. At the end of the evening the supper table would be ceremoniously overthrown amidst the sound of breaking glass, so dear to the upper classes, as a kind of violent variant of James Hay’s double feasts.

Charles and Henrietta were good at the visual, and they also had in Nicholas Lanier a fine musician. Their pet poets were less distinguished. Here is William Davenant: ‘How had you walked in mists of sea-coal smoke,/ Such as your ever-teeming wives would choke/ (False sons of thrift!) did not her beauteous light/ Dispel your clouds and quicken your dull sight?’

Shakespeare it isn’t, but it is fascinating testimony to the returning traveller’s first impression of London; coal fires – whoever you were. Coal, and its black dust, linked Henrietta and Lucy to Anna Trapnel’s Stepney.

And Lucy Hay, too, had to instruct her maids to get the coal dust off the new upholstery. The first years of Lucy’s marriage were difficult. She fell ill, so seriously that she nearly died, and perhaps as a result of this illness, she suffered the tragic stillbirth of the only baby she would ever carry. Having married a man with no money of his own, dependent on the king for favours, Lucy was in an oddly vulnerable position. She and her husband needed her efforts to survive James I’s death in 1625 without loss of position. And they had a tremendous stroke of luck early in the new reign. Exasperated with Henrietta Maria’s French ladies-in-waiting, Charles literally threw them out on 7 August 1626. James Hay may have been among those who urged this; Buckingham certainly was. The list of replacements included Lucy. But Henrietta didn’t want her – hers was the name which made the young queen balk.

It is easy to understand the queen’s difficulties. Henrietta was young, and rather daunted by England and the English court. Lucy was beautiful and clever and seems to have struck every man who met her as a kind of goddess. What queen consort in her senses would want her footsteps dogged day and night by somebody so very desirable, so charismatic? Henrietta wanted to lead; she didn’t want to follow. And Lucy’s sexual reputation had begun its nosedive. It was widely assumed that she was the mistress of that most glittering, most hated upstart of all, the Duke of Buckingham, and that Hay and Buckingham both hoped to use her to gain power over the young queen. Henrietta was quite intelligent enough to resent this. And she hated Buckingham, and detested his power over her husband.

Her mixed feelings about Lucy might have had another, darker cause. It may be that James Hay and Buckingham were both hoping that Charles might become infatuated with Lucy, that they might be able to control the king through his mistresses. This was not a stupid idea: the strategy was to pay rich dividends with Charles’s son, after all. And even the rumour cannot have endeared Lucy to the young, insecure queen, who believed passionately in marital fidelity.

And how might Lucy have felt about these plans? The self-willed girl, who chose her own husband? Perhaps the sense of being used and ordered in and out of bed bred a curious solidarity between Lucy and the queen, since in these unpromising circumstances Lucy somehow triumphed. By the summer of 1628, she had become Henrietta’s best friend and closest lady-in-waiting. As James Hay had taught her, she used dinners and entertainments: Bassompierre, the French ambassador, reported on Lucy’s cosy supper parties ‘in extreme privacy, rarely used in England, and caused a great stir, since the Queen rarely associates with her subjects at small supper gatherings’. This was high fashion, exciting, vivid, very faintly transgressive. It was women-only, too. Bassompierre noted that the king ‘once found himself in these little festivities … but behaved with a gravity which spoiled the conversation, because his humour is not inclined to this sort of debauche’. The kind of games which may have been played are exemplified by Lucy’s doglike and ambitious follower Sir Tobie Mathew, who wrote a character of her; it can be read as nauseatingly fulsome or very double-tongued indeed. Those who saw it as flattery agreed that it was ‘a ridiculous piece’. In his character, Mathew praises her ability to turn aside her followers’ wooing by seeming not to understand them. What Lucy liked was the idea of love, love as a game: a solemn Platonic game, yes, but one that could at any moment be deflated by sharp satire.

It was typical of Lucy that she could bring triumph even out of the disaster of serious and disfiguring illness. When she developed smallpox in the hot summer of 1628, it coincided very neatly with the death of the Duke of Buckingham, who had come to be James Hay’s rival and enemy. Buckingham’s death left an enormous gap at the very centre of power, a gap which James and Lucy Hay raced to fill. Everyone wrote to James, who was in Venice, urging him to return to England at once, even urging Lucy’s illness as a good excuse. In fact, though, James was both too late and not needed. The person who stepped into Buckingham’s position of power and influence over Charles was in fact his queen, Henrietta. And Lucy had assiduously cultivated her. Henrietta loved Lucy so much that she could hardly be restrained from nursing her personally. When Lucy began to recover, Henrietta rushed to her side.

But despite these glowing moments, the relationship had its ups and downs. Tobie Mathew could report in March 1630 that Lucy and Henrietta were not as close as before, and by November William, Lord Powys could inform Henry Vane that Lucy was back in full favour again. The problem sometimes seemed to be that Lucy was not very good at being a courtier: her natural dominance sometimes overpowered her political instincts. Powys remarked that ‘she is become a pretty diligent waiter, but how long the humour will last in that course I know not’. And although she and Henrietta had much in common, they were very different in inclination and temperament. Lucy’s rather Jacobean liking for fun, frivolity and parties was not altogether shared by Henrietta, who liked her parties too, but preferred them to have serious moral themes. When another of Henrietta’s advisers lamented that the wicked Lucy was teaching the queen to use makeup, he was complaining that she brought some Jacobean dissoluteness to the primness of the new court. Henrietta had moods in which she found this fun, and moods in which it made her feel shamed and guilty, particularly since Lucy could not share the great passion of her life, her Roman Catholic religious zeal. Finally, as Tobie Mathew remarked, Lucy was really a man’s woman: ‘She more willingly allows of the conversation of men, than of Women; yet, when she is amongst those of her own sex, her discourse is of Fashions and Dressings, which she hath ever so perfect upon herself, as she likewise teaches it by seeing her.’

She liked admiration and she also liked politics and intrigue. Her main interest in Henrietta was almost certainly centred on the access the queen gave her to her own powerful court faction, and Henrietta, like anyone, may sometimes have resented the fact that she was never liked for herself. And both women were locked in the competition that court society imposed on them, an unspoken, deadly scramble for notice, importance, power, access, which neither could ever truly win. Henrietta was always ahead because of her position, but like most people, wanted to be loved for her own qualities, and there Lucy could outdo her in wit, charm and beauty. It was easier for Henrietta to blame Lucy for her occasional eclipse than to question why her husband’s nobles so resented her influence; it was easier for Lucy to triumph over and rival Henrietta than to ask herself why her role in affairs always had to be a minor one.

Lucy and Henrietta were also frustrated because no one really took them seriously. They were both encased in a role which compelled them to be sweet and wise and self-controlled in public. Though women were often seen as emotionally and sexually uncontrolled, behaving that way led to social ostracism. They were not allowed to display or even to have feelings of competitiveness, anger, and frustration, which meant that those feelings raged unexpressed and unchecked. Composing bons mots of detraction, laughing at adorers, and slighting each other gave those feelings temporary release. What they both truly wanted was to have an impact on policy.

So, late in the 1620s, Lucy was a trifle bored. It all seemed so easy. At first the new monarchy of Charles I appeared a little dull and straitlaced: ‘If you saw how little gallantry there is at court,’ Lucy complained, ‘you would believe that it were no great adventure to come thither after having the small pox, for it is most desolate and I have no great desire to return.’ But this is the carelessness of success. A 1628 painting shows her translated to the centre of feminine power at court, transformed by masque costume into a goddess. The Duke of Buckingham, as Mercury, leads a procession of the arts to the king and queen, Apollo and Diana; the countess can be seen directly behind the queen’s shoulder, handily placed for whispering in her ear. Such allegorical names could be codewords, too; the countess’s brother-in-law referred to himself as Apollo, Walter Montagu as Leicester (a name that hinted at his role as the queen’s favourite, and perhaps implied something about their relationship). Lucy sponsored a performance called The Masque of Amazons, and danced in other masques. She was on top of her own small world.

But then it all fell apart. For reasons about which we can only speculate, Lucy declined a personal invitation to dance in William Davenant’s The Temple of Love, in 1634. And she never danced again in a court masque. Her absence from court was also noted by Viscount Conway in 1634: ‘now and a long time she hath not been at Whitehall, as she was wont to be, which is as when you left her: But she is not now in the Masque. I think they were afraid to ask and be refused … What the Words [quarrel] were, I know not, but I conceive they were spoken on the queen’s side, where there will never be perfect friendship. For my Lady of Carlisle … will not suffer herself to be beloved but of those that are her servants.’ Conway’s diagnosis was that Lucy was spoiled, could not bear to play second fiddle to the queen any longer, but it’s notable that he attributes the final unforgivable words to Henrietta.

While James Hay was accomplishing his gorgeous dash through Europe, Lucy was pursuing her own interests with equal vim and excess. With her customary adaptability and nose for fashion, she picked up from France the one role that would allow a woman in her position exactly the kind of power that her father had declared to be impossible. She was a salonnière, which meant something more than an influential hostess. A salonnière was a woman who was married or widowed, beautiful, sought-after, enormously literate and well-informed, fun to talk to, and interested in politics. Her salon consisted of her followers, chosen (like guests at a dinner party) with both business and pleasure in mind – a mix of poets and politicians. These followers played a half-joking, half-serious amorous game, presenting themselves as devoted to their lady, writing sonnets and letters to her, composing love games for her. Yet the focus was on wit and skill rather than merely on sex; the game of courtship provided a thrilling occasion for exercising power and talent. In particular, the goal was to find new ways of praising the salonnière herself – and new extremes of praise, too. So when Edmund Waller assured Lucy that in her presence all men ‘ambition lose, and have no other scope,/ Save Carlisle’s favour, to employ their hope’, William Cartwright could trump him by telling Lucy that any jewels she wore could only darken her lustre. And it was not only professional poets, perhaps hungry for advancement, who wrote. Courtiers and nobles addressed verse to her too. The Earl of Holland wrote love poems. Lucy’s sister Dorothy thought they were awful, ‘he is more her slave than ever creature was’, she wrote disgustedly, ‘many verses he hath lately writ to her, which are the worst that ever were seen’.

But then, Dorothy was biased. Like Lucy, Dorothy was ambitious and intelligent, but unlike Lucy she was married to a quiet, mild-mannered nobleman with strong principles, a member of the Sidney family with little interest in making a place for himself at the centre of the Caroline court. That did not stop Dorothy intriguing for him night and day, though. Her letters to and about Lucy burn with a frustrated ambition that allows us to see how galling it must have been for other women to witness Lucy’s success. But she was admired by men. Perhaps her effect was most eloquently summarized by the ageing Earl of Exeter:

The night is the mother of dreams and phantoms, the winter is the mother of the night, all this mingled with my infirmities have protracted this homage so due and so vowed to your ladyship, lest the fume and vapours so arising should contaminate my so sacred and pure intention. But much more pleasure it were to me to perform this duty in your lodgings at Court when you see your perfections in the glass adding perfection to perfection approving the bon mots spoken in your presence, moderating the excess of compliments, passing over a dull guest, without a sweet smile, giving a wise answer to an extravagant question … Were I young again, I should be a most humble suitor.

It sounds idyllic. But for her critics, and for the critics of salons and their female patrons in general, the salon was a nightmarish space full of horribly spoiled women whose caprices could unfairly influence national policy.

For a while, Lucy did not care, and could afford not to. But the game of love toyed with the deadly serious game that Lucy and James were also playing: advancement. For James Hay, whose power had been based on James I’s favour, the transition to Charles’s reign was a struggle, and though he kept his hand in, he was never quite so central again. Charles made him Governor of the Caribbees in 1627, and a Gentleman of the Bedchamber in 1633. But he died relatively young, on 20 April 1636, when he was only fifty-six, and he did it, like everything else, with character and in style. ‘When the most able physicians and his own weakness had passed a judgement that he could not live many days, he did not forbear his entertainment, but made divers brave clothes, as he said, to out-face naked and despicable death withal.’ It was a gallant remark, but one that showed James Hay’s limitations. Even facing death, his mind ran along its usual graceful, frivolous paths.

Next time, Lucy would look for someone more serious. Just as she had altered her world spectacularly by marrying James, so she would seek out extreme change again and again. James’s death left her a rich, young and beautiful widow, perhaps the ideal position for a woman in the seventeenth century who wanted both power and a good time. No patriarchs and no mental limits would stop her now. And perhaps having had a husband of glorious frivolity is precisely why she then sought seriousness, and sought it before the now-ailing James had died. Political power for Lucy was to come next through Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, one of her most self-abasing followers, but also one of the shrewdest and least disinterested. Holland was an eager member of a faction which included Lucy’s brother the Earl of Northumberland, which argued passionately for a French alliance and for movement against the rising power of the Hapsburgs. Henrietta Maria often supported this faction. It was anti-Spanish, bursting with military ambition and rather reminiscent of the Earl of Essex and his followers during the reign of Elizabeth in its dash and impracticality.

Seriousness led to seriousness. She had had troops of frivolous followers, but when Lucy fell in love again, it was not with a gallant cavalier. The man who caught her eye was like her father and her husband in that he was powerful, mobile, and ambitious. But Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Strafford, was utterly unlike the easygoing and high-living James Hay. He wasn’t content with a life of pleasure, as Hay had been. He wanted to rule, and Lucy was a vital part of his political plans.

Wentworth’s ambitions had changed radically in the course of his lifetime. He had begun as an ardent defender of Parliament’s ‘ancient and undoubted right’, and in 1627 had eagerly gone to gaol for refusing to pay the Forced Loan. But he always opposed the godly, and attempts to control the king, and these considerations led him to change sides abruptly, a volte face which led directly to a barony and elevation to the Privy Council. Victorian historian Thomas Macaulay commented that he was the first Englishman to whom a peerage was ‘a baptism into the community of corruption’. Part of the loathing he aroused in contemporaries was caused by dislike of the opportunist turncoat. But he may have sincerely believed that in the all-too-evident split between the king and Parliament, it was the king who was ruling the country. Lucy was part of his plan to ingratiate himself thoroughly with the court.

Wentworth knew the language he should use to approach someone like Lucy, the fashionable vocabulary of literary Platonism, on which he was drafting a short dissertation designed to please the ladies. In a letter to Viscount Conway, as early as March 1635, Wentworth wrote: ‘I admire and honour her, whatever her position be at court. You might tell her sometimes when she looks at herself at night in the glass, that I have the ambition to be one of those servants she will suffer to honour her … a nobler or a more intelligent friendship did I never meet with in my life.’ As a result of drawing the most powerful courtier in Britain into her net, Lucy was confirmed as a source of power – frightening but indispensable. Like a rich relation, she had to be conciliated and placated. And it went straight to her head – to Wentworth’s, too. For him, Lucy was a kind of trophy, a sign that he had made it, to the very top of the world. They exchanged portraits, full-sized ones by Van Dyck; Wentworth could literally hang Lucy on his wall.

But for Lucy it was all part of a pathway to a sterner, fiercer kind of love, the love of God. For she became, and ardently remained, a Presbyterian, an adherent of the Scottish Kirk, one of those who longed to see the achievements of the Scots repeated in the English Church. Perhaps Wentworth had told her stories about Ireland, or possibly she was intimidated by the tight knot of Catholics around Henrietta. Perhaps attaching herself to Wentworth, who was rather Godlike in his own estimation, helped form her views. She was as partisan, as militant, as Anna Trapnel on behalf of God. She never became fanatical – at the end of her life she could still tell ribald jokes about godly Scots – but she was serious. And she was also very practical. Her new admirer could help her protect her property in Ireland from the papists. Women like Lucy used their power to keep their estates intact.

So the streets of London in the late 1630s threaded through radically different worlds. They were stitched together by trade. A piece of silk might have known a wider London than any of those who wore it, for the silk would have come into the country through Poplar docks, new home of the East India Company. Unloaded on a wharf, surrounded by spices and scents from the East, it was also thrown about by hardworking navvies who lived in the sprawling, brawling East End, which was terra incognita to the West End that it served. Luxury passed by the life of a poor girl like Anna Trapnel, but did not settle in her hard world. Yet her London was linked to the brighter London of Lucy Hay through a finely spun skein of silk, and both women would be affected by the war.

IV The Bishops’ Wars, the Three Kingdoms, and Montrose

The immediate cause of the terrible wars wasn’t class difference, or resentment of the luxury at court. The gulf between dismal shipyard conditions and the exceptional extravagance of court masques was for the most part endured silently. What triggered the war was a prayer book. It was known as the Scottish Prayer Book, and it was an attempt by Archbishop William Laud to extend to Scotland the reforms that had made many so unhappy in England. The book in question was large, a folio. It was badly printed, with many typographical errors, and it was delayed for months in the press. But these were not the worst of its problems. It came to symbolize many things: the menace of popery, English rule in Scotland, the king’s unwillingness to listen to his truest friends.

This little cause of a great war still has its posterity today. Unless you are Roman Catholic, the Lord’s Prayer ends with the words ‘For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever’. These final lines are William Laud’s lasting memorial. As Archbishop of Canterbury, he added them to the Lord’s Prayer in the new Scottish book. When Charles II created the 1662 Prayer Book, its authors borrowed heavily from Laud’s Scottish Prayer Book, and retained the lines, which to this day have something of the ring of ecclesiastical monarchic absolutism.

But the addition to the Lord’s Prayer was not why the Scottish Prayer Book was so disliked, though a general antipathy to set prayers rather than extempore devotions was an issue. The controversy brought to a head tensions that were already at work. The crisis reflected the unstable situation between the three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland. It exposed deep fissures and incongruities which were already present. It would be an exaggeration to call them festering grievances. The badly printed book acted as a wake-up call. People suddenly stubbed their toes on differences which they had once been unwilling to see. Charles wanted to extend his father’s policy and attempt uniformity of religion between the kingdoms. He wanted order and obedience. He was announcing that he and not the Scots was in charge of the Kirk. And that could not be borne.

Charles’s intentions and personality mattered terribly because all that tied Scotland to England was the bare person of the king. James I had tried to unite England and Scotland in more than himself, but had met with ferocious opposition from both sides. The English didn’t want smart Scots on the make like James Hay influencing affairs in London. The Scots didn’t want to disappear into the identity of their richer, more populous, more powerful neighbour. Their unease was exacerbated when James died and was replaced by his son Charles. Charles sounded much more English than James had, despite having been born in Scotland. The Scots suddenly felt they were being ruled by a king from another country; James, after all, had been their king first.