The English Civil War

A People’s History

Diane Purkiss

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Maps

An Epistle to the Gentle Reader

I The Last Cavalier?

II The Meek-Eyed Peace

III Two Women: Anna Trapnel and Lucy Hay

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

V Pym against the Papists

VI Stand Up, Shout Mars

VII The Valley of Decision

VIII Bright-Harnessed Angels: Edgehill

IX Down with Bishops and Bells: Iconoclasm

X The Death of Dreams

XI The War over Christmas

XII The Queen’s Tale: Henrietta Maria

XIII Newbury Fight

XIV Two Capitals: Oxford and London

XV The Bitterness of War

XVI Two Marriages

XVII The Power of Heaven: Marston Moor and Cromwell

XVIII The Cookery Writers’ Tales: General Hunger, Hannah Wolley, Kenelm Digby and the Deer of Corse Lawn

XIX Twenty Thousand Cornish Boys: The Battle of Lostwithiel

XX The Nation’s Nightmares

XXI Th’ Easy Earth That Covers Her: The Children’s Tales

XXII God with Us! Montrose’s Campaign

XXIII New Professions: Parliament Joan and Richard Wiseman

XXIV The World is Turned Upside Down: The New Model Army and Naseby Fight

XXV Ashes: The Siege of Taunton and the Clubmen

XXVI The Birds in the Greenwoods are Mated Together: Anne Halkett and the Escape of James II

XXVII Nor Iron Bars a Cage: The Capture of Charles I

XXVIII A New Heaven and a New Earth: Anna Trapnel and the Levellers

XXIX Stand Up Now, Stand Up Now: Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers

XXX The Second Civil War

XXXI To Carisbrooke’s Narrow Case: Charles I in Captivity

XXXII Oh, He is Gone, and Now hath Left Us Here: The Trial and Execution of Charles I

XXXIII Into Another Mould? The Aftermath

FURTHER READING

INDEX

P.S. Ideas, interviews & features…

Interview

About the Book

Read on

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Maps

An Epistle to the Gentle Reader

If this were truly a seventeenth-century book or pamphlet, it would be likely to include an epistle to you, the reader. In the seventeenth century, with which this book is concerned, authors and readers approached each other more formally and courteously than is now customary. A book usually began with a polite letter to the gentle reader, a letter which asked for the reader’s attention, apologized for the book’s shortcomings, and explained what benefits patient perusal of the work might offer. The tone was often self-deprecating, and it was usual to deprecate the book itself as ‘my poor book’. The poet Robert Herrick thought his book was likely to be used as toilet paper when his readers were tired of it; Milton repeatedly asked God to fix his awful weaknesses. In addressing the reader as ‘gentle’, the author invited him or her to be so; to be courteous and polite in turn. Gentle also has a class meaning; it implies wealth, and with it education, power and discernment.

I hope it is not too self-conscious for me to emulate this charming tradition and thus to offer a tribute to it. In reviving a good custom and addressing you, gentle reader, my chief purpose is to welcome you to a story that greatly concerns you.

Frankly, I am in hopes that you may be among those to whom the words ‘The English Civil War’ have always stood for an unsolved mystery. The Civil War is perhaps the single most important event in our history, but for rather complex reasons many of the very intelligent readers who abound in these isles know little of it. The great battlefield sites of Edgehill, Marston Moor, and Naseby are difficult to find and poorly marked. The siege sites of Basing House and Donnington Castle are ruins dotted with picnickers rather than sacred memorials to heroic endeavour and ideas. We have no Fourth of July, no Bastille Day to commemorate our own heroic struggle to define and enact freedom, even though on it depended the ideas that were later to lead to those two other revolutions. Self-deprecation can go too far, and as a nation we are perhaps too good at it, so good that it becomes a species of forgetting.

So it is that in these pages I would like to introduce you – gently – to the war and the men and women who fought in it. In this book I invite you with all respect to make the acquaintance of what we call The Civil War – the series of battles and campaigns fought on the field and also in people’s hearts and minds between 1642 and 1649, culminating in the judicial execution of a king and the creation of the only English Republic to date.

You, dear courteous reader, will come to know more anon. You will not come to know everything worth knowing from my poor book alone, but it may make you feel well enough acquainted with its subject to pursue the men and women it sketches through other books, to see them in the streets of your own town or city.

To some of you I should not presume ot offer such an introduction. For some of you, the civil war is an old friend, and I welcome you too to these pages. Among your number are doubtless the formidable amateur experts who also dot our landscape; those who know far more than I about the siege of Gloucester or the range of a demiculverin, those who could draw an accurate sketch of the battle lines at Newbury, those who have an especial hero among the fighting men and women whose stories burst from the pages of history – Fairfax, Cromwell, Charles I. I bow to you and apologize in advance for any errors you may discern. But I also beg you not merely to indulge your passion, but to make the acquaintance of persons whose stories you may not have considered important, especially the stories of noncombatants, the stories of those for whom war was not battle but privation or writing or ideas.

Finally, I address you, discerning and erudite readers, academic historians, colleagues. Not all of you will agree with what I have done here. So it must be, for I hope we might at least unite in stating that no history of this war has ever commanded universal acclamation. It may be that some of you may think, for instance, that cookery writers should not elbow parliamentary debates aside as they do here, for the reason that the latter have more serious influence on the lives of ordinary men and women. But do they? The democratization of simple knowledge is part of the political story of these years. And unlike the form of government, this reform is lasting. Bear with me, tolerate me, and you may find some profit in it.

I also want to say this to you, as an apology for my poor naked book; once upon a time, our courteous readers enjoyed academic history because it was grounded, as was the novel, in a drama of character. Macaulay and Carlyle were read and loved because their version of history was a guide to human nature. For complex and very good reasons, their approach has been largely abandoned by professional historians; indeed, for many a focus on individual character in history is now an irredeemable sign of the amateur. In all my work I am trying to seduce the academy into taking this human approach back, reviving it, and thus giving its revived force to the subjects of our ruminations. If the past is not to be dry, then it must live, and so must its people. I hope I may be forgiven much that is faulty or imperfect for my attempt to return to a moment when history was a vital part of the nation’s idea of who and what human beings are.

I also gratefully greet those of my profession who have made the present book possible by their tireless, often unrewarded and unrecognized attempts to labour through unread and grimy manuscripts and smudged public records in search of those most elusive of all historical personages, the ordinary man and woman. May we all, author and readers, unite in their name. And I commend this my poor book to you above all.

Your very humble servant,

THE AUTHOR

Oxford

February 2006

I The Last Cavalier?

One night in 1712, a man named Thomas Neville lay dying in his own bed, surrounded by family and friends. He was an ordinary gentleman, but in his lifetime he had been among those who had seen the Middle Ages finally disappear, and the modern era emerge. He had seen wonders, and had even made them happen. But the changes he had witnessed were accompanied by violence and terror unmatched in the history of his country. Thomas Neville was the last man to remember that turmoil, the last surviving field officer from a once-great but defeated army, the army of King Charles I.

Thomas Neville had had better reason than most to join the king’s army. He had seen his rich father ordered to give up the house he had grown up in and had heard him say that ‘rather than yield to dishonourable persons, I will make my house my grave’. His enemy – the Parliamentarian Lord Grey of Groby – stormed the house and took his father prisoner; the building was burned to the ground. From then on Thomas Neville and his elder brother William were at war, whether they wished to be or not. In 1644, they fought at Newark; in 1646 at Ashby de la Zouch. Both brothers survived the war, but William was dead by 1661. Thomas survived to tell his stories of dashing Cavalier Prince Rupert galloping to the rescue of his children and grandchildren.

By the time Thomas Neville closed his eyes in death, the war he had fought in had become distant even for his grandchildren. In the decades that followed the war, throughout Britain, people began to make efforts to write down the Civil War stories that their grandfathers had told. Those who had fought themselves had spent the Restoration years writing down their experiences, fighting old battles again. And grandmothers wrote too, for grandchildren who would never know their grandfathers because they lay buried at Edgehill, at Newbury, at Marston Moor or Naseby, or by lesser towns or streams where short sharp engagements had been fought. Some wrote for the God for whom they had shed their blood; others for the Good Old Cause, and still others for the kings living and dead whom they had served. Some recounted their war experiences in the hope of a disability pension, or to explain to a sceptical community exactly what they had done. All of them wrote because they knew they had lived through a time like no other.

Their descendants kept their letters, their diaries, their memoirs faithfully, knowing that in those pages lay a link to a time fast passing from memory into history. Others sought to scrabble together the storm of paper the war had produced; George Thomason tried to collect every pamphlet, newspaper and ballad printed during the war, while Samuel Pepys put together ballads and Edward Hyde and John Aubrey wrote down soldiers’ and survivors’ recollections. Those who had been children when King Charles raised his standard recorded their memories of the lost king; those who had been youths when Cromwell held court at Westminster wrote down what they had seen. Between them all, they kept alive what all history needs: the stories of the people who lived it.

Those who kept these careful records were right about the importance of what they had seen to the lives of the men and women of the future. We owe our state of government to the English Civil War, but most of its beneficiaries have little idea who fought whom or when or why. Nor do most of us care; what little we know seems remote and difficult to grasp, with stiff figures on battlefields and stiffer constitutional debates. Yet actually, the English Civil War was the making of our country. It made us the nation we are, the countries we are, the people we are. It also created those more permanent revolutions by influence: Thomas Jefferson and George Washington recalled and revered the Good Old Cause against the king’s tyranny, and the French revolutionaries had read their Milton. The glories and liberations of that long-ago conflict still benefit us today; so too its failings and limitations are with us, part of our blood, setting the horizon of our expectations. And to understand ourselves, we have to understand the people we were, the people who fought in that war.

This book has two goals: to tell the story of the English Civil War up to and including the execution of the king, and to bring to life the people who fought in it, died in it, and in doing so changed the history of the world for ever.

To do this, I tell the story of the war from the points of view of the people involved. The war is interesting because it was fought by people, men and women. My cast of characters ranges from Charles I himself, disastrous shaper of his own fate, through his most educated and articulate opponents, men like John Milton, and through men and women utterly obscure before the war and glintingly prominent after it, men like Oliver Cromwell, through to what Charles himself might have called ‘the meaner sort’, men like witch-finder Matthew Hopkins and revolutionary Gerrard Winstanley, godly women like Anna Trapnel. We first glimpse these people before the war, and we see how the war changes them, creates unexpected chances for them to change their lives, overthrows what they thought they could take for granted. When the war ends, when King Charles is dead, we see what all these people have left, what remains of their lives. Mine is not an even-handed portrait. Not all of these people represent something beyond themselves and their individual stories. Some figures that were important do not get as much space as the well-informed reader might expect. But this unevenness was part of contemporaries’ experience of the war; they too did not always see a ‘big picture’, but the small details of a burned barn, a changed pattern of church service, a son lost in battle.

The armed conflict was also a major event in its own right. Estimates suggest that around 800,000 people in the British Isles died during its course, the majority of them in Ireland. One in four of all men served in the armies on one side or the other, which suggests that a majority of able-bodied men was involved. The war was not a clean and tidy affair of sabres and dashing cavalry charges; it was a bloody business largely driven by guns – cannons and muskets and pistols – which at times appears to have combined the worst aspects of the American Civil War and Vietnam. Both sides used soft lead bullets that did terrible damage to flesh. For years afterwards, the London streets were full of one-legged beggars. Cities and castles were razed to the ground.

There were atrocities involving civilians, again especially in Ireland. The war was expensive, and individual families were ruined – or made – by its sweeping hand. And so people came to see change all around them. They thought that the world had been transformed for ever, for them and for their families. Because they thought that, some of them began questioning many taken-for-granted aspects of life, looking in new ways at the purpose of women, the purpose of government and of its leaders, and at the purpose of human beings. Some of what they invented still governs our lives: universal male suffrage, promotion on merit, women’s involvement in politics, the ordinary man’s need for a home and food.

Isabella Twysden’s Civil War diary illustrates the way big events look to small people. In her journal, however, a big event could be personal or political; she gave equal weight to the birth of a new baby, or King Charles’s capture by his enemies in the Parliamentarian army. She tried to chronicle her own life and the life of the nation, with no anxiety about the disparity of scale, because to her both kinds of events were important.

She tried to keep a record of news, a daily chronicle. She didn’t write down what she felt, but only what happened. Her first three entries for 1645 read:

The first of Janua. Mr John Hotham was beheaded on Tower Hill.

The 2nd of Janu Sr John Hotham (father to Mr Hotham) was beheaded on Tower Hill.

The 10 of January My Lord of Canterbury was beheaded on Tower Hill and was buried at Barking Church

Interspersed with the doings of the great she recorded events crucial to her:

The 8 Feb I came to Peckham great with child, and ride all the way a horseback, and I thank God had no hurt

The 6 of March [1645], between one and two in the morning I was brought to bed of a boy, the 7 he was christened and named Charles, the gossips [godparents] were my brother Charles and Francis Twysden and my Lady Astley [wife of Jacob Astley]

The 11 of March there was the terriblest wind, that had been known since ever the like, it did a great deal of hurt

The 3 of April a little before 3 in the morning my sister Twysden was brought to bed of a girl at Maling, it was christened the 5 and named Ann, without gossips … the new way.

It might seem incongruous that Isabella recorded this mass of detail about her baby’s christening and her niece’s christening in a war diary, but she did so because domestic details like this had themselves become battlefields. In particular, the baptism of babies had become caught up in the political divisions the war had created. Many families of traditional views were made miserable by the difficulty of getting vulnerable infants baptized by their preferred rite. As George Thomason amassed a collection of over a hundred tracts on the question of infant baptism, worried parents tried to do their own homework, anxiously poring over the Bibles and pamphlets much as modern parents might agonize over vaccination. In 1646, when their child was born, John and Lucy Hutchinson took some time to decide, but eventually chose not to have the new baby baptized, whereupon, Lucy wrote, they were reviled as sectarians. The Directory of Public Worship, which replaced the prayer book in 1645, dispensed with the sign of the cross, and the minister was told bluntly to sprinkle the child’s face ‘without adding any other ceremony’. Godparents were also ruled out firmly, and instead the child was presented by its father. Some people accepted this philosophically. Still others rejoiced at the opportunity to choose adult baptism, and found names for themselves that reflected their faith. But the diarist John Evelyn loathed it, and had his babies christened at home, according to the old rite, while he continued to act as godparent for friends who felt the same.

This is how war and other such large events are experienced: Isabella juxtaposes Fairfax’s capture of 4000 soldiers at the pivotal battle of Naseby in 1645 with worries about the money owed to the baby’s monthly nurse, who is leaving for London. For her, the personal and the political are well blended. My intention is to achieve the same mix in this book. This method has its drawbacks, as Isabella’s diary shows; the stories that result can seem to jump about, and strict chronology is sometimes sacrificed to the writer’s interest in particular events. But it is truer to how this war was felt. There was not one Civil War, but thousands, different for each person involved.

So large impersonal changes such as constitutional reforms are important but only because they are eventually experienced by people. I found Charles Stuart much more interesting than absolutism, Oliver Cromwell more compelling than Puritanism. And neither man is helpfully summed up by a list of his beliefs, because both were also feeling human beings, inconsistent and emotional, and so were all those who fought alongside them.

II The Meek-Eyed Peace

The story of the Civil War begins with the world before the cataclysm. The group of people who were to play great roles in the enormous events to come were in 1639 leading lives that seemed to them normal. There were political struggles, there was murmuring and discontent, but these disputes were well within the realm of normality. True, there had been a war with Scotland, and matters there were still not settled. But there had been such wars before. There was nothing to suggest that the nation was about to be violently torn in pieces by the most costly armed conflict in its history. Even the two protagonists, Charles and Cromwell, could have no inkling of what was coming.

By focusing on a morning in the late winter of 1639, we can catch a glimpse of those last moments of unthinking normality. On that morning Charles I was hunting. The king loved hunting on horseback, and loved it far more than the tedious obligations that came with rule. When on a progress, a tour to meet his subjects, Charles would sneak off to the chase rather than remain to shake the lord mayor’s hand. On a cold morning, a winter’s morning, the horse and the freshly killed game both steamed lightly, the heat of their bodies drowning out the scent of trodden leaves. For Charles, his horse was more interesting and less demanding company than his subjects; it did not rush up to him with importunities he did not understand, did not beg for his touch to heal it of nauseating diseases. It served him and knew its place – and so did those who rode with him. Through hunting Charles could feel connected with his father, James I, who had also loved the chase, but who had not very greatly loved Charles. And he could feel absolute – absolutely confident that the still-vast royal forests belonged to him and no one else. In those forests were deer that had been bred by his royal predecessors, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, as well as his father. The forests were also still dangerous, full of wild boar. In their leafless and endless embrace, Charles need not fear having to treat with anyone. He ruled all he saw. And at just a year short of forty, his grip on power had become tight and remorseless.

His future foe, Oliver Cromwell, loved to hunt on horseback too, and like Charles, a winter morning in 1639 might have found him at the chase. We can picture both, then, crouched over the carcass of a slain deer, ceremoniously dividing the venison for various people: their fellow-hunters, those who were due a gift, the hunt servants. This picture to us suggests mess, but to Charles and Cromwell it would have meant order, the comforts of ritual. Bloody and dangerous as hunting could be, it was a moment for all gentlemen to feel in control of the world, like God looking over his creation on the seventh day of rest. An important metaphor for Cromwell, for ever since his extreme depression in his middle twenties, religion had become his reason for living. Now a man of forty, he had put his turbulent youth firmly behind him. But he still loved the chase. The experience of hunting yoked the gentry to the aristocracy; it made gentlemen feel like rulers.

Middle-class town dwellers like John Milton had other interests. Milton loved books. On a winter’s morning in 1639, he would have been at his desk or in his library, reading, writing, thinking. He liked to get up early, working or studying until dawn. He had only the slender light of a candle to illuminate and warm his small dark parlour. He did not order a fire, despite the cold; Milton was not a poor man, but he was not a rich one. At thirty-one, he did not have what his father might have called a proper job, and by 1639 he had published only one poem. But he already knew that he would be the greatest English poet in history. His Latin was so good that he could, literally, write like Horace and Ovid; he knew the epics of Homer and the tragedies of Euripides by heart. Now he had just come back to England after a Grand Tour of Italy, and was writing an elegy in Latin for his only real friend, who had just died. During the war, Milton would have many associates, but no real intimates; the conflict would both further and thwart his passionate ambition.

Nehemiah Wallington might have been reading, too, if he had not had to work so hard at his trade of woodturning; like most ordinary Londoners, his day was dominated by work, to which he was called by the many London bells which tolled the hours of daybreak and dark. He liked to follow theological debates when his job allowed, and he especially loved the bestselling work The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven; much of its homespun wisdom found its way into the journal Nehemiah was keeping, recording his spiritual life. At forty-two, he couldn’t help but be conscious that his life might well be drawing to a close. So Nehemiah liked sermons too, and preaching of all kinds. That was lucky, because a sermon from a very godly preacher could easily last two hours, sometimes longer, and on a Sunday Nehemiah and hundreds like him would be in the congregation, absorbing every word. It was people like Nehemiah who hated the Anglican Church’s swerves towards what they thought was treacherous popery, and provided most of the unrest before the Civil War itself began. It would not take much for them to blame the king for it, and his little Catholic queen.

If Nehemiah went to his favourite church, though, he could pass the theatres it denounced on his way, and sometimes even feel tempted to enter them. If he had ever given in to temptation, he would have seen thrillingly innovative new scenery that looked from a distance like the real world, and in 1639 might have been adorning plays like Henry Glapthorne’s Argalus and Parthenia. A Caroline play could be perverse and tragical, climaxing in a huge pile of corpses, or a sharp and salty comedy that made fun of the people in the next street. Nobles, on the other hand, could see a very different kind of production, a masque, a four-hour extravaganza presented by the most beautiful and alluring ladies of the court; in one scandalous production they wore topless costumes, baring their breasts. This was doubly scandalous, because these were real women acting, and speaking lines as well – not professional actresses, but the queen and her ladies. A man named William Prynne had recently lost his ears for writing that women actresses were notorious whores, in a manner that plainly insulted Queen Henrietta. But to a man like Wallington, the queen’s activities were a clear temptation to providence, and a sign that London was no city for the godly, but rather a portal of hell.

For better-off children, the country could be a delicious place of play. In 1639, some who would rise to prominence in the war were still close to a childhood of wild unsupervised games. The eleven-year-old John Bunyan might have been holed up somewhere with his favourite book, no Bible, but the racy – and sexy – adventures of a superhero called Bevis of Hampden. And thirteen-year-old Richard Cromwell, Oliver’s son, was still slogging his unenthusiastic way through grammar school, unaware that he was to be – briefly – ruler of England. The young Matthew Hopkins shows what terrible pressures could be created inside the good seventeenth-century child. As a boy, Matthew is said to have ‘took affright at an apparition of the Devil, which he saw in the night’. As the son of a godly vicar, whose will insists firmly on salvation through faith alone, Hopkins was like most godly children; he was terrified of the powers of hell, which he believed might claim him. And yet in maturity Hopkins liked to invent different childhoods for himself. He told William Lilly that he came from a line of schoolmasters in Suffolk, ‘who had composed for the psalms of King David’; there was indeed a John Hopkins, an English hymn-writer, but he didn’t have a son called Matthew. Hopkins told Lady Jane Whorwood that he was really named Hopequins and was the grandson of an English Catholic diplomat, Richard Hopequins, a much grander background than he could really claim. These alternative identities suggest a profound wish to hide from something or someone, perhaps from the Devil.

Among all those relishing peace were the two men who were to be the chief protagonists in the coming wars. The man who was to be the only king ever executed by the English people was born a privileged little boy, but one whom nobody particularly wanted. Charles Stuart spent a childhood ill and in pain, bullied by those he loved, and he grew into a disabled and often unhappy adult. In the same calendar year, another boy was born, a boy who was to become the only man not of royal blood ever to head the English state. Oliver Cromwell was welcomed into a family of struggling East Anglian gentry, the adored and long-awaited only boy in a family of girls. The boost to his self-esteem was lifelong.

When Charles was born on 19 November 1600, he was his parents’ third child, and they had a fine son already, destined to rule in Edinburgh one day. Charles was nobody’s favourite, nobody’s problem. He was first assigned a noblewoman to be his foster-mother, in the manner usual for those of his class; her name was Lady Margaret Ochiltree. Charles cared enough about Lady Margaret to be angry when her pension fell into arrears in 1634. But of course she didn’t do the childcare herself; Charles also had a wetnurse, and a rocker who was supposed to rock the cradle, but was also a general nurserymaid, and other nursery nurses. Like other upper-class children, his closest bonds were therefore with servants, and hence precarious because servants could come and go. A child was supposed to be attached to his natural parents, but when he was only two, Charles lost his parents to England; James left Scotland in April to take the throne of England after Elizabeth I died in March 1603, and was followed a month later by Anne, with her eldest children, Henry and Elizabeth. With astonishing insensitivity, or perhaps with a desire to begin Charles’s princely training, the royal couple also moved him to a new household, that of Alexander Seton, Lord Fyvie, who had nine surviving daughters and a son.

Installed in this overflowing family, Charles does not seem to have flourished. Reports sent on him spoke of his longing to be with his parents. There was another problem, too, one that would overshadow Charles’s relations with his parents still further. Fyvie sent bullish reports on Charles to the court, but read carefully they contained alarming news. In April 1604 – when Charles was three – Fyvie said that Charles was ‘in good health, courage and lofty mind’ but added that he was ‘weak in body’. Most ominously of all, he confided that Charles was ‘beginning to speak some words’. If Charles was really only beginning to speak at the age of three, it points to severe disability. Fyvie added ‘he is far better of his mind and tongue than of his body and feet’. This report alarmed Charles’s parents, for James sent Dr Henry Atkins to examine the prince. Arriving on the night of 12 May 1604, he reported to the king that he had found the young duke ‘walking with an ancient gentlewoman his nurse in the great chamber … although he walked not alone but sustained and led by that gentlewoman’s hand’. Atkins said that Charles evaded an examination by ‘calling for music to one of his servants … desiring several kinds of measures … and would imitate the instrument with the sound of the true tune with his high tender voice’. But the next day he was duly examined, and Atkins reported that he was in reasonable condition but for the joint problems, ‘the weakness of his legs’, diarrhoea said to be caused by teething, and a desire to drink often. Tellingly, Atkins couldn’t examine Charles’s teeth because ‘his Highness would not permit any to feel his gums’. Despite his fairly reassuring report to the king and queen, Atkins wrote more frankly to Secretary of State Robert Cecil that ‘at my coming the duke was far out of order’. To the king he announced that the duke would begin a journey south under his supervision. Charles had difficulty standing and walking because ‘he was so weak in his joints and especially ankles, insomuch as many feared they were out of joint’ and of the ‘joints of his knees, hips and ankles being great and loose are not yet closed and knit together as happeneth to many in their tender years which afterwards when years hath confirmed them proves very strong and able persons’.

The lonely little boy had rickets. This childhood illness was a dominant factor in the development of his personality. The victims of rickets suffer low height and weight, and painful decayed teeth. The spine and breastbone are affected, long bones are shortened and deformed, the ligaments are loose, and fractures are common. Rickets gives bow legs and a pigeon chest, visible deformities. Rickets may also have caused lowered resistance to other diseases, including measles, diarrhoea and whooping cough. But perhaps most significantly, modern studies of rickets suggest that it affects the personality, making for apathy and irritability, and this was noted in Charles’s case. His guardian wrote to James, saying that ‘the great weakness of his body, after so long and heavy sickness, is much supplied by the might and strength of his spirit and mind’ – which might be a diplomatic way of calling the small duke a headstrong child. A toddler in pain is a difficult toddler.

Unfortunately, Charles was not especially lucky in his parents’ response to his illness. If we compare it with that of Buckinghamshire gentleman Ralph Verney, we can see that the royal family were not only careless but callous. Mary Verney wrote of her son: ‘for Jack his legs are most miserable, crooked as ever I saw any child’s, and yet thank God he goes very strongly, and is very straight in his body as any child can bee; and is a very fine child in all but his legs’ … And she too blamed diet. ‘Truly I think it would be much finer if we had him in ordering, for they let him eat anything he has a mind to, and he keeps a very ill diet.’ Ralph Verney’s response was anxious and sympathetic: ‘truly the crookedness of his legs grieves my very heart, ask some advice about it at London, but do not tamper with him’. What he meant by this is dismally clear. When Charles arrived in London on the heels of Atkins’s report, fresh stories of his illness flew about, and those eager to act as guardians to him melted away. ‘There were many great ladies suitors for the keeping of the duke; but when they did see how weak a child he was, and not likely to live, their hearts were down, and none of them was desirous to take charge of him.’ Kind Richard Carey took Charles on, though he reported that ‘he was not able to go, nor scant stand alone, he was so weak in his joints, and especially his ankles, insomuch as many feared they were out of joint’. Carey’s first move was to surround Charles with his own servants; another change of personnel for the little boy. Even more disturbing is his account of his wife’s struggles with James I’s plans, as Richard reported:

Many a battle my wife had with the King, but she still prevailed. The King was desirous that the string under his tongue should be cut, for he was so long beginning to speak as he [the king] thought he would never have spoke. Then he [the king] would have him put in iron boots, to strengthen his sinews and joints, but my wife protested so much against them both, as she got the victory, and the King was fain to yield.

These cruel treatments, contested by Charles’s new foster-mother, may have had their origins in James’s own separation from his mother and his own lack of security. Mary Queen of Scots fled to England without James before his first birthday, leaving him with foster-parents. James himself did not walk until he was about five, and like his son he too had childhood rickets. Also like his son, he compensated for his difficulty in walking by taking up riding and then hunting with especial vigour. When James was around four, he was moved from the woman’s world of the nursery to the schoolroom; this was three years earlier than normal, and it reflected his status as king, but it was hard on him. He loved books, but his tutor George Buchanan was a hard man who hated Catholics, and Mary Queen of Scots most of all. James grew up with his ears ringing with stories of his mother’s wickedness. Buchanan thought she was a witch, a whore and a murderer. On one occasion, he beat the king severely. James may also have been alarmed at seeing his own disabilities reflected in his son. James had very noticeable physical problems: his tongue was too large for his mouth, which made him dribble, and he had only imperfect control over bodily functions and a profound dislike of bathing. When thwarted, he would fling himself furiously about, sobbing or screaming, as his son did.

Historians have tended to portray Charles’s rickets as shortlived, but this may betray the influence of Stuart propaganda. Richard Carey was afterwards keen to tell the world that he had performed a miracle cure. ‘Beyond all men’s expectations so blessed the duke with health and strength under my wife’s charge, as he grew better and better every day.’ Royal astrologer William Lilly said Charles overcame his physical weakness by running and riding and hunting, and that his success made him stubborn in endeavour. Similarly, Philip Warwick reported that ‘though born weakly yet came [he] through temperance and exercise to have as firm and strong a body as that of most persons I ever knew’. And all his life he walked breathlessly fast. But on 6 January 1605, when Charles was created Duke of York, all his robes and other vestments had to be carried by an attendant gentleman, and Charles himself was held in the arms of the Lord High Admiral, the Earl of Nottingham. On 15 September 1608 he was too weak to go to a christening, and it was said that he was ‘exceedingly feeble in his lower parts, his legs growing not erect but repandous [crooked] and embowed, whereas he was unapt for exercises of activity’. As late as 1610 his movements were clumsy, and his part in a masque had to be specially contrived to hide his legs – a circle of children surrounded him as he danced. Finally, Charles’s father and his son, the future Charles II, were both tall, but Charles remained small, further evidence of the severity of his rickets. His brittle bones impeded his growth severely, so that he only reached 5’ 4”, or in other accounts 4’ 11”. (5’ 4” is based on a surviving suit of armour.) The Court portrait painter, Van Dyck, used devices such as a flight of steps, the presence of a dwarf, and a raised throne to make Charles look bigger. In the case of the mounted figure of Charles created by Hubert le Sueur the sculptor was explicitly told to make the figure six feet in height. By contrast, both his older siblings Henry and Elizabeth were relatively tall – Henry was 5’ 8” at the age of seventeen – and also healthy.

The disparity led to rivalry, and James made matters worse by telling Henry that he would leave the crown to Charles if Henry did not work harder. This sort of cruelty, together with the characteristically violent and competitive early modern boys’ culture, led Henry to bully his smaller, weaker, less capable brother, and to taunt him, explicitly, about his disability. One day, as the two were waiting with a group of bishops and courtiers for the king to appear, Henry snatched the Archbishop of Canterbury’s hat and put it on Charles, saying that when he was king he would make Charles primate, since he was swot and toady enough for the job and the long robes would hide his ugly legs. Charles had to be dragged away, screaming with rage. Like many a victim of bullying, Charles tried to win his brother over by extreme submissiveness: ‘Sweet, sweet brother,’ he wrote, desperately, when he was nine, ‘I will give everything I have to you, both horses, and my books, and my pieces [guns], and my crossbow, or anything you would have. Good brother love me … ’ The pathos of this letter can scarcely be exaggerated. In late 1612, however, Henry was dead, aged eighteen. He died of typhoid fever after a hard game of tennis. His last request was for his sister Elizabeth to visit his bedside; there was no mention of his brother. Diarist and MP Simonds D’Ewes recorded that ‘Charles duke of York was so young and sickly as the thought of their enjoying him [as king] did nothing at all to alienate or mollify the people’s mourning’.

King James wrote textbooks to edify his children, but was less enthusiastic about spending time with them. He preferred his male companions, especially his lover and favourite George Villiers Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham, beautiful as a hunting leopard, supernaturally brilliant at divining the psychic needs of the powerful and supplying them, became after Henry’s death the elder brother Charles had always wanted, one who loved and accepted him. Like all brothers, Charles and Buckingham fought for mastery, and Charles usually lost. Charles bet Buckingham a banquet on a game of tennis – he lost – and another on which of two footmen could run fastest – he lost again. The disastrous Spanish marriage negotiations of 1623 were a similar game, designed to show the boys in a romantic, daredevil light. Fancying himself in love with the Spanish Infanta, whom he had never seen, Charles impetuously decided to sweep her off her feet. Adopting a disguise was part of the fun; all his life he loved theatricality. In this case he donned a false beard and a false name, John Smith, and set out, accompanied by a similarly attired Buckingham, who was travelling as ‘Tom Smith’. The disguises were so poor that they were arrested as suspicious characters in Canterbury. The boys bought better beards over the Channel, and visited the court of Louis XIII; they rustled some mountain goats in the Pyrenees, and in March they walked into the British embassy in Madrid and declared that they were taking control of the marriage negotiations. To show his love, Charles climbed over the wall of the garden where the Infanta liked to walk. As he leapt down, the Infanta fled, screaming for her chaperone, and Charles had to be let out by a side door. Charles also made many concessions to the Spanish in the negotiations. But when Philip began to insist that Elizabeth’s eldest son would need to marry a Hapsburg before Spain would help the Palatinate, Charles balked. This gave Philip the excuse to pack off his guests by pretending that Charles’s threat to return home to his ageing father was a farewell. The boys slunk home. Charles may have been miserable and humiliated, but London was overjoyed – the people had not warmed to the idea of a queen from Spain.

And yet Charles’s lifelong quest for the love he lost as a child did evoke a response in some of those closest to him, most of all in his future wife, who had herself been a lonely little princess. When Buckingham was removed by an assassin in late August 1628, Charles and his till-then neglected bride fell abruptly but permanently in love, and what had been a miserable forced marriage became blissful domesticity. Gradually, encircled by his wife’s warm regard, Charles built up a retinue of trusted retainers who could help him to feel safe, conceal his deformities, and support him. He made an idyll and then resisted anything that came to disturb it. The loyalty Charles commanded was personal and protective. All his life, Charles would be loved by those who saw him every day, hated only by those who saw him from a distance. James Harrington, one of those appointed by Parliament to attend on the king during his captivity, ‘passionately loved his Majesty, and I have oftentimes heard him speak of King Charles I with the greatest zeal and passion imaginable, and that his death gave him so great a grief that he contracted a disease by it; that never anything did go so neer to him’. Sir Philip Warwick wrote that when he thought of dying what cheered him up was the thought that he would meet King Charles again. Warwick also praised the dignity of his deportment, a contrast with his father’s uncontrolled excitability: ‘he would not let fall his dignity, no not to the Greatest Foreigners that came to visit him and his court’. Clarendon was personally devoted to the king whose decisions he criticized. The Duke of Ormonde, passed over for promotion by Charles, lost his son in 1680, but wrote to a wellwisher that ‘my loss, indeed, sits heavily on me, and nothing else in the world could affect me so much, but since I could bear the death of my great and good master King Charles the First I can bear anything else’.

Historians have long agreed that ‘the man Charles Stuart’ was one of the principal causes of the war. The king’s small and painful body was a picture in miniature of the divisions that were also to rive his people. Charles’s love of codes and disguises and his longing to make the monarchy independent of any hurtful criticism proceeded from the bullied child he was. He wanted to put the past behind him, but that longing itself chained him to it. His odd and fatal mixture of indecision and stubbornness is typical of a victim of bullying. All his life, Charles needed love. He set his people test after test, and they could not love him enough to heal the wounds inflicted in the past. By 1639, Charles was keeping the peace by deafening himself to any signs of conflict. His need for tranquillity had become one cause of the coming war.

Oliver Cromwell was born on 25 April 1599, in the High Street of Huntingdon. He was the last of a long family; he had six sisters, and three siblings who died in infancy. Like Charles I, he had an older brother named Henry, four years older than Oliver, who died before 1617; another boy, named Robert, died in 1609, shortly after his birth. Cromwell had an unusually close, tender and long-term relationship with his mother for whom he soon became the main patriarch and protector. For most male children in Tudor and Stuart England, the early years were split in two by the onset of formal schooling or training around the age of seven. Before that, they were at home under the care of mothers and servants. Schooling represented a violent repudiation of infancy, and with it the world of the mother; it also symbolized a tussle with the father’s authority. It was a chance for boys to be different from their fathers, to do something their fathers had never done, to climb an inch or two further up the social ladder than their fathers had. And their fathers were not always overjoyed about it.

The grammars were a wide crack in the invincible hierarchy of the class system in more respects than this. The master was compared to an ‘absolute monarch’, ‘a little despotic emperor’. It may be that many grammar schools bred suspicion of such absolutism. What reinforced these feelings of misgiving and dislike were the beatings; it is hard for us to imagine what these were like, or to understand the fear and horror they generated. Both John Aubrey and Samuel Hartlib still dreamed of school beatings twenty years after leaving. Bulstrode Whitelocke, who hated them, understood them as ‘a severe discipline’, that would lead boys to ‘a greater courage and constancy’. The experience of this schooling was shared by all the men who became Charles’s principal foes, though it was also common enough among Royalists. Oliver Cromwell attended the free school just down the road from his home, which offered a grammar-style education, preparing him for entry to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Many not very reliable and Royalist accounts of Cromwell’s childhood describe him as distinctly rowdy in late boyhood and early adolescence; taking hearty exercise, behaving with noticeable boisterousness, scrumping apples and stealing pigeons, getting into fights … All this may well be untrue, but the stories convey the perception that Cromwell was energetic and dynamic, a force of nature difficult to control.

Cromwell described himself as ‘by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity’. Actually, even this simple statement was defensive rather than descriptive. He was the eldest surviving son of the younger son of a knight. Cromwell’s grandfather lived the life of a gentleman in a brand-new manor house, built on the site of a former nunnery, and with a second hunting house in the fen, on the site of a former abbey. Oliver’s father Robert could manage only a town house in Huntingdon, and a modest income of £300 a year, nothing like the £2000 a year that his father enjoyed. His grander relatives had a mansion at Hinchinbrooke, built from the ruins of three abbeys, a nunnery and two priories. The manor was splendid enough to entertain James I. Oliver could only be a poor relation of all this substance. Oliver was so badly off that he paid tax in bonis, on the value of his moveable goods, and even that was only four pounds a year, suggesting an income of a hundred pounds a year or less. When he moved to St Ives in 1631, essentially he was there as a yeoman, not a gentleman; he had slipped from the gentry to the rank of the middling sort. His circumstances improved somewhat in 1636, but he nevertheless continued to lead a life more like that of those just below the gentry. He lived in a town, not a manor, he worked for his living. He had only a few household servants, no tenants or dependants. When he declared his enthusiasm for the ‘russet-coated captain that knows what he is fighting for’, he was not condescending; he was describing the men among whom he had spent his life as an equal, the men of his own class – he was describing himself. And when as Protector he likened himself to a good constable rather than to a justice, he was expressing the same class allegiance.

Eight of Cromwell’s children survived infancy, but his eldest son Robert suffered an accident at school in Felsted in May 1639 and was buried there, at seventeen. Recalling this twenty years later, Cromwell recalled that ‘when my eldest son died, [it] went as a dagger to my heart’. It was this sympathy with parents who had lost a child which led Cromwell to write so warmly to the bereaved during the war. And yet Cromwell’s son’s death draws our attention to the troubled aspects of his childhood and youth. Because early modern men were supposed to see themselves as their fathers over again, for a son to be truly adult, he had to somehow push his father aside in order to take his place. The death of a father or of a son could induce an identity crisis. This sounds abstruse, but it is exactly the kind of question encouraged by the work of Thomas Beard, Cromwell’s schoolmaster, whose book The Theater of Gods Judgements proposed that reprobates are punished for their sins in this life as well as the next. Struck down by bolts of lightning on their way home from church, the sinful begin their sojourn in hell and act as an example to the living.

Cromwell’s mother Elizabeth Steward was thirty-four when Oliver was born. Before she married Cromwell’s father, she had been the wife of John Lynne of Bassingbourn, and had a daughter called Katherine who died as a baby. From the Lynnes she inherited the brewing-house whose association with Cromwell later writers found so rib-ticklingly funny. Her father was a solid gentleman-farmer who farmed the cathedral lands of Ely. Clarendon called her ‘a decent woman’ and an ambassador praised her as ‘a woman of ripe wisdom and great prudence’. Cromwell, as the only surviving son, was forced to abandon his Cambridge college and return to the household on his father’s death. But he returned not as a child, to be under his mother’s governance, but as head of that household, effectively usurping his father’s place. Elizabeth Steward Cromwell formally combined her household with her son’s in the late 1630s, along with his youngest sister Robina. She never left him again, and remained such a key part of his circle that everyone who knew him knew her too. During the war, when Cromwell was desperate for money and reinforcements, his mother wrote, crossly, to a cousin: ‘I wish there might be care to spare some monies for my son, who I fear hath been too long and much neglected.’ When he moved from his London lodgings to Whitehall as Protector, she went with him. Elizabeth Cromwell Senior did not enjoy the palace; its splendours did not impress her. She was more concerned about her son; musket fire made her tremble for him, lest it be an assassin’s bullet. She did not die until she had seen her son become Lord Protector. Elizabeth Cromwell was eighty-nine at her death late in 1654. Her health had been failing for some time, and Cromwell put off a visit to Richard Mayor: ‘truly’, he wrote, ‘my mother is in such a condition of illness that I could not leave her’. Thurloe recorded her last blessing to her son: ‘The Lord cause his face to shine upon you and comfort you in all your adversities, and enable you to do great things for the glory of your most high God.’ She was given a funeral at Westminster Abbey, illuminated by hundreds of flickering torches.

A mix of frustrated social ambition and a longing for absolution, together with the strain of being thrust early into the role of family carer and provider, may explain the spiritual crisis which overtook Cromwell towards the end of the 1620s. Although such crises were commonplace, this was because stories of reprobation and salvation were among those most available to people trying to negotiate complex feelings. Cromwell’s emerged out of a period of black depression. Sir Theodore Mayerne, the prominent London physician, treated Cromwell for valde melancholicus at the time of the 1628/9 Parliament. Melancholy and mopishness were common accompaniments to a religious conversion. Cromwell’s doctor Dr Simcotts of Huntingdon said that he had often been called out to Cromwell because he believed himself to be dying. Simcotts also said that he was ‘a most splenetic man and hypochondriacal’. This may be what contemporaries classed as spoiling, too. Of his conversion, Cromwell himself wrote: ‘You know what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated the light. I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true: I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me. Oh the riches of his mercy! Praise Him for me, pray for me, that he who hath begun a good work would perfect it to the day of Christ.’

When Royalists talk about Cromwell’s wildness ‘which afterwards he seemed sensible of and sorrowful for’, and the Puritan Richard Baxter says he was ‘prodigal’, this implies that Cromwell may have been fond of telling his life story as the story of the Lord’s prodigal, a sinner in youth, converted in a sudden crisis to godliness and a repudiation of his former life. All godly people thought of themselves as repentant sinners. Being godly did not mean being gloomy and sad; Cromwell liked food, music and dancing, but not as forms of religious practice. His oft-repeated conversion should not lead us to imagine that Cromwell’s sins were especially great, but it does suggest that he saw himself as distinct from the godly prior to his conversion. Bishop Burnet said Cromwell led a very strict life for about eight years before the war; being a Scot, he probably meant the Bishops’ Wars, which would put Cromwell’s conversion in 1631 or thereabouts. What godly people like Cromwell wanted was to complete the work of Reformation, which meant both reforming the liturgy and Church calendar and reforming behaviour.

It was Charles, who had had the more difficult and painful childhood, who was the first to think differently about the state. He wanted a new kind of kingdom. But this wasn’t a long-held dream; it was an angry response to what he felt as intolerable bullying. When the 1628/9 Parliament tried to assert its own sovereignty over his, when it began making demands on him rather than acting according to his direction, when it failed him – as he saw it – in a manner that compromised his honour in his dealings with his enemies abroad, then – and only then – Charles recalled that the Bourbons were phasing out their ancient assembly, that the Spanish had never needed one. Why go on summoning Parliament, that dated institution? The events that were ultimately to lead to the Civil War were set in motion by a royal tantrum.

The idea of ‘personal rule’ did not occur to Charles all at once. Indeed, in his proclamation dissolving what turned out to be his last Parliament, he affirmed his enthusiasm for the institution. But he resolved to do without it, and do without it he did, in an ad hoc and improvisational manner. The process was scarcely trouble-free, and the biggest problem was supply. From the king’s point of view, Parliament existed to generate revenue. Without it, the king could only use his prerogative, as it was called. It meant he could raise money through reviving some archaic taxes – more of this in a moment – and enforce policy mainly through the courts – the Star Chamber, and the High Court. The Star Chamber was a kind of distillation of the Privy Council, which met in the room so named at the Palace of Westminster; it became a court that focused its gaze on political and public order cases, which made it a natural political instrument of repression.

Even before Charles began trying to rule without Parliament, he faced a mountain of debt generated by successive and entirely unsuccessful wars with France. But the astounding thing was that he cleared it without coming anywhere near alienating the vast majority of his subjects. By 1635, after six years of peace, royal finances were in reasonable shape. The economy had improved, and so the king was able to earn extra money from customs. Charles also dug deeply into his nobles’ purses, finding tiny revenue-raisers like fining gentlemen who could have become knights for failing to do so at his coronation. These were petty, but no one much minded about them.

Historians have tended to see Charles’s other big moneyspinner as significantly more controversial. This was the so-called Ship Money. Ship Money was a hangover from the days when the English navy was a dignified name for a bunch of privateers. The king would conscript ships that were owned by nobles or gentlemen for the duration of a particular campaign, and then give them back, along with any plunder or any valuable prisoners, at the end of the campaign in question. Because of revolutions in ship design, such privately-owned ships no longer made for a powerful navy by the 1630s, so Charles began to fear that the French and Dutch would gain control of the English Channel and the North Sea. He could have done the orthodox thing, called Parliament to pass legislation authorizing a tax to finance the navy. Instead, he twisted the medieval system into a means of financing a standing, professional fleet.

Popular notions of the Civil War give this tax much prominence, as the tyrannical extraction of monies without ‘representation’, as the American revolutionaries were to put it nearly one hundred and fifty years later. When the payments were first demanded, the nation grumbled a bit – taxes are never popular – but it paid up. Much of the discontent was about the unevenness of methods of assessment; in some areas, quite different standards were used to assess near neighbours, and this was just as popular as one might expect. But until 1638 returns hovered around the 90% mark. As time went on the mutterings did increase in volume, as it dawned on people that this occasional levy had somehow become a permanent seasonal item, coming round as regularly as Christmas. But for most of the 1630s, the nation grumbled but it paid the tax.

A Buckinghamshire gentleman called John Hampden sought to change this state of discontent into something more substantial. He was the son of an outstandingly godly man, whose will had roundly announced, ‘I know my soul to be sanctified.’ This holy, inspirational figure died when John was only a toddler, and his mother harboured political ambitions for him. The family was not a great one, but was solidly prosperous. John Hampden was soon drawn into a political circle that became immensely powerful in its criticism of Charles’s policies. He had been very active in the 1628 Parliament, collaborating with John Pym, and in the key debate of 5 June 1628, he made a speech that a contemporary summarized as follows:

Here is [firstly], an innovation of religion suspected; is it not high time to take it to heart and acquaint his Majesty? Secondly, alteration of government; can you forbear when it goes no less than the subversion of the whole state? Thirdly, hemmed in with enemies; is it now a time to be silent, and not to show to his Majesty that a man that has so much power uses none of it to help us? If he be no papist, papists are friends and kindred to him.

This speech may have been the reason that the king chose to try Hampden of all the Ship Money refusers, rather than the godly peer Lord Saye and Sele, who had also been noisily refusing to pay in the hope of bringing matters to a head. Hampden was determined to secure a ruling that called the king’s taxation into question. He deliberately failed to pay just one pound of what he owed, meekly anteing up otherwise. The judges treated Hampden’s case with a procedure reserved for the most significant disputes. Instead of being heard in the Court of Exchequer, normally responsible for collecting revenues, it was referred to the Court of Exchequer Chamber, a special body dating from 1585, in which all twelve judges in England took part, and the Court of Exchequer was to follow the advice it received from a simple majority of the twelve. The trial began in November 1637. On Hampden’s side the case was argued by a member of the group critical of the king, the Earl of Bedford’s client Oliver St John. St John was an obscure young lawyer who was to make his name out of the case, just as Hampden did. He argued not that the king had no power to command his subjects to provide a ship, but that he could only exercise this power in an emergency, such as the invasion of the realm. Because no such emergency existed at the time the king called for the money, he was required to call Parliament to levy it as a tax; hence Ship Money was an unparliamentary tax. The king’s solicitor and representative Sir Edward Littleton replied for the Crown, arguing that the circumstances had not permitted the time-consuming summoning of Parliament. Hampden’s second lawyer, Robert Holborne, replied, and in his submission the fundamental issue was carefully stated: ‘by the fundamental laws of England, the king cannot, out of parliament, charge the subject – no, not for the common good unless in special cases’, even if he thought the danger was imminent. The subject’s right to his property occluded the king’s right to decide that danger was immediate. (Unfortunately, Holborne’s delivery was marred by some kind of speech impediment.) The fat was in the fire, and the king’s representative Anthony Bankes began talking of principles instead of narrow micromanaging. He made a ringing and poetic defence of the king as ‘the first mover among these orbs of ours … the soul of this body, whose proper act is to command’. No one could criticize the king’s exercise of his powers because there was no valid place or position from which to do it.

When the judges finally considered their verdict, they had a complex body of issues to address. Four of them made strong claims for the prerogative, following the lead given by Bankes. Two took a firm stand against any such claims, and one of them – Croke – argued flatly that only Parliament could allow the king to charge a subject. But the others stuck doggedly to the legal technicalities and tried to close their eyes to the wider issues, debating whether the king could act alone if he merely apprehended national danger, and whether he had used due means. This last point was really about whether Ship Money was a tax or a form of military service; none of the judges was very sure what to decide, but eventually two key judges said that since Hampden was being tried for unpaid debt then he could not be seen as required to provide a service, and they ruled against the king. This led them to decide for Hampden. The eventual result was that the king won, but with a narrow majority; because of divisions among the judges, bystanders could not even agree on what, exactly, the majority was, but many thought it just seven over five. The nation had been following the case so passionately that curious bystanders couldn’t get into the court even by rising at dawn. The case turned Hampden into a hero; it might have been better for Charles if he had lost, since winning made him seem more of a tyrant. From then on, more people began to refuse to pay Ship Money.

But the hearing did nothing directly to unseat Charles. It gave a brief voice to resentment, but resentment is not revolution. The main result was that for the sheriffs and constables forced to collect trifling sums such as a penny from the poorest men, life became nearly unbearable. Administrative nuisances, however, did not threaten the regime in and of themselves. There was no chance of personal rule being truly disturbed by tax protests. The sense of grievance was confined to a small minority; but it was an articulate minority with good connections, increasingly an organized minority, drawn from exactly the class the House of Commons existed to represent. It was becoming obvious that if Charles ever did call Parliament, he could expect trouble from it.

Personal rule was not, however, sunk solely by finance and taxes, but by the fact that the king made another, larger group of enemies. Or rather, this second group of enemies were made for him by his Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud and his queen, Henrietta Maria. Again, these enemies probably never amounted to a majority of the nation. But they were exceptionally motivated, as religious minorities are apt to be, articulate, superb at using the printing press to spread their ideas, and they increasingly overlapped with the first group, the erstwhile MPs. They were godly Protestants who feared popery; they ranged from sectarians who wanted complete reform to Presbyterians who would have no bishops, to conservatives who supported the Anglican Church of Elizabethan England.

If there was simmering discontent in the 1630s, it was not so much with Ship Money as with Archbishop Laud, eagerly bringing ceremonial back to the Church of England in the form of altar-rails and reverence for the Eucharist, and as eagerly denouncing and suppressing ‘Puritans’, or the godly, as they called themselves. Worst of all, Laud was dismantling the central doctrine of Calvinism, predestination. In Calvinist predestination, every person is already bound for heaven or hell. Human beings are so sinful that they can only understand God’s message and achieve faith if he gives them grace to do so. This happens suddenly if it happens at all. God chooses who will be saved and who damned, regardless of merit or desert. God emerges as not unlike a capricious monarch, electing some to bliss, dropping others into woe. But Laud and his followers were Arminians (though Laud tried to stay neutral in public), and this meant they believed that faith grew slowly together with a person’s chosen and willed virtue.

So from a godly point of view, the Church of England was being run by an emissary of hell, and the king was doing nothing to stop him. People began to wonder if Charles’s personal rule risked running the kingdom into the arms of Rome. In the Stuart era, religion led, and political questions followed. The result was to stir up constant questions about what might previously be taken for granted.

Whatever the godly thought, Laud saw himself as a stout Protestant, doughtily fighting the encroachments of Rome and the godly alike. For him, the Church of England was a shambles. He was especially upset by Old St Paul’s in London, the nave of which had become a place to see and be seen, to sleep rough, or to do a little business. There were adverts plastered on the walls and pillars. The noise was intense and irreverent: ‘like that of bees, a strange humming or buzz mixed’, thought the horrified prelate. For Laud, the church should be hallowed, special. It wasn’t that he believed in the Real Presence; he just thought, not too eccentrically, that churches ought to be different from markets, and that it wouldn’t hurt to bring beauty and order to them.

But it did hurt. The Church of England, then as now, was an awkward coalition of quite diverse groups. With much bickering, its members had come to tolerate the white walls and bare wood of the Elizabethan church settlement, the spareness of its services. Some wanted still more reform – was not a church itself a kind of icon? – but were willing for it to take place gradually, through local effort. Some still enjoyed church ales – a kind of beery parish sale-of-work – and maypoles, and defended them robustly. But in most places everyone felt that though far from perfect the church did offer something to them.

Laud’s reforms destroyed everyone’s optimism. The moderate middle were comfortable with a reduced number of icons, but not happy to see them going up instead of coming down. As for the very godly, they viewed Laud’s alterations with utter horror. William Prynne wrote furiously of those ‘who now erect crucifixes and images in our churches, contrary to our articles, injunctions, homilies’. And these fears and horrors were not baseless. Bristol alone spent almost £200 on its high cross, which now included statues of James I and Charles I. The link between images of the Stuart kings and icons was ultimately to prove very unfortunate, but also indissoluble. New stained-glass windows were put in, especially in Oxford and Cambridge colleges and at Durham and Lambeth. And there was a new service order. Ministers had to wear full clerical robes; they had to bow at the name of Jesus, use the cross to baptize and recite the full Book of Common Prayer service with no omissions and additions.

And while personal rule might be forgotten for months on end, Laud’s innovations were on constant display in every church. Laud had said, for example, that the altar ‘is the greatest place of God’s residence on earth’: ‘yea, ‘tis greater than the pulpit, for there ‘tis hoc est corpus meum, this is my body. But in the pulpit ‘tis at most but Hoc est verbum meum, This is my word.’ For a godly churchwarden, this was a direct attack – on his authority, and on that of God Himself. To keep the altar sacred, the churchwarden was supposed to erect railings, which were to mark the space around the altar as sacred, and hence keep out of it everyone from the churchwarden keen to use it as a table for his account books to schoolboys using it as a place to store hats and satchels. Boys were apparently especially inclined to take a quiet nap under it at sermon time, and dogs sometimes nipped in and took the consecrated bread, to Laud’s very particular horror; a woman in Cheshire was unpopular because she held her dancing baby over the table and afterwards someone spotted a lot of water on the table itself. Laud concluded sensibly that it might have been worse. But the new arrangement also kept the congregation away from the sacred, implying that it was not for the likes of them. In Suffolk people complained that the new rails and table meant that ‘not half of the people can see or hear the ministration’.

This is one of the moments where the interlacing of politics and religion becomes obvious: the rails and table, harmless though they sound, were experienced as creating an entirely artificial hierarchy, reserving the priest as sacred and the altar as a sacred space where he presided (not unlike the inner rooms at court). Because that new church hierarchy seemed so specious, other hierarchies began to seem equally open to question.

Laud and his altar-rails were in part an attempt to prevent an upper-class drift to Rome. Fear of this had begun when Charles married Henrietta Maria, and was realized when the queen’s Jesuit chaplains and courtiers managed a spectacular wave of conversions among the aristocracy. To grasp this dread and its power, we might begin on a day in July 1626, when the then-new queen made an unusual pilgrimage, as one of those who disliked her reported in horror:

Some say the queen and a group of her followers were strolling through the royal parks around St James’s palace, and happened to stop for prayer for the Catholics who had died on Tyburn Tree.

Others say the queen made it an almost official pilgrimage: barefoot, she walked while her confessor rode, as if to imitate the martyrs’ routes to the scaffold. At the gallows, she fell to her knees with a rosary in her hand.

Nay their [the priests’] insolences towards the queen were not to be endured; for, besides that these bawdy knaves would, by way of confession, interrogate her how often in a night the king had kissed her; and no longer ago than upon St James’s Day last those hypocritical dogs made the poor queen walk afoot (some say barefoot) from her house at St James’s to the gallows at Tyburn, thereby to honour the saint of the day in visiting that holy place where so many martyrs forsooth hath shed their blood in defence of the Catholic cause. Had they not also made her to dabble in the dirt, in a foul morning, from Somerset House to St James’s her Luciferian confessor riding alongside her in his coach? Yea, they have made her to go barefoot, to spin, to cut her meat out of dishes, to wait at the table, to serve her servants, with many other ridiculous and absurd penances; and if they dare thus insult over the daughter, sister, and wife of so great kings, what slavery would they not make us, the people, to undergo?

For this reporter, not only was Henrietta’s pilgrimage an outrage to Christendom, it was also an affront to royal dignity. What was the background to this extraordinary event, unprecedented – and for that matter, unrepeated – in the annals of English monarchy? For Henrietta, what was being visited was a sacred site, a wailing wall, a place holy to her people because sanctified by their blood. Tyburn, with its Triple Tree, was not any old gallows; it was the place where men and women had died bravely for the Catholic faith.

Henrietta held to a belief for which material objects – people, places – were important. Catholicism was not something that happened in the head; it involved the vital and willing body in strenuous acts of faith to other bodies, beginning with Christ’s own bleeding body, and ending with those of the martyrs. Visiting Tyburn, she would have felt something of what we might feel visiting the site of Auschwitz – awe, pity, fear, and passionate indignation – and a little of the fear might still have felt pressing and personal, for the laws of England allowed people to be hanged for being Catholic, for doing no more and sometimes rather less than Henrietta’s marriage treaty allowed her to do. Only two years after the treaty was signed, two Catholics were hanged at Lancaster. Henrietta’s family were Catholic, as were her friends, and she was personally devout. Events like the hangings were utterly baffling for her, and hardly added to an already imperilled sense of security.

Catholics had been feared since the 1570 papal edict against Elizabeth I, but what aroused a new kind of anxiety was the perceived influence of Catholics at court. The powerful Duke of Buckingham’s wife and his mother had both converted to Catholicism in 1622. Catholic icons were still being imported into the country. One member of the 1621 Parliament reported that rosaries, crucifixes, relics, and ‘papistical pictures’ were flooding in, and that in Lancashire they were made and sold openly in the streets. In The Popish Royal Favourite, William Prynne claimed that Buckingham’s ‘Jesuited mother and sister’ influenced him and through him the kingdom. Henrietta’s marriage treaty guaranteed her the right to practise her own religion, and her household servants to do the same. This was by itself enough to terrify. But her behaviour made matters worse. Henrietta was strongly, passionately, vehemently Catholic. The English were inclined to read this as rather tactless. They hadn’t been unduly pleased by the previous queen Anne of Denmark’s Catholicism, but at least she had shown the good taste to keep it decently under wraps. Henrietta was a woman of real conviction, which meant she didn’t and couldn’t. She was also a girl in her late teens, not very experienced in politics or used to compromise. Half Bourbon, half Medici, she had not learnt much about giving way from her mother. She stoutly refused to attend her husband’s coronation, because it was a Church of England ceremony.

Henrietta’s fervour had much to do with fashion. To a godly critic of the queen, Catholicism was part of a deadly and poisoned past, but to the queen herself it seemed the future. Catholicism fitted with court fashions; the court loved ritual and drama, colour and the baroque. The Laudian idea of ‘the beauty of holiness’ was one that Catholicism could accept, even if Laud himself was eager to maintain boundaries. When the aestheticization of faith became the goal, England could only lope awkwardly behind Rubens’s Antwerp or Bellini’s Rome. Both Charles and Henrietta did not want to trail in last in the aesthetic revolutionary army; they wanted to march in the front ranks. Precisely because the godly were not keen on images, pagan or Christian, those vanguards were dominated by Catholics.

As well, Henrietta wanted to be Esther, freeing her people through her influence. She was called to save English Catholics from the savage prejudices of their fellow-countrymen. Henrietta had been asked by the pope himself to promote Catholicism in her new kingdom. She went about it with characteristic verve and taste.

The centrepiece of her campaign was the building of her hated chapel. She wanted to create a new kind of place of worship, employing the most avant-garde and brilliant architect, Inigo Jones. The foundation stone was laid on 14 September 1632, and the chapel opened 8 December 1635, the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. One French envoy claimed that it had taken a long time because Inigo Jones was a Puritan and did not want it done. However, like many a godly soul, Jones was not averse to commerce, and after he had been given some additional monies, the work was completed.

The old chapel, which had existed since Anne of Denmark’s day, had been unpopular enough. Apprentices talked of pulling it down in 1634. The new one became a symbol of all the terrors the queen’s very existence came to evoke. It was plain outside; inside it was exuberant, rich, fanciful. There were the gold and silver reliquaries. There were ciberia, chalices, embroidered stoles. There were paintings, statues, even a chapel garden, a tribute to the queen’s interest in all things that grew green. It was, observers thought, ‘quite masculine and unaffected’ on the outside. But inside it was splendid, with an elaborate altarpiece made up of a series of seven oval frames containing angels sitting on clouds. A delicate carved screen on fluted and gilded Doric columns marked the entrance to the queen’s closet. And the opening celebrations were more splendid still.

As George Garrard observed tartly, ‘the ceremonies lasted three days, massing, preaching and singing of litanies, and such a glorious scene built over their altar, the Glory of Heaven, Inigo Jones never presented a more curious piece in any of the masques at Whitehall; with this our English ignorant papists are mightily taken’. The king visited it three days after the opening, and told Father Gamache that he had never seen anything more beautiful or more ingeniously contrived. It had one feature which would strike some modern Catholics as surprising, and which horrified Protestant contemporaries. An eminent sculptor named François Dieussart ‘made a machine, which was admired even by the most ingenious persons, to exhibit the Holy Sacrament, and to give it a more majestic appearance’. The resulting spectacle deserves a full description, even though it is tiring; the ceremony itself must have been even slower:

It represented in oval a Paradise of glory, about forty feet in height. To accommodate it to the hearing in the chapel, a great arch was supported by two pillars towards the high altar, at the distance of about eight Roman palms from the two side walls of the chapel. The spaces between the pillar and walls served for passages to go from the sacristy to the altar … Over each side appeared a Prophet, with a text from his prophecy. Beneath the arch was placed outside the portable altar, ten palms in height … Behind the altar was seen a paraclete, raised above seven ranges of clouds, in which were figures of archangels, of cherubim, of seraphim, to the number of two hundred, some adoring the Holy Sacrament, others singing and playing on all sorts of musical instruments … all conceiving that, instead of the music, they heard the melody of the angels, singing and playing upon musical instruments … In the sixth and seventh circles were seen children with wings … like so many little angels issuing from the clouds … In the eighth and ninth circles appeared cherubim and seraphim among the clouds, surrounded by luminous rays … All these things were covered with two curtains. It was the 10th of December, in the year 1636, that the queen came with all her court to hear Mass. As soon as she had taken the place prepared for her, the curtains being drawn back, all at once gave to view those wonders which excited admiration, joy, and adoration in her Majesty and in all the Catholics … Tears of joy seemed to trickle from the eyes of the queen.

This magic chapel was the height of fashion, but in essence not unique. Before the Reformation, such contraptions were not uncommon, and they were not, of course, intended to fool anyone, but to add a dramatic element to sacred ritual. In the 1433 York Domesday pageant, there was ‘a cloud and two pieces of rainbow of timber array for God’ and a heaven with red and blue clouds, an iron swing or frame pulled up with ropes ‘that God shall sit upon when he shall sit up to heaven’. At Lincoln Cathedral, a series of ropes and pulleys allowed the Paraclete to descend at Pentecost. The grail romances sometimes described similar contrivances. Reincarnating and refurbishing such sacred dramas, Henrietta had not meant to trick anyone, any more than she thought people would take her for a goddess when she appeared before Inigo Jones’s painted scenes, so lifelike in their three-dimensionality. What she did intend to convey was sophisticated knowledge, spectacle, and perhaps fun.

She liked jokes. She once managed to inveigle Charles into gambling with her for a golden crucifix. The king won, and was placed in the embarrassing position of having to decide whether to keep it or not. The Catholic Elizabeth Thorowgood thought that the king was sympathetic to Catholics because of his wife, but Mary Cole, also a Catholic, thought the opposite. She wondered how the queen could stand it.

She could stand it best by making and enlarging her own brilliant Catholic world, lit and sculpted with the very latest. And Henrietta wanted London to know it was there; in 1638, she even planned a procession to Somerset House to celebrate the birth of the dauphin. She made a new and very Catholic festive calendar for it; in 1637, there was a special Christmas Mass, attended by her flock of recent converts, and at Worcester House, in the Strand, there was a display of the Holy Sepulchre during the 1638 Easter season. But on Holy Thursday 1638, the Spanish ambassador shocked London by processing through the streets, crucifixes and torches held aloft, from the queen’s chapel to his own residence. There was a minor riot, and he was warned by the king.

So neither Henrietta nor her allies were content to hear Mass in a private fashion. It was not only that she felt she had nothing to be ashamed of. She was not even trying to revive Catholic England, that medieval past that had been violently rocked to sleep by Elizabeth and James and by her husband. She was trying something much more ambitious. She was attempting to bring modern Catholicism to England, and with it the eye-popping glories of the Catholic baroque that had fuelled the Counter-Reformation with their beauty and exoticism. She was hoping to seduce the English aristocracy with the brilliant modernity of a Church that was part of a rich aesthetic future. This was a far riskier project. It was also doomed to ultimate failure.

But not at first; initially it succeeded brilliantly. When the Earl of Bath attended Catholic Mass for the first time, he wondered aloud why Protestants were deprived of the many splendid aesthetic consolations offered by Rome. There were multiple conversions among Henrietta’s ladies, and Rome became quite the fashion, especially when Lady Newport converted, despite her husband’s godliness. The centre of much of the bustle was the household of Olive Porter, niece of Buckingham; she had been miraculously prevented from dying in childbirth in February 1638. ‘Our great women fall away every day’, wrote one of Strafford’s less sanguine correspondents. One of the horrors was that it was all so … feminine. But there were men involved too – social historian Lawrence Stone speculates that in 1641 something in the order of a fifth of the in peers were Roman Catholics. Historian Kevin Sharpe suggests that not only were there more Catholics in the 1630s – and more visible Catholics – but that overall numbers may have reached 300,000. The papal envoy George Conn reported happily that while in the past Catholics would only hear Mass in secret, now they flocked to the queen’s chapel and the embassy chapels. When one of the king’s favourites, Endymion Porter, abruptly silenced a French Huguenot for criticizing the papal agent, the court knew the prevailing wind was blowing from Rome.

Inigo Jones, of course, was the name that connected the chapel with other activities at Somerset House; as well as building the chapel, he was also constructing a theatre there from 1632, and the connection was not lost on men like William Prynne. The new theatre was to be the venue for a new kind of play, a French pastoral by Walter Montagu. It was called The Shepherd’s Paradise, it lasted for seven hours, and was in rehearsal for four months. It was about love. It was about faith. It was about four hours longer than the audience was used to.

For William Prynne, the problem with such work wasn’t that it was long and exceedingly moral and rather dull; anyone who thought Montagu’s playtexts on the long and wordy side had only to sample Prynne’s prose to find Montagu positively crisp and succinct. No, for Prynne the problem was that it was all far too terribly exciting, so that Tempe Restored, another drama of the same sort, was for him a ‘Devil’s mass’, a Catholic ritual. In this masque, there is a kind of confession, and a scene of absolution: Tempe is cleansed of the evil beasts of Circe.

Everyone at court took the hint, though not all were willing to act from expediency. They could see that the tides of fashion were flowing in the queen’s favour. Laud, who hated Rome because he was somewhat seduced by it himself, stridently issued a proclamation against those resorting to Mass, and the queen as belligerently responded by holding a special midnight Mass for all converts. Endorsements of the Virgin Mary, including Maria Triumphans, an anonymous work dedicated to defending the Virgin, linked Henrietta – Queen Mary – with Mary the Queen of Heaven: ‘She whom [the book] chiefly concerns, will anew become your patroness, and thus will Mary, the Queen of Heaven for a great queen upon earth, the mother of our Celestial king for the mother of our future terrene king. And finally, by your protecting and pleading for it, the immaculate virgin will (in a more full manner) become an advocate for you, her Advocate.’

This was not the wisest move the queen could have made. It arose from her name: the king liked to call her Maria, and the English did call her Queen Mary, a name that now sounds positively stuffy and cosy, but which at the time had a dangerous ring. England had had a Queen Mary, and a Catholic one at that. She had also narrowly missed another in Mary Queen of Scots. ‘Some kind of fatality, too,’ wrote Lucy Hutchinson waspishly, ‘the English imagined to be in her name of Marie.’ When Marian devotion was constantly evoked, so too were the queen’s dismal predecessors, Mary Tudor and Mary Queen of Scots. It did offer the queen an opportunity to knit together the Platonic cult of devotion to her, evoked by many sighing sonnets, and the cult of the Virgin Mary, so that she and the Virgin could be understood in the same way; as intercessors, whose special grace it was to plead with the king … of earth, of heaven. It made the tiny queen feel important. Being Mary’s votary involved (again) touches of theatre; one could be Mary’s bondslave, for instance, and wear a length of chain to show it.

But it was the sheer flagrant unapologetic visibility of Henrietta’s Catholicism and its proximity – in every sense – to the centre of monarchic power that really alarmed those who hated and feared popery. We might detect a trace of defiance in Henrietta’s openness, a trace, therefore, of fear. But to the godly, she seemed a shameless emissary of the Whore of Babylon. Her attempts to secure the religious toleration of Catholics seemed to many a sinister plot. When she and her helper Conn tried to facilitate Catholic marriages (then illegal) and to obstruct a plan to take into care the eldest sons of all Catholic families to bring them up as Protestants, she was thwarting the godly.

The fact that the godly were witnessing the happiest royal marriage in English history only made them more miserable, for what might the emissary of the Whore do with the king? Everyone knew how close they were, and for anyone who doubted it, there was the long row of children to prove it. Lucy Hutchinson thought, with many, that Charles was more in love with his wife than she with him, describing him as ‘enslaved in his affection towards her’. She was, thought Hutchinson, ‘a great wit and beauty’, which only made matters worse. Just as ordinary women could persuade their husbands to buy them pretty dresses while cosily tucked up between the sheets, thought one pamphlet, so the queen might incline the king to popery: note the connection between popery and feminine frills and furbelows. ‘Some say she is the man, and reigns’, said Mercurius Brittanicus more bluntly and much later (15–22 July 1644). When Parliamentarians said ‘evil counsellors’, it was often the queen they meant. Surely, they felt, it was only a matter of time before Henrietta managed to persuade the king to greater toleration – or worse … In fact, perhaps, even now … The dreads represented by the queen were knitted together and became suspicion of the king. At one London house in May 1640, a woman named Mrs Chickleworth told all she knew: ‘the queen’s grace, she said, went unto the communion table with the king, and the queen had asked your grace [Archbishop Laud] whether that she might not be of that religion which the King was – yes or no? Whereupon his Grace answered her Majesty “you are very well as you are, and I would wish to keep you there.” And now the King goes to Mass with the queen.’ The story spread, and was retold in the same London neighbourhood later that year, this time (optimistically?) by a Catholic. The king, she said, ‘was turned to be a Papist’.

Actually, this was unlikely to the point of impossibility. Charles was horrified by the rate of conversion the queen’s efforts had made possible, just as Laud was. In 1630 he ordered his subjects not to attend Mass at Denmark House, and he repeated the ban the following year. Laud was even less enthusiastic. In particular, he was dismayed by the ructions in the Falkland family. Lady Newport and Lady Hamilton converted. Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, had not only converted to Catholicism, but managed to persuade her daughters to it as well, and Laud was alarmed. It was partly because he so feared the new waves of conversion that Laud thought it sensible to readmit the beauty of holiness to the simplicity of the Church of England. The queen’s favourite, Walter Montagu, had also converted, and when he returned to England from France the only people who would receive him were the earls of Holland and Dorset. Charles ordered his subjects not to attend embassy Masses, and ticked off the Spanish ambassador for going so openly to Somerset House. But suspicion continued to rise, and as Laud tightened his grip on ordinary worship, people formed simple equations: altar-rails, popery, the queen, the king. What it amounted to was that England, elect Protestant nation, was believed to be in danger from its own sovereign.

Nevertheless, despite all these doubts and difficulties, the terrifying thing about Charles’s personal rule is not that it was bound to fail, but that it nearly succeeded. There were tensions, there were fears, even panics; there was also opposition. But these things were common, and had accompanied the Tudor reforms of the monarchy, too; indeed, Elizabeth I was threatened with far greater outbursts of popular dissent than Charles faced before 1642. The Civil War was not bound to occur; it would take a special, exceptional set of circumstances to make it happen.

Like all those keen to redefine their powers by extending them, Charles eventually stretched his arm too far, and only in this sense was he ‘doomed’ to failure. But had he managed to avoid this characteristic tendency to test the limits one more time, he might well have succeeded in transforming the English monarchy at any rate from a leadership role amidst a system of checks and balances to something that would look to history like the rule of the Bourbons in France. Such absolutism might have produced a comparable cultural renaissance. Certainly this would have suited Charles; without the restraints of the implied need for consultation, he might even have endorsed something like Catholic toleration, and equally probably a more determined attempt to confine and restrict Calvinist Protestantism. After all, these became the settled policies of both his sons when they eventually succeeded him.

And we should not assume too blithely that the sequel would therefore have been a more violent and more total repudiation of the monarchy at some later date. But it would also have had an immeasurable impact on the history of the world. If there had been no English Civil War, would there have been an American or a French Revolution? It may be that Charles could have redefined government in autocratic terms for the whole of Western civilization, almost indefinitely. The result might well have been a British Empire that looked a good deal more like the Roman Empire, with concomitant court corruption and rivalry. Charles’s good characteristics – taste, refinement, elegance, sophistication, complexity – would have flourished. But we would altogether have lost Cromwell’s virtues – common sense, pragmatism, simple hard work, honesty. We would be a different nation in a different world.

III Two Women: Anna Trapnel and Lucy Hay

The key to the kingdom in 1639 was London, and it was mushrooming from town to megalopolis. At the beginning of the sixteenth century it was as small and compact as a provincial town in modern Britain. Now it was growing rapidly, and its growth imposed structural change. The old ways of life in London had to alter to accommodate the city’s new immensity. It was possible to begin to think new thoughts – political, religious, social – in this new space.

The old city had been hugger-mugger since the days of the Romans, and all through the Middle Ages the rich lived cheek-by-jowl with the poor. An aristocrat could be deafened by the hammering of a blacksmith next door. This created a kind of unity. There was just one London, whoever you were. Now the capital was breaking down into many cities, as Jacobean and Caroline London began sorting itself into zones. Industry was slowly being exiled from the city, and was always excluded from the new, pretty residential areas for the better-off. Increasingly, the suburbs were the site of manufacturing industries – pewterers in Billingsgate and Bishopsgate, for instance. Immigrants were crucial to the development of new industries: London’s first fine glass came from the Broad Street Glasshouse, run by an emigrant from Venice originally, and later by Englishmen who learned his skills. This influx created further divisions; some industries were different culturally and linguistically from one another and from their customers.

The result of the new industrial suburbs and the new residential areas, taken together, was a city that was divided, at least to some extent, by social class: the rich lived mostly in the newly built West End, in beautiful regular buildings, while the poor lived around the walls of the old city and by the river, and – increasingly – in the expanding, wild, unregulated ‘East End’. It would be wrong to equate the West End with Royalism to come, and the emerging East with Parliamentarianism, or to see in that sharp class division the inevitable, bloody division of a nation. But it would also be wrong not to, because the East End did declare all but unilaterally for Parliament. A concomitant West End support for the king did not emerge, however, and the East Enders’ Parliamentarianism proceeded less from class hatred than from the much more subtle expression of social class in religious difference. Getting to know two women, Anna Trapnel from the East End, Lucy Hay from the West End, will help to show why matters were complicated.

We need to recall that both the West and East Ends were reacting against a sturdy, ageing centre; in the seventeenth century, the aristocracy could be as innovative as the workers, and as eager to extend its power. Between those two extremes, the old city of London still stood, walled against attack as it had been in the now-vanishing Middle Ages. The great gates in its walls could be closed against invaders: and had been, as recently as the reign of Elizabeth. It was a city preoccupied with two things: religion, and work. It was the home of churches, and of the trade guilds that ruled men’s lives and professions. There were so very many churches, hundreds of tiny intricate parish boundaries: All Hallows, Honey Lane, All Hallows the Great, All Hallows the Less, St Benet Sherehog, St Faith Under St Paul’s, a parish church actually inside the great cathedral, St Laurence Pountney, with its tall spire. And the guildhalls clustered round them, bakers and silversmiths and chandlers and shoemakers, civil and ecclesiastical authorities knitted together in the twisting, weaving, narrow streets. It was a city governed by hierarchy which constrained enterprise, but because it was a boom city enterprise still managed to flourish there.

One such enterprise was the West End itself, new-built estates run up by nobles. Far more of the West End that Lucy Hay knew is still visible; Anna Trapnel’s East End was all but erased by the giant hands of industry and the Blitz. There are some constants, though, most of all the street plan. If Anna Trapnel were blindfolded, her feet could still trace the way along the length of Poplar High Street to St Dunstan’s church, Stepney. And the church that was the centre of her world is still standing, though smudged and blurred by Victorian ‘restoration’.

Anna Trapnel was nobody in particular. She was one of many nobodies given a voice by the war. She came from the world of radical religious outlaws, the independent sects, and in it she became – briefly – a well-known figure. Then she faded, and we do not even know how or when she died. But she left writings behind which open something of her life to us. Anna Trapnel tells us that she was born in Poplar, Stepney, in the parish of St Dunstan’s. There is no record of her baptism, and this might mean that she wasn’t baptized as a baby, suggesting very strong godly views on her parents’ part. She also tells us that she was the daughter of William Trapnel, shipwright.

‘Shipwright’ is a vague term. It could mean anything from a master designer who could keep in his head complex and secret plans that allowed a ship to be buoyant and able to manoeuvre, to a man with an adze – but even a man with an adze was a man of remarkable skill. Shipwrights were among the most skilled workers of their day, trained to assemble large and heavy timbers into a vessel which would withstand the enormous stresses both of the sea and wind and of a heavy cargo, or guns. On their skill many lives depended. A master shipwright was also a manager, controlling huge teams of workers. And yet as one expert on the seventeenth-century navy remarks, a shipyard at that time must have been a pretty dangerous place. It was, necessarily, full of inflammable materials – wood, tar, cordage. As in later shipyards, heavy weights would have been slung on relatively rickety sheers, using vegetable cordage, tackles and capstans. And everywhere, fires: fires for steaming timbers into flexibility, fires to melt pitch, to mould iron. There were sawpits too, and other dangers: the mis-swung adze or axe. It would have seemed nearly infernal to a young girl, with its brilliant red fires and smoking tar.

The Poplar shipyards were created to be outside the jurisdiction of the shipwrights’ guild which governed shipbuilding at the London docks. It was outside the walls of custom and law. Independency in trade perhaps encouraged Independency in religion. For St Dunstan’s Stepney, the East End church, was one of the most staunchly godly and anti-Laudian churches of the time. This was in part because its congregation included a high proportion of Huguenot refugees from the wars of religion in France, men and women who could tell many stories of how papists persecuted the people of God.

It was industrial, cosmopolitan, but also rural. Poplar obtained its name from the great number of poplar trees that grew there. Poplar High Street was open to fields on both sides; Poplar Marsh raised cattle, and its grass was esteemed. An eighteenth-century visitor noted the mix of rural and urban: ‘Part of this marsh is called the Isle of Dogs, although it is not an island, nor quite a peninsula. It is opposite Greenwich in Kent; and when our sovereigns had a palace near the site of the present magnificent hospital, they used it as a hunting-seat, and, it is said, kept the kennels of their hounds in this marsh. These hounds frequently making a great noise, the seamen called the place the Isle of Dogs.’ Anna could have heard the royal hunters, and they in turn could have heard the hammer of the shipyards. Poplar High Street was lined with shipwrights’ houses, but it was also a sailors’ town, so these were interspersed with pubs: the Green Man, the Spotted Dog, the Black Boy, the Green Dragon. Dragonish indeed to the godly: freedom could become lawlessness. Poplar saw many sailors’ riots.

Later, when Anna Trapnel had moved inside the walls of the City of London, Poplar became an industry town, even a boom town. Within the parish of St Dunstan’s were huge new shipyards at Blackwell (for the East India Company), Limehouse, Wapping and Ratcliffe. The East India Company – in a manner almost anticipating Ford and Microsoft, and limping in the footsteps of landowning gentry – began to build its own amenities for its employees, including a chapel, which was erected in the year 1654 by a subscription of the inhabitants.

As London divided into better and worse areas, where Londoners lived began to make a difference to how long they lived. Slums like Bridewell and Blackfriars suffered much more from the 1636 plague than the richer central areas. Stepney’s burials outnumbered baptisms by 80%, though this statistic may mislead us as it may be due to godly reluctance to baptize. Some 90,000 people lived east of the City, in the parishes of Poplar, Stepney and Hackney. John Stow said these people inhabited what he called ‘base tenements’, which may simply reflect Stow’s prejudice against new build. And houses were smaller and more cramped. In Shadwell and Tower Liberty in the 1650 survey, 80% of houses were one or two storeys with an average of four rooms each, compared with 6.7 rooms in the West End. And the East End houses were mostly of timber and boards, not brick, and only one-third had gardens (often crucial economically) compared with 42.9% in the West End. Already, too, the East End had more constables.

Housing design, even for the rich, was in a state of flux. In this period domestic architecture was moving from what are called hall houses to the organization of separate chambers. The hall house was a large room with many smaller rooms built onto it. The hall had a central hearth. In the hall, communal male activities took place, while the private chambers were occupied by women and children. But in the sixteenth century houses changed, a process which had begun much earlier but now became commonplace. Segregation by sex was replaced by segregation by class, with servants cut off from everyone else. Upstairs and downstairs assumed their significances. As a result, great houses became disconnected from those whose economic activity supported them – farms, quarries and the like were separated from houses by distance. Finally, domestic surroundings became increasingly elaborate – more and more windows had curtains, more tables were encased in cloths, more floors were covered in carpets and rugs. This inspired plenty of shopping, and shipping to fill the new shops with exotica, and to that end London acquired its first shopping mall, the Royal Exchange.

The kind of house Trapnel probably knew best was multipurpose, a dwelling and also a business. Houses above or with a shop often used the ground floor exclusively for business purposes, and the family rooms were on the upper floors. But the ‘shop’ would also be a manufacturing place – a workshop – and so it could be noisy or dusty. Many businesses needed kitchen facilities, so households would have to share their kitchen with the dairying or laundry. We can get a glimpse of this kind of house from probate inventories. When Daniel Jeames, a chandler from Middlesex, died in 1663, shortly after the tumultuous events described in this book, his house contained the following:

Kitchen: Sixteen porringers, two great flagons, nine little flagons, two pewter candlesticks, six chamber pots, one brass kettle, one brass pot, one fire shovel and tongs, and five forks, four spits and dripping pan, one gridiron, one chopping-knife, one iron pot, one iron kettle, and a jack, two cup-boards, one table, three chairs and three stools.

In the shop Butter and cheese and other commodities

In the room over the shop seven chairs, two tables, one form, one set of hangings, one chest, one cupboard

In the room over the kitchen six pairs of shoes, two dozen of napkins, three table clothes, one dozen of towels, one Featherbed, two Featherbolsters, one Flockbed, one drawbed, one green rug, one Trundle bedstead mat, one Feather pillow, two blankets, one jug, one table, three chairs, two stools, a little trunk with some other things

In the garrett two featherbeds, one bolster, a set of striped curtains and valance, one table one cupboard and one old sawpot [?] with some other lumber

Item two Bibles and a Testament

Item two silver bowls and two silver drinking cupes

Item in ready money iiii pence

Item his apparel

It all seems pitifully little, if we imagine how extensive our own inventories might be. The stress on bedclothes, too, is alien to us; before washing machines, to own a lot of bedlinen was an important source of comfort. For ordinary tradespeople like the Trapnels, home was still a bare place, about warmth and family rather than interior design. But the few possessions needed to make it livable were doubly precious.

Paradoxically, at exactly the moment people demanded more space, and more privacy, housing in London and in some other fast-growing towns like Bristol was getting hard to find; so scarce that most people lived in lodgings or took in lodgers. The family of John Milton shared a house with five other families. Anna Trapnel, when she moved to central London from Poplar, lived with two different landladies. They may have been her employers, too, for everyone but the very poorest also had servants. Servants were vital assistants in the constant struggles for food, warmth and cleanliness, which all centred on the hearth and the fire. Later eras have sentimentalized the phrase ‘hearth and home’, but in the kind of house Anna Trapnel lived in, the maintenance of a good fire involved much vital, risky and backbreaking work, wrestling not only with heavy, dirty fuel but with extreme heat, red-hot implements, and boiling liquids.

While Anna Trapnel’s father struggled with hot metal in the shipyard, or with bubbling tar, she grappled with blistering cauldrons at home. The difference between industry and cooking – in smell, risk, filth – was much less marked than it later became. Despite women’s efforts, inadequate fires meant that houses were not comfortable. Most bedrooms had no fireplaces, and even the biggest houses, with fifteen or more rooms, had on average only a third of them heated. Innovations were beginning to change this, and with the developments in heating came social changes. Just as the city was dividing into rich and poor districts, so the house itself was increasingly marked off into different areas.

Though Poplar was outside the walls, Trapnel was still a Londoner, an inhabitant of by far the largest and most important city in the British Isles. Between 1600 and 1650 the population grew from 200,000 to 375,000, despite outbreaks of bubonic plague. If this book were to attempt the impossible task of writing about the Civil War experience ‘representatively’, then most of those it studied would need to be Londoners. In 1642, London stretched for five miles from Stepney to Westminster, and south five miles more to Rotherhithe. One of the main sights of the old city was London Bridge, with its eighteen solid stone piers which rested on piles that forced the current into narrow and swift channels; the boatmen couldn’t shoot the bridge on a flood tide, and it was also dangerous on an ebb tide. Many people avoided the danger by getting out at Old Swan Stairs, on one side of the bridge, walking down Upper Thames Street, and getting back into boats at Billingsgate Stairs. Fifty watermen or so died every year trying to shoot the bridge, usually by drowning.

While the East End was being built, rich landowners were arriving in town for what came to be known as the season. They also needed housing, and it was for them that the West End was built. The new city catered for the rich, and for their new power to shop. For a gentleman like Sir Humphrey Mildmay, the whole day could be spent shopping. When you had promenaded down Paul’s Walk, the middle aisle of St Paul’s, which was also a shortcut that saved walking around the cathedral itself, you could say that everyone important had seen your new clothes. Or you could go to an ordinary, or eating house, which were graded according to cost. They served good simple food. Servants could eat at a threeha’penny ordinary. Around St Paul’s too were the London booksellers and the tobacconists. In Cheapside there were the goldsmiths’ shops, the nearest London came to actually having streets paved with gold. The menagerie in the Tower was another spectacle.

But Trapnel may not have done any of these things. They were part of a richer, more leisured life than hers. Her focal point was the church. As she herself wrote:

When a child, the Lord awed my spirit, and so for the least trespass, my heart was smitten, and though my godly mother did not see me offend, that she might reprove me, which she was ready to do, being tender of the honour of her beloved Saviour, even the least secret sin, that the world calls a trifle, though I thought it nothing, yet still the all-seeing eye watched my ways, and he called to me, though I knew it not … a child of wrath as well as others.

We don’t know how old Trapnel was when she wrote this, but she was part of a local community which felt the same. In 1641, Stepney produced the first call to allow parishes to appoint their own lecturers, visiting speakers, often not in holy orders, who might preach for hours. Many disliked their way of speaking, which was to allow themselves to say anything prompted by the Spirit. Ex tempore, thought one critic, excludes the pater noster. One lecturer was Jeremiah Burroughs, suspended by Bishop Wren and later chaplain to the Earl of Warwick, a defender of popular sovereignty; another was William Greenhill who established a gathered church in 1644.

Greenhill was a man who had been in trouble for refusing to read The Book of Sports, the Stuart guide to maypole building and hock-carts which had upset godly people up and down the country. He was the afternoon preacher to the congregation at Stepney, while Jeremiah Burroughs ministered in the morning, so that they were called respectively the ‘Evening Star’ and the ‘Morning Star’ of Stepney. In 1643, he was to preach before the House of Commons on the occasion of a public fast, and his sermon was published by command of the House, with the title ‘The Axe at the Root’, a title which suggests his strong independent opinions. His later career shows his ability to reach children: after the death of Charles, he became Parliament’s chaplain to three of the king’s children: James, Duke of York (afterwards James II); Henry, Duke of Gloucester; and the Princess Henrietta Maria, and he dedicated a work on Ezekiel to Princess Elizabeth, at that time a little girl.

To us it is difficult to imagine that sermons could be exciting or radical, and comparisons with political meetings or public lectures do little to convey the mixture of shivering tent-revival rapture and sharp thought which they produced. But to the average Protestant, and especially to the godly, all individuals – and the nation itself – were always understood to be trembling on the brink of an abyss, the pit of hell, from which they could be snatched to safety at the eleventh hour by the strong words of an heroic preacher. This was just the sort of drama – a kind of endless, high-emotion soap – likely to attract an adolescent girl whose circumstances were otherwise obscure. Anna herself describes her eager response:

When I was about fourteen years of age, I began to be very eager and forward to hear and pray, though in a very formal manner; Thus I went on some years, and then I rose to a higher pitch, to a more spiritual condition, as I thought, and I followed after that Ministry that was most pressed after by the strictest Professors, and I ran with great violence, having a great zeal, though not according to knowledge, and I appeared a very high-grown Christian in the thoughts of man; … providence ordered that I should hear Mr Peters speak … though I thought myself in a very good condition before, yet now it seized upon my spirit, that surely I was not in the covenant … I then went home full of horror, concluding myself to be the stony ground Christ spoke of in the parable of the sower; I apprehended divine displeasure against me … I ran from minister to minister, from sermon to sermon.

Anna Trapnel’s religious background supported her notion that she was worthless, while feeding her longing for compensation through being specially chosen by God. This drama had its dark side. During a prolonged spiritual depression, Anna contemplated murder and suicide, but on New Year’s Day 1642 she heard John Simpson preaching at All Hallows the Great, and there was an immediate (and joyful) conversion. The godly typically went through these periods of joy and misery; they were an intrinsic part of Calvinist salvation.

Simpson was relatively young, in his thirties, and another of the St Dunstan’s lecturers. A man of passionately independent views, he was removed from his lectureship in St Aldgate in 1643, and banned from preaching. He was soon in trouble again for asserting, allegedly, that Christ was to be found even ‘in hogs, and dogs, or sheep’. In 1647 Simpson became pastor of the gathered congregation at All Hallows the Great. He was also to fight against Prince Charles at Worcester in 1650. Unlike many radicals, Simpson placed no trust in Oliver Cromwell as the instrument of God. He reported visions in which God had revealed to him Cromwell’s lust for power and his impending ruin. He became a leader of the Fifth Monarchists, a group who believed themselves the elect and the end of the world near. Many contemporaries were bewildered by Simpson’s volatile and passionate nature and thought him mad. But everyone recognized his power as a preacher. In the heady atmosphere of freedom from guild restraints, immigrants bringing novel ideas, the wildness of the East End, and the religious adventure of St Dunstan’s, the unthinkable was soon being thought, and not only by Trapnel. Joan Sherrard, of Anna Trapnel’s parish, said in 1644 that the king was ‘a stuttering fool’ and asked passionately ‘is there never a Fel[t]on yet living? [Felton was the man who had assassinated the Duke of Buckingham.] If I were a man, as I am a woman, I would help to pull him to pieces.’ It was the kind of thing one housewife might shout at another in a noisy high street. It was unimaginable at court, only a few miles distant.

The world was an altogether different place for noblewoman Lucy Hay. West End, not East End; magnificent houses, not wooden terraces; shopping, not working; the court, not the pulpit – though Lucy was religious, and militantly Protestant at that. Lucy Hay was England’s salonnière, a beautiful woman who enjoyed politics, intrigue, plots, but also intellectual games, poetry, love affairs (intellectual, and probably occasionally physical), fashion, clothes and admiration. She was one of Henrietta Maria’s closest and most trusted friends, but also her competitor and sometime political enemy. Her world was more introverted than Trapnel’s, with the obsessive cliquishness of an exclusive girls’ school. But like many a pupil, Lucy struggled not only to dominate it, but also to find ways to widen it.

Her success was founded on her face. She was such a beauty that when she contracted smallpox, the whole court joined forces to write reassuring letters to her husband, telling him that she was not in danger of losing her looks. She asked for and received permission to wear a mask on her return to court, until her sores were entirely healed; when she removed it, people said that she was not only unblemished, but lovelier than ever.

Lucy Hay came from an extraordinary family, the Percys, Earls of Northumberland, a family of nobles always powerful in dissent. Her great-uncle was a leader in the Northern Earls rebellion, beheaded for it in 1572, and her father was imprisoned in the Tower for suspected involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. The Percys were a noble family inclined to see the monarch of the day as only primus inter pares, and to act accordingly. Lucy’s father was known as ‘the wizard earl’ because of his interest in magic, astronomy and mathematics – he was so interested in numbers that he kept three private mathematicians at his side. Hard of hearing, remote of bearing, and often shy, he was also a passionate gambler, and his contemporaries found him difficult to understand. His wife, Dorothy Devereux, was the sister of the Earl of Essex who was Elizabeth’s favourite late in her life, and Dorothy, too, was loved by the queen. But like the Percys, the Devereux found it difficult to accept the absolute sovereignty of the monarch. They had their own power and they wanted it respected.

Within the marriage this mutual strong-mindedness did not make for harmony. The couple separated, and after Elizabeth had brought about a reconciliation which produced a male heir, fell out again. There was no divorce, but they lived apart. Henry Percy did not take to James I. He disliked in particular the many Scots James had brought with him and may have seen their promotion to the nobility as a threat to established families like his own. In the autumn of 1605, he retired to Syon House to think more about numbers and less about politics. His choice of retreat points to the way the Percys had come to see themselves as a southern family; there was no question of a retreat to the north, to the family seat at Alnwick.

This mathematical pastoral was, however, threatened in two ways. First, the Gunpowder Plot exploded, and Northumberland’s kinsman Thomas Percy, four years his elder and one of the chief conspirators, had dined on 4 November with Northumberland at Syon House. Though not a papist, Northumberland was a known Catholic sympathizer, who had tried to secure the position of Catholics with James when he became king. Although he had few arms, horses or followers at Syon, and had known none of the conspirators excepting Percy, he was sent to the Tower on 27 November. He tried to excuse himself in a manner which reveals the Percy attitude to affairs of state: ‘Examine’, he said, ‘but my humours in buildings, gardenings, and private expenses these two years past.’ He was not believed. On 27 June 1606 he was tried in the Court of Star Chamber for contempt and misprision of treason. At his trial, he was accused of seeking to become chief of the papists in England; of failing to administer the Oath of Supremacy to Thomas Percy. He pleaded guilty to some of the facts set forth in the indictment, but indignantly repudiated the inferences placed upon them by his prosecutors. He was sentenced to pay a fine of 30,000 pounds, to be removed from all offices and places, to be rendered incapable of holding any of them hereafter, and to be kept a prisoner in the Tower for life. Voluntary exile had become forced imprisonment. The hand of royalty was heavy.

Northumberland protested to the king against the severity of this sentence, but his cries went unheard. Much more significantly, and perhaps more effectively, his wife Dorothy appealed to the queen, Anne of Denmark, who took a sympathetic interest in his case. This may have been where Lucy learned that women have power, that one can work through queens where kings are initially deaf. The king nevertheless insisted that 11,000 pounds of the fine should be paid at once, and, when the earl declared himself unable to find the money, his estates were seized, and funds were raised by granting leases on them. Northumberland did pay 11,000 pounds on 13 November 1613. He and his daughter had learnt an unforgettable lesson about royal power and nobles’ power.

Typically, Northumberland tried to recreate his private paradise inside the Tower. Thomas Harriot, once Walter Ralegh’s conjuror-servant, Walter Warner, and Thomas Hughes, the mathematicians, were regular attendants and pensioners, and were known as the earl’s ‘three magi’. And Northumberland had Walter Ralegh himself, also in the Tower, as an occasional companion. Nicholas Hill aided him in experiments in astrology and alchemy. A large library was placed in his cell, consisting mainly of Italian books on fortification, astrology and medicine; he also had Tasso, Machiavelli, Chapman’s Homer, The Gardener’s Labyrinth, Daniel’s History of England, and Florio’s Dictionary.

During her stay in the Tower, did Lucy read them? An intelligent girl might have been expected to do so. Another Lucy, Lucy Hutchinson, recalled her own intensive education:

By the time I was four years old, I read English perfectly, and having a great memory, I was carried to sermons, and while I was very young could remember and repeat them exactly … I had at one time eight tutors in several qualities, languages, music, dancing, writing and needlework; but my genius was quite averse from all but my book, and that I was so eager of, that my mother thinking it prejudiced my health, would moderate me in it. Yet this rather animated me than kept me back, and every moment I could steal from my play I would employ in any book I could find, when my own were locked up from me. After dinner and supper I still had an hour allowed me to play, and then I would steal into some hole or other to read. My father would have me learn latin, and I was so apt that I outstripped my brothers who were at school, although my father’s chaplain, that was my tutor, was a pitiful dull fellow.

Lucy Hay never became an eager reader, as Lucy Hutchinson did. Instead, she whiled away her time in exactly the way any adolescent girl would: she fell wildly in love with someone her father thought very unsuitable, the king’s Scottish favourite James Hay. But Lucy was also still a daughter in her father’s house. As dutiful daughters, Lucy and her elder sister Dorothy paid their father a visit in the Tower. In Lucy’s case duty was not rewarded. After he had given her sister a few embraces, Northumberland abruptly dismissed Dorothy, but instructed Lucy to stay where she was, asking her sister to send Lucy’s maids to her at once. ‘I am a Percy,’ he said, ‘and I cannot endure that my daughter should dance any Scottish jigs.’ The Percys who had been keeping the Scots out of England for several hundred years were speaking through him.

‘Come, let’s away to prison’, Northumberland might have said to his errant Cordelia, hoping that they would sing like birds in the cage. However, since he snatched Lucy away from an exceptionally lavish party put on just to impress her by her very passionate suitor, it seems unlikely that she was pleased. In any case, all her life, Lucy wanted anything but retirement. She wished to be at the centre of things. And her choice of partner was a sign of her lifelong brilliance at spotting just who was able to open secret doors to power.

To Northumberland, imprisoning his daughter along with him, and thus depriving the king’s favourite of his desires, might have seemed a nice and ironic revenge on the king who had unfairly locked him away. Revenge apart, however, Northumberland loathed James Hay. First, he was a Scot, and there was great resentment among English courtiers and nobles against those Scots brought south by James Stuart. Secondly, he was a favourite of the king who had just punished and shamed Northumberland. But more than all this, the antipathy seems to have been personal. On reflection it is hard to think of two more dissimilar men. Northumberland was intellectual, shy, proud, private, and above all of an ancient family. James Hay was a social being. If Northumberland loved books, James Hay loved banquets and parties.

Especially, he loved giving them. When he held a banquet, Whitehall hummed with servants carrying twenty or twenty-five dishes from the kitchens to the banqueting hall. It was James Hay who invented the so-called antefeast: ‘the manner of which was to have the board covered, at the first entrance of the guests, with dishes, as high as a tall man could well reach, and dearest viands sea or land could afford: and all this once seen, and having feasted the eyes of the invited, was in an manner thrown away, and fresh set on the same height, having only this advantage of the other, that it was hot’ Hay’s servants were always recognizable because they were so richly dressed. Or because they were carrying cloakbags full of uneaten food: ‘dried sweetmeats and comfets, valued to his lordship at more than 10 shillings the pound’. Once a hundred cooks worked for eight days to make a feast for his guests. The party he had put on to impress Lucy involved thirty cooks, twelve days’ preparation, seven score pheasants, twelve partridges, twelve salmon, and cost 2200 pounds in all. John Chamberlain thought it disgustingly wasteful, an apish imitation of the monstrous ways of the French. But it was exactly the ways of the French – elegance, taste, fashion – that made James Hay so personable, so modern. He also liked elegant clothes, court socials and courtly pursuits, especially tilting. He introduced Lucy to the pleasures of the court masque, a musical drama which combined the attractions of amateur theatricals, drawing-room musicmaking, and a costume ball. His wedding to Honora Denny had been accompanied by a masque by Thomas Campion, and in 1617, the year of his courtship of Lucy, he sponsored a masque subsequently known as the Essex House Masque. He also funded a performance of Ben Jonson’s Lovers Made Men.

Hardest, perhaps, for Northumberland to bear, Hay was the son of a gentleman-farmer of very modest means. He was on the make, charmingly and intelligently. He was no fool: he spoke French, Latin and Italian, and one of the reasons he liked to live at a slightly faster pace was that he had spent his youth in France learning about food, wine and pleasure. His choice of Lucy Percy as a bride was astute and sensible, too; he must have spotted her as a future beauty, and of course her family credentials were good, or would be when he had wheedled Northumberland out of gaol.

Lucy was abandoning her father’s world and its values in choosing James Hay. He must have fascinated her, enough to make her put up with virtual imprisonment to get her way, but it was not his looks that made him so appealing. Surviving portraits bear out Princess Elizabeth’s nickname for him, which was ‘camelface’. Encumbered with a notoriously shy and distant father, it may have been James’s easy charm that Lucy found irresistible. And she was only a teenager; though used to magnificence, she was not used to courtly sophistication. James exuded the suavity of French and Italian courts. He knew all about how things were done in those foreign places, then as now redolent with associations of class and chic. And coming from a difficult, even tempestuous marriage between two people of equal rank, she knew that nobility in a partner was no passport to married bliss. Most of all, and all her life, Lucy was alert to power – who had it, who did not, who was in, who out.

Finally, banquets and masques and feasts and court life offered Lucy a chance to take centre-stage. Northumberland was never going to offer her that. He thought great men’s wives existed ‘to bring up their children well in their long coat age, to tend their health and education, to obey their husbands … and to see that their women … keep the linen sweet’. Or so he wrote to his sons, at the very time when Lucy was incarcerated with him. He added that if wives complained, the best idea was to ‘let them talk, and you keep the power in your hands, that you may do as you list’.

Northumberland may have thought he had power, but as many men were to find when the Civil War began, the women in his family knew exactly where real influence lay. About this his daughter was wiser than he. Eventually she wore her father down. He began using pleas rather than force. He offered her 20,000 pounds if she publicly renounced James Hay. Lucy declined; she probably knew that he didn’t have the money, encumbered as he was by fines. Instead, she escaped from the Tower, and fled straight to James, who as Groom of the Stool was resident in the Wardrobe Building. Alas, he was in Scotland with the king, but he knew his Lucy. He left a fund of 2000 pounds for her entertainment while he was away.

James, on his return, worked sensibly on and through Lucy’s mother and sister, winning them with the same charm that had dazzled Lucy. Finally, in October 1617, the old earl gave in. He blessed the pair. Perhaps he was tired of seclusion in the Tower and knew Hay could procure his release. Perhaps Northumberland was forced to recognize what his daughter had noticed long before, that power had passed to a new and very different generation.

Lucy and James were married in November 1617. It was a quiet wedding by James’s usually ebullient standards, costing a mere £1600, but it was well attended: the king, Prince Charles, and George Villiers, later the powerful Duke of Buckingham, were among the guests. James Hay, in order, apparently, to overcome Northumberland’s prejudice against him, made every effort to obtain his release. In this he at length proved successful. In 1621 King James was induced to celebrate his birthday by setting Northumberland and other political prisoners at liberty. The earl showed some compunction in accepting a favour which he attributed to Hay’s agency.

James’s lightheartedness concealed a tragic past, however. His first wife, Honora Denny, was an intelligent and kind woman who had received dedications from Guillaume Du Bartas, one of John Milton’s role models. But she had died in 1614. Her death was the result of an attempted robbery; she had been returning from a supper party through the Ludgate Hill area when a man seized the jewel she wore around her neck and tried to run off with it, dragging her to the ground. Seven months pregnant, the fall meant she delivered her baby prematurely. She died a week later. Her assailant was hanged, even though Honora had pleaded that he be spared before her own death. It was a moment in which the two almost separate worlds of peerage and poor met violently; the meeting was fatal to both.

Despite this saintly act, Honora Denny Hay was no saint. Either James Hay’s taste in women was consistent, or his second wife modelled herself closely on his first. Honora Denny was a powerful figure because she was a close confidante of Anne of Denmark. Rumour said that she had used her position as the Queen’s friend to make sure a man who had tried to murder one of her lovers was fully punished. Lucy, the wilful teenage bride, was to become one of the most brilliant, beautiful and sought-after women in Caroline England, following her predecessor’s example studiously and intelligently. And if Honora Denny Hay had lovers, and got away with it, Lucy could learn from this too.

James Hay’s career was as glittering as she had predicted. Retaining his position as the king’s favourite without any of the slips that dogged the careers of Somerset and Buckingham, he did a good deal of diplomatic work which took him far from home. In 1619 he was in Germany, mediating between the emperor and the Bohemians, and paying a visit to William of Orange on the way home. William scandalized Hay by offering him a dinner in which only one suckling pig was on the table. On his next mission to France in 1621, James cheered himself by having his horse shod with silver; every time it cast a shoe there was a scramble for the discard. But it was not only the old-fashioned who might have preferred William’s solitary pig to James’s extravaganzas. The disapproval of courtly colleagues like Chamberlain symbolized the difficulty facing the Hays as they tried to get on in society.

This society was unimaginable to Anna Trapnel, as her world was to them. It was a milieu full of new and beautiful things, new ideas. The court was their world, headed by a king who came to own the greatest art collection in the history of England, while in Stepney people ate black bread and died daily in the shipyards that built trading vessels to bring his finds to England.

A Van Dyck portrait of Henrietta Maria with her dwarf Jeffrey Hudson painted in 1633 shows fragments, symbols of her court. The monkey is a representative of Henrietta Maria’s menagerie of dogs, monkeys and caged birds, while the orange tree alludes to her love of gardens. Van Dyck deliberately downplays regality; gone are the stiff robes and jewels of Tudor portraiture, and here is a warmer, more relaxed figure who enjoys her garden and pets and is kind to her servant.

Lapped in such care, the queen and Lucy were encapsulated in the jewel case of the royal household, which included everyone from aristocratic advisers and career administrators to grooms and scullions. At the outbreak of the war, it comprised as many as 1800 people. Some of these were given bed and board, others received what was called ‘bouge of court’, which included bread, ale, firewood and candles. The court also supported hordes of nobles, princes, ambassadors and other state visitors, who all resided in it with their households, such as Henrietta’s mother Marie de Medici, and her entourage.

The household above stairs was called the chamber (these were people who organized state visits and the reception of ambassadors); below stairs it was called simply the household (these were the people who did the actual work, the cooking, cleaning and laundering). Supporting the household accounted for more than 40% of royal expenditure. Many servants had grand titles, rather like civil service managers now: the Pages of the Scalding House, the Breadbearers of the Pantry. There were unimaginable numbers of them. The king had, for example, thirty-one falconers, thirty-five huntsmen, and four officers of bears, bulls and mastiffs. The queen had her own household, which included a full kitchen staff, a keeper of the sweet coffers, a laundress and a starcher, and a seamstress. There were over 180, not including the stables staff.

Charles’s court was divided into the king’s side and the queen’s side, horizontally. It was also very strictly divided vertically, with exceptionally formal protocols to enforce these divisions. Charles insisted on the enforcement of these protocols far more firmly than his father had. Only peers, bishops and Privy Councillors could tread on the carpet around the king’s table in the Presence Chamber, for example. All these labyrinthine rules had to be learnt and kept. The king’s chambers were themselves a kind of nest of Chinese boxes; the further in you were allowed, the more important you were. The most public room was the Presence Chamber; beyond it was the Privy Chamber, which could be entered only by nobles and councillors; beyond that was the Withdrawing Chamber and the Bedchamber, reserved for the king and his body servants, and governed by the Groom of the Stool.

Charles actively maintained seven palaces: Greenwich, Hampton Court, Nonesuch, Oatlands, Richmond, St James’s and Whitehall, and he also had Somerset House, Theobalds, Holdenby (in Northamptonshire), and Wimbledon, the newest, bought by Charles as a gift for Henrietta Maria in 1639. There were also five castles, including the Tower of London, and three hunting lodges, at Royston, Newmarket and Thetford (the last was sold in 1630). All were to be touched by the war. Many were ruined.

Whitehall was the king’s principal London residence, a status recognized by both the Council of State and Cromwell, who chose it as the principal residence themselves. It was a warren, a maze of long galleries that connected its disparate parts in a rough and ready fashion, and it was cut in two by the highway that ran from London to Westminster, and bridged (in a manner reminiscent of Oxford’s Bridge of Sighs) by the Holbein Gate. Set down in the middle of the medieval muddle, like a beautiful woman in a white frock, was the Inigo Jones Banqueting House: icy, classical perfection. The long, rambling corridors and rooms of Whitehall were full of tapestries, paintings, statues (over a hundred) and furniture; it illustrated the idea that a palace was about interiors and personnel, not architecture. In that, it was oddly like the houses Anna Trapnel knew.

But Charles and Henrietta tried to alter this muddle. Dedicated and knowledgeable collectors, they eagerly acquired and displayed beautiful art. St James’s had an Inigo Jones sculpture gallery in the grounds that had been built to house the astounding collection of the Duke of Mantua; a colonnaded gallery ran parallel to the orchard wall, whose roof was cantilevered over the gardens so the king could ride under cover if the weather was wet. Somerset House had belonged to Anne of Denmark, and now it became Henrietta Maria’s. There were thirteen sculptures dotted about its garden, some from the Gonzaga collection. In the chapel, some thirty-four paintings were inventoried during Parliament’s rule, some described in the angry terms of iconoclasm: ‘a pope in white satin’. (In a hilarious irony, this was where Oliver Cromwell’s body was displayed to the nation in 1658.) Hampton Court chapel had ‘popish and superstitious pictures’, later destroyed.

Among their other hobbies, Charles and Henrietta were eager gardeners – though neither picked up a spade. But they were both keenly interested in the visual and its symbolic possibilities. The garden, for the Renaissance, was not just an extra room, but an extra theatre, the setting for masques, balls and parties. But it was also a place to be alone and melancholy. It symbolized aristocratic ownership and control of the earth and its fruits. Like other visual arts, garden fashion was changing. As portraits became more realistic, gardens assumed a new and striking formality: mannerist gardens, with grottoes and water-works, gave way to the new French-style gardens, which were all about geometry and precision, and acres of gravel on which no plant dared spread unruly roots. André Mollet, a French designer whose ideas prefigured Le Nôtre’s Versailles, created gardens at St James’s and at Wimbledon House for Charles and Henrietta. It was not for nothing that this style became associated with the absolutism of the Bourbon kings, and Louis XIV in particular. Such baroque planting in masses seemed richly symbolic of the ordered world of obedient and grateful subjects beyond the garden gates. It symbolized their mastery over the realm; every little dianthus, in a row, identical, massed, smiling. No weeds.

But Charles and Henrietta were not just buyers of pictures and makers of gardens. They wanted to be great patrons, like the Medici. One of the first seriously talented artists that Charles managed to lure to England was Orazio Gentileschi, now best-known as the father of Caravaggio’s most brilliant follower, Artemisia Gentileschi. Orazio arrived in England in October 1626, perhaps as part of the entourage of Henrietta’s favourite Bassompierre. He came to England directly from the court of Marie de Medici. Orazio was so much Henrietta’s painter that he was buried beneath the floor of her chapel at Somerset House when he died, an entitlement extended to all the queen’s Catholic servants. She may have liked him because, like her beloved husband, he always wore the sober, elegant black of the melancholy intellectual. He was also small and slight, like Charles.

His greatest commission was probably Henrietta’s own idea; nine huge panels for the ceiling of the Queen’s House at Greenwich. Greenwich itself, referred to as ‘some curious device of Inigo Jones’s’, was also called ‘the House of Delight’. The house was elegant, smooth, very feminine – seventeenth-century minimalism, but with curves, with grace. The paintings added colour and fire. The white-and-gold ceiling was augmented with the brilliant colours of a sequence that was to be called Allegory of Peace and the Arts under an English Crown. The so-called tulip staircase is a misnomer, but a felicitous one, since it conveys the long elegant lines of the curling flights. And like the tulip craze, the palace’s glory was short-lived, for its mistress did not enjoy it for long. Its post-war fate was to become a prison for Dutch seamen, a victim of Parliament’s iconoclasm.

In the seventeenth century, artists often worked with family members; in acquiring Orazio’s services, Charles and Henrietta also gained those of his brilliant daughter. Artemisia almost certainly helped her father with the sequence, while the plague raged through London and the armies gathered reluctantly for the Bishops’ Wars. Orazio’s two sons played a crucial role in Charles’s activities as a collector, going to the Continent to advise King’s Musician Nicholas Lanier when he was negotiating to buy the Duke of Mantua’s collection, the biggest single picture purchase by an English sovereign. Lanier also bought Caravaggio’s astounding and magnificent Death of the Virgin for Charles secretly in Venice. And the melancholy, artistic Richard Symonds suggests a closer relationship between these two exceptionally talented royal servants; in describing Lanier, Symonds calls him ‘inamorato di Artemisia Gentileschi: che pingera bene’ (lover of Artemisia Gentileschi, that good painter) while Theodore Turquet de Megerne says Nicholas Lanier knew artistic techniques that were Gentileschi family secrets; they could have met in Rome or Venice, via Artemisia’s brothers. If so, this was an affair between two of the most talented people at Charles and Henrietta’s court. However the country felt about them, the king and queen had created a world in which such talent could flourish, and find an echo in the mind of another.

And the royal couple could be influenced by this cultural world of their own making. Artemisia says something in one of her letters that is very reminiscent of remarks Henrietta makes about herself during the war: ‘You will find that I have the soul of Caesar in a woman’s heart’ (13 November 1649). Henrietta was to call herself a she-generalissima in similar fashion.

Other schemes came to nothing. Henrietta had ordered a Bacchus and Ariadne from one of her favourite artists, Guido Reni of Bologna, whose Labours of Hercules was one of the paintings Charles had acquired from the Duke of Mantua. It was never sent to London because Cardinal Barberini thought it too lascivious. A cut-price deal was done to ornament the withdrawing room with twenty-two paintings by Jacob Jordaens, a pupil of Rubens, bound to charge much less than the master himself. Balthasar Gerbier tried to get the job for Rubens, promising that the master would not seek to represent drunken-headed imaginary gods, but that he was ‘the gentlest in his representations’. Nonetheless, the royal couple chose the cheaper pupil, with instructions not to tell Jordaens who the clients were, in case he raised his price. He was also firmly told to make his women ‘as beautiful as may be, the figures gracious and svelte’. Gerbier kept on pushing to get the commission for Rubens, but on 23 May, he had to report the failure of his hopes with Rubens’ death. Eight of Jordaens’s paintings were duly executed; like many another artist in the service of Charles and Henrietta, he saw only a small portion of his promised fee, £100 of £680.

The might of the court, its self-absorption and glory, is best glimpsed in the way it displayed its own world to itself. The court masque was like a mirror, gleaming, shining. It was also like an insanely elaborate production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a well-endowed school; big sets, but amateur actors.

Shrovetide 1630 was a festivity from the seventh Sunday before Easter till the following Tuesday (now called Shrove or Pancake Tuesday). The idea was to eat up all the meat, eggs, cheese and other foods forbidden in Lent. But Shrove also meant shriving or confession of sins, and the gift of absolution from them. The godly didn’t like it much; it was ‘a day of great gluttony, surfeiting and drunkenness’, thought one godly minister, and it was also a day for football and cockfights. In choosing it for her first big masque, called Chloridia, and telling the story depicted in Botticelli’s Primavera, Henrietta was trying to tame festivity, to make it her own, and to combine fun with the shriving of sin, with redemption. The masque’s preface recorded the splendour of the event:

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.

James had, in fact, been especially the nobles’ king. The Scottish nobility knew all about managing the power of a monarch with worrying ideas in matters of religion. They had managed to carry out a Protestant reformation in 1560, against the wishes of their ruler, the Queen Mother, who had been acting as regent for her daughter Mary Queen of Scots while she reigned as Queen of France. Then, in 1567, they had replaced Mary Queen of Scots, the recalcitrantly Catholic monarch, with her newborn son. Of course they had never meant to do away with monarchy itself, only with popery. But they were practised in putting God first and the monarch resolutely second.

But though the nobles had felt James was theirs, they saw that he was lost to them when he went south in 1603 to govern England. The court vanished from Edinburgh, and the Scottish nobility no longer had access to the person of the king. James only revisited Scotland once in his entire reign, so he came to see English ways as natural. This trend intensified under Charles, so that by 1638, the English thought of the king as theirs, with Scotland as a kind of allotment that he might visit and farm in his off-hours, or a small estate, best left to second sons. England’s arrogance in this was founded in its undoubted economic superiority; it was richer by far, had almost twice the population of Scotland, Wales and Ireland put together, and had the largest city in Western Europe as its capital.

Ironically, the identity of the Scottish nobility was not only compromised by their absentee landlord, but by their own Anglicization. The Scottish nobility began to demand deference from inferiors in a way that had never before been customary. They also expected a king to require less deference from them than the English norm. The trouble was that Charles failed utterly to convince them that he valued them. A slew of administrative reforms flew past their heads, and Charles did not even make a pretence of consultation. In a world of honour, that stung. The result was that Charles had few friends or allies among the Scottish Lowland nobles.

Through its earlier civil war over Mary Queen of Scots, Scotland came to define itself in terms of religion. It needed a unifying factor, for Scotland was as ethnically split as Ireland. The Lowlands spoke Anglo-Scots, and the Highlands spoke Gaelic. The Lowlands thought the Highlands barbarous, almost like the Irish; after all, they both spoke Gaelic, and the Highlanders were violent thieves in Lowlanders’ eyes. The Highlanders thought the Lowland Scots were usurping foreigners who had pushed the Gaels out of the fertile lands. Finally, Highland chiefs liked to ignore the Crown as much as possible, while Lowland chiefs tried to be involved in decision-making and government. But religious differences, though fierce, were less stark. The Lowlands, or the ‘radical south-west’, was passionately godly, vehemently Presbyterian, but Aberdeen was Episcopalian. Many Highlanders were nominally Catholic, but the Campbells were eagerly Protestant; in fact, despite being Highlanders, the Campbell Lords of Argyll tended to think like Lowlanders, keen to ‘civilize’ the Highlands.

The Scottish Church was itself a jumble. It had been a Presbyterian, Calvinist Kirk, with strict Church courts imposing tough moral discipline, presided over by ministers and lay elders. James had managed to bolt an episcopate onto it, and while some of its members remained unenthusiastic, the uneasy Jacobean status quo was grudgingly accepted. This disgruntled compromise was symbolized by the Five Articles of Perth, of 1618, which attached to the Kirk such Anglican matters as holy days, confirmation by bishops, kneeling at communion, private baptism, and private communion. But they were often not obeyed by those for whom they stuck in the throat as popish, and at first Charles seemed happy to tolerate this.

It was when it became evident that Charles and Laud hoped to make the Church of England and the Kirk as close to identical as possible that the Kirk grew restive. A small radical party was created within the Kirk just as a godly party formed within the Church of England. Most of the very godliest Scots went to Ulster, to preach there. But some stayed behind because they felt that the Kirk was still God’s chosen church. One godly minister, Samuel Rutherford of Kircudbrightshire, wrote of the Kirk as his ‘whorish mother’, or ‘harlot mother’. She might be corrupt, but she still belonged to him.

To understand the Scots, one must understand the way the Kirk fostered a certain idea of collective identity, generating a powerful sense of sin, and then alleviating it with penitence. The Stool of Repentance was a wooden seat, often a kind of step-stool with different levels for different crimes. It stood immediately in front of the pulpit, elevated to where everyone could see it. Those deemed immoral by the Church courts had to sit on it while a sermon was preached. The connection between the trembling example of sin before the eyes of the congregation and the words of the preacher was what made this punishment different from most English methods, in which the sinner was generally displayed by the church door rather than inside the building. In Scotland, words and spectacle were welded together into a single great theatrical event. To emphasize this, the sinner then made a speech of repentance. It was important to cry, and sound truly sorry. If the congregation was convinced, the sinner would be welcomed back into the community with kisses and handclasps; if not, there would be more of the same. Some ‘sinners’ embraced the drama, and revelled in the opportunity to tell everyone exactly how wicked they had been. The congregation, too, was knitted together by their shared emotions of revulsion and joy at repentance. The ritual created a community which reacted to divisions and differences sternly, with horror and violence.

The Kirk’s idea of community became central to Scotland’s sense of its national destiny. To reinforce this ideal, the Eucharist was extended into a great festival of togetherness, with everyone sitting at long tables, passing bread and wine, and then listening to very, very long sermons. Advisers tried their best to warn Charles that he couldn’t impose the English Prayer Book on Scotland from the first moment they knew a new liturgy was coming. So Charles and Laud listened, and tried to incorporate changes that they hoped would appease the Scots. But their efforts failed to quell rising alarm, which was further spread by the new canons imposed in 1636. These ruled out extempore prayer and insisted that ministers be allowed to preach only in their own locale. Wild rumours circulated in Edinburgh that the new liturgy was going to reappoint abbots to the old monasteries and offer them seats in the Scottish Parliament. Even some Scottish Catholics began to believe the king was gradually restoring the Roman Church. These rumours fomented existing opposition within the Kirk. Implicit in Kirk identity was the idea that Scotland was the chosen Nation of God, the true Israel. Just as the Israelites had suffered enslavement and imprisonment at the hands of tyrants, but had triumphed through the might of God, so they too would succeed through God’s power. Their views were given a darkly frightening context by the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in Europe, which pitted Catholic against Protestant. For Protestants, it was the beginning of the struggle against Antichrist, encouraging them to see the fight against Rome as a fight between Good and Evil.

The crunch came in October 1636, when the Scottish Privy Council was ordered to issue a proclamation commanding the use of the new prayer book. By that time, the opposition was ready. The alarm generated by the whole affair was now at a level where some of the Kirk members would not have accepted a prayer book handed down by Moses from Mount Sinai. Accordingly, in April 1637, one of the Kirk’s most godly spokesmen, Alexander Henderson of Leuchars, met in secret with a group of Edinburgh matrons, who agreed to lead the protest when the prayer book was first used. Women may have been chosen because it was hoped that they would not be punished savagely.

The prayer book’s supporters tried to be ready, too. Those willing to use it decided to begin at the same time, hoping to divide the opposition and to show solidarity. So on the morning of Sunday 23 July 1637, ‘that black doleful Sunday to the Kirk and the Kingdom of Scotland’, said Presbyterian Archibald Johnston, the two Scottish archbishops, and eight or nine bishops, assembled in St Giles Church Edinburgh, and the dean began to read. Johnston of Warriston was a zealous lawyer who became a Scots commissioner. He deposited his diary in Edinburgh Castle for safekeeping, believing he was living in momentous times, like an Old Testament prophet. Johnston recorded what happened: ‘at the beginning thereof there rose such a tumult, such an outcrying … as the like was never seen in Scotland’. Women began to shout insults, ‘calling them traitors, belly-gods, and deceivers’. Others ‘cried Woe! Woe!’ and some cried ‘Sorrow, sorrow for this doleful day, that they are bringing in popery among us!’ and many got to their feet and threw their wooden stools at the bishops. The atmosphere was intimidating, as one observer, minister James Gordon, reported; ‘There was a gentleman who standing behind a pew and answering Amen to what the Dean was reading, a she-Zealot hearing him starts up in choler, traitor, says she, does thou say Mass at my ear, and with that struck him on the face with her Bible in great agitation and fury.’

Seeing that the crowd was inattentive, the bishop abandoned his attempt to read from the prayer book, and preached a sermon instead. Some of the most violent protesters had already left, but they hung around outside, making a racket, and finally throwing stones at the bishop when he tried to leave. Other bishops and clerics were also attacked by groups of Edinburgh women. Johnston was pleased. ‘I pray the Lord to make his own children with tears and cries to pray against the spiritual plague of Egyptian darkness covering the light of the Gospel shining in this nation’, he wrote, fitting words for the man who was to be one of the leaders of resistance himself.

The women involved were described as ‘rascal serving-women’, and certainly those arrested were indeed servants. Other ‘women’ were said to be men in disguise, for, said one witness, ‘they threw stools to a great length’. The opposition now gathered itself together to organize a campaign to petition the king in London. Petitions came mainly from Fife and the West, and when it began to be obvious that the king wasn’t speeding to remove the hated book, many became anxious that war might ensue. The godly Presbyterians had no intention of backing down. There were more riots, and more petitions, and finally Charles responded autocratically, claiming that he had written the prayer book himself (the suppliants had claimed to believe it was the work of bishops). His touchy pride had surfaced again, but so had his wish to be loved; he offered to forgive everyone if they would only go home and do as they were told.

This offered nothing to moderates, and made the intransigent even more certain that they were doing God’s work. On 23 February 1638, the nobles chose a committee of lairds, burgesses and ministers to sit with them. This committee created the Covenant. It was based on the old confession of faith signed by Charles’s father James in 1581, a textual ancestry that tried to proclaim the committee’s loyalty to the Stuart monarch. It vowed to uphold the true religion of the Church of Scotland, and to oppose popery and superstition. It was first signed at Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh, on 28 February. Read aloud by Johnston, it was signed by the assembled nobles first, then lairds. Next day three hundred ministers signed it. Then hundreds of people in Edinburgh, then thousands more as it was distributed across the nation by its original signatories.

Later, support for the Covenant came to mean resistance to tyranny, but that was an evolution. The original Covenant bound its signatories to uphold true religion and to support the king. It neglected to specify which injunction was more important if there should be a conflict between them.

The Scots invented the Covenant as a form of resistance to rule from Westminster. Those who took the oath were required to oppose the recent innovations in religion. Loyalty was reserved for a king willing to defend true Protestant religion. The Covenant was with God; if the king failed to defend the reformed tradition in the Kirk, the people were morally required to resist him because to do so was to keep faith with God. But the oath also included a declaration of allegiance and mutual association which became a definition of nationhood. Scotland, under a covenanted king, had a divine role to play in overthrowing popery and thus bringing about Christ’s rule on earth. Perhaps one day every nation was to be part of the Covenant, under Scotland’s leadership.

Charles still failed to act. It was becoming clear that he was not in control of the situation. Like many men with problems, his were made worse by a visit from his mother-in-law, who came for a prolonged stay in 1638. A contemporary engraving of her progress shows a sumptuous procession down a Cheapside lined with slender, pointed Jacobean gables. A brilliant patron of the arts, a flamboyant presence, a Medici to the core, Marie de Medici cut a swathe through London’s crowds. Her vast entourage, which she expected Charles to support, included six coaches, hundreds of horses, monks and confessors in handfuls, peers and princesses, dwarfs and dogs. Dash was a strong point. Tact was not. She told everyone that she was hoping for Charles’s conversion to the one true Church. He, so quiet, so shy, so unwilling to express public opinions, must have felt uneasy with her bounce and verve. Laud, too, had grave doubts about the boisterous Marie’s impact on her daughter and so on the king. When Henrietta called for English Catholics to fast on Saturdays and to contribute the money to the army sent against the wholesomely Protestant Scots, she linked the expedition in the mind of the public with her own faction. She was also known to be contemplating a Spanish match for her daughter, who was seen attending Mass as the army marched.

In London, Charles and his advisers had begun to evolve ambitious plans for Scotland. Wentworth was determined to carry out the policies he had introduced in Ireland; he wanted an English deputy, and probably English law, too. The Scots, who had ears in the king’s circle, probably got wind of this line of thinking. It made them more determined to hang on. By now, Charles was convinced that the only way to solve his problems in Scotland was by force of arms, and he spun out the negotiations only to give himself time to arm, a pattern of behaviour he was to repeat in England later.

In June 1638, Charles finally sent Hamilton to mediate with his fellow-Scots. By then the Covenanters had grown more confident, encouraged by the widespread support they had received. They asked for a free general assembly and a Parliament to make sure the prayer book could never be reintroduced. Hamilton was only there to stall the Scots until Charles could get his army moving. The Covenanters had created a new system of representation; commissioners from each shire and burgh were to form an elected body and to remain in the capital, being replaced frequently by elected substitutes. This new body was to have a different president every day, so that power was not concentrated in the hands of one man. This idealistic if slightly impractical rule suggests that tyranny was very much a preoccupation. And yet despite all this, the new assembly was window-dressing. Power remained with the strongest nobles, Rothes, Montrose and Loudoun.

On 21 November 1638, a new representative body met, this time representing the Kirk itself. This was the Glasgow Assembly. Huge numbers of people filled Glasgow Cathedral. The new body soon proved unmanageably radical. Hamilton tried to control it, with about as much success as Canute holding back the waves. Having rid itself of Hamilton, the new body began enacting a godly dream of restoring the Kirk to its glory days of full and unmixed Presbyterianism. On 4 December, the new assembly passed an act declaring the six previous Kirk assemblies unlawful, which meant that the Kirk was no longer bound by their decisions. Then on 6 December the assembly condemned Charles’s prayer book and canons as replete with popish errors. On 8 December, the assembly abolished episcopacy, and on 10 December it removed the disputed Five Articles of James’s reign. This brisk and decisive rate of progress resulted in a Kirk purified of compromise and popery, in less than a month. The Scots were creating God’s kingdom, allowing the light of the gospels to shine.

Their decisiveness would prove an example for the English godly party from this time on. The Kirk ensured this by distributing polemics explaining the connection between the restored Kirk and the legitimacy of resisting a tyrant. One of the creators of the Covenant, Alexander Henderson, wrote that ‘except we stand fast to our liberty we can look for nothing but miserable and perpetual slavery’. What he meant was liberty in religion, but the heady experience of having that liberty at Glasgow had made him determined to protect it against the prerogative of anyone who sought to take it away. The result of the prayer book crisis was therefore to join religion and political ideology stoutly together by an unbreakable chain.

It was easy to see why men like Alexander Henderson would be Covenanters. Less easy to understand is the position of Highland nobles like Argyll and Montrose. Of these two leading Highland nobles of the Civil War years, it was the ambitious, eager, warmhearted Montrose who was the first to subscribe to the Covenant. He first joined those Covenanters who sought to petition or supplicate the king in November 1637. It seems an odd decision for a Highlander. The Lowlands were suspicious of popery in part because they perceived the Gaelic lands – Ireland and the Highlands – as a hotbed of papists, and this was not altogether paranoia; there had been a significant Catholic revival among the Gaelic lands. Lowlanders also saw the Highlands as barbaric because of the growth and development of its clan structure in the sixteenth century. Later writers infatuated with the romance of old Scotland portray the clans as ancient, even paleolithic, but in fact they were largely a product of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is difficult to define what a clan was; it came to be seen as a family structure, but in Montrose’s time it was a band, or bond, which could be created between equals or between those of different rank. Usually, it was faintly feudal; the clan chieftains offered protection (from other clans) in return for loyalty (fighting when summoned). The result was to set up violent rivalries across the Highlands. Each clan could increase its wealth, honour and fame only by expanding into the territory of another clan, by raiding another clan, or by plunder. The result might be just a few casualties, but it sometimes involved the massacre of whole communities, including women and children. Such bloodshed frightened and horrified Lowlanders, who were inclined to see the Highlanders as barbarians.

The Covenant flourished in an urban world of merchants, professionals and other middling men. These people were all but absent from clan Highland life. So too was the king, and central government in general. Highland chiefs were traditionally not very interested in central government, or even in the making of laws. At home, they made their own. As for the monarch, in theory Highlanders were effusive in their tributes to the Stuart kings, but in practice they recognized few real obligations to them. Highlanders also shared with their royal master King Charles a love of disguise and tricks which is especially manifest in Montrose’s generalship and tactics. Montrose would be dependent, too, on men even more monoculturally clannish than he, notably the fighter Alasdair MacColla. Masking, mumming and women dressed in men’s clothing doing strange midnight dances were ineradicable parts of the Highland scene, and alien to the Presbyterian Kirk.

But Montrose signed the fierce and rigid Covenant. It is entirely probable that he was swayed by two things: the excitement of the moment which fed his personal ambition, and a very reasonable wish to influence events. He came from one of the oldest and noblest families in Scotland, and held estates in Perth, Stirling and Angus; he was educated richly and fully, in France and Italy as well as Scotland. He was graceful and handsome, with cold, lucid grey eyes. He was also a fine horseman and an excellent archer. He was, said Clarendon, too apt to condemn those he did not love.

He had been at the University of St Andrews, majoring, as it were, in hunting and hawking, in archery and golfing, though he did do some studying. At the age of seventeen, Montrose was married to Magdalene Carnegie, daughter of Lord Carnegie, afterwards Earl of Southesk. In 1633, as soon as he was twenty-one, he left Scotland to travel on the Continent. He had come back to Scotland in 1636, and had been presented to the king in London, by Hamilton, who apparently told Charles that someone as beautiful and charismatic and arrogant as Montrose could only be a menace. So Charles merely extended his hand to be kissed, then turned away. Montrose was bright and proud; he got the message. It has been suggested that the slight to his honour was what impelled him to see the merits of the Covenant. But he himself later wrote:

This our nation was reduced to almost irreparable evil by the perverse practices of these sometime pretended prelates, who having abused lawful authority did not only usurp to be lords over God’s inheritance, but also intruded themselves in prime places of civil government; and by their Court of High Commission, did so abandon themselves to the prejudice of the Gospel, that the very quintessence of Popery was publicly preached by Arminians, and the life of the Gospel stolen away by enforcing on the Kirk a dead service book, the brood of the bowels of the whore of Babylon, as also to the prejudice of the country, fining and confining at their pleasure: in such sort, that trampling upon the necks of all whose conscience could not condescend to be of their own coin, none were sure of life nor estate, till it pleased God to stir up his own instruments, both in Church and policy, for preventing further, and opposing, such impiety.

For Montrose, then, Covenanting was not always an angry response to rule from Westminster; it could also be an angry response to rule from Canterbury. Montrose had been reading not only the Bible, but Foxe and Spenser, and from them he had learned about the global war against the evil Whore of Babylon, popery whether lodged in the so-called Church of England or in Rome. It was that war which he set out to fight. But he set out to fight it as a Highlander, and this meant to increase his own power at the expense of other Highland nobles.

He was not the only one. Archibald Campbell, Earl and later Marquess of Argyll, a Highland noble with a huge estate, much of which had been acquired from the MacDonalds by very dubious methods, similarly had an eye to the main chance. He became an ardent Covenanter because the king was willing to employ the MacDonalds under the Catholic Earl of Antrim to suppress the ‘rebellion’. The new war of religion meant business as usual among nobles and clans who had been enemies for centuries. Meanwhile, veterans from Protestant armies on the Continent were flooding back to Scotland, forming a professional army under Alexander Leslie, who had held a senior command under Swedish Protestant King Gustavus Adolphus.

It was an age that loved plotting and feared the plotting of others, but there may have been a real conspiracy. The Scots’ success at doing what some English people longed to do – rolling back the Laudian reforms – struck the English forcibly. There is some evidence of high-level contact between the king’s godly opponents in all three kingdoms from the early 1630s. John Pym, the Earl of Warwick, and Lord Saye and Sele actively plotted with their natural allies among the Covenanters to force Charles to call Parliament. Contemporaries thought that the Covenanters would never have dared to rebel without friends in England. We could even think of a kind of cross-border godly culture, with exchanges of publications, and personal contacts sensibly unmarked by treasonable correspondence. Print and pamphlets allowed the godly party in England to connect the terror of Catholicism with their own godly agenda.

This meant Montrose was not alone in his dread of the pope’s divisions. He believed firmly in monarchic power, too, but also thought that it must be restrained by law. He was elected to one of the ‘tables’, committees which also contained representatives of lairds, burghers and ministers, to monitor information which passed between the king and his council.

Opposite the Edinburgh Mercat Cross, a scaffold was erected. ‘James,’ said John Leslie to Montrose, ‘you will not be at rest till you be lifted up there above the rest in three fathoms of rope.’

From England, it all looked very different; so much so that you could be forgiven for thinking you were reading about different events. From London, the conflict did not appear to be a war about who the Scots were, but a war about the Laudian Church. To Charles, the Scots’ opposition seemed like a threat, a deliberate and mean attempt to undermine him. It was victory or death. His feelings blinded him to politics. For Charles, the Scots were out to destroy monarchy and impose a republic. ‘So long as the covenant is in force,’ he declared, ‘I am no more in Scotland than a Duke in Venice, which I will rather die than suffer.’ He spoke of ‘those traitors, the Covenanters’. He murmured defensively that ‘the blame for the consequences is theirs’. In August he ordered one of their propaganda sheets burned by the public hangman, and a few weeks later proclaimed all Scots invaders traitors whose lives were forfeit.

Charles saw the Covenanters as incomprehensible aliens, not as his familiar subjects even though he had spent his early childhood in Scotland, and may even have retained a very slight Scottish accent. Charles’s warm embrace of Europe in the person of his wife, his liking for European fashion and formality in matters of court life and religion, meant that Scottish plainness struck him as boorish and threatening.

Whitehall tried to organize an army under the Earl of Essex to go to Scotland. The godly Essex’s appointment was designed to reassure those who feared that the war was a campaign against the godly, since he had fought for the Dutch; however, Henrietta insisted that her ally the Earl of Holland be general of the horse. Holland was never an especially credible military leader, and his appointment convinced some that sinister forces were at work (meaning the queen). In fact Holland was part of a warmly Presbyterian faction at her court, which included Lucy Hay, but the anxiety about popery in high places refused to abate.

A slow-paced mobilization continued. Finally, at the end of March 1639, the king left, at the head of some 20,000 men, many of them notably unwilling. ‘We must needs go against the Scots for not being idolatrous and will have no mass amongst them’, declared an anonymous news-sheet. There was a shortage of incentives. Scotland was cold and plunder-free. The loyal, brave Sir Edmund Verney wrote to his son Ralph that ‘our army is but weak. Our purse is weaker, and if we fight with these forces and early in the year we shall have our throats cut, and to delay fighting long we cannot for want of money to keep our army together.’ He also commented that ‘I dare say there was never so raw, so unskilful and so unwilling an army brought to fight … Truly here are many brave gentlemen that for point of honour must run such a hazard as truly would grieve any heart but his that does it purposely to ruin them. For mine own part I have lived till pain and trouble has made me weary of to do so, and the worst that can come shall not be unwelcome to me, but it is a pity to see what men are like to be slaughtered here, unless it shall please God to put it in the king’s heart to increase his army, or stay till these know what they do, for as yet they are as like to kill their fellows as the enemy.’

Verney thought he knew who the mysterious agents behind the war were: ‘The Catholics make a large contribution, as they pretend, and indeed use all the ways and means they can to set us by the ears, and I think they will not fail of their plot.’ He thought that in part because Henrietta Maria was diligently trying to persuade the English Catholics to prove their loyalty to Charles with lavish donations to the war chest. She wrote individually to Catholic gentry families and especially to women. Some ladies did give up their jewellery, and peers like the Marquess of Winchester contributed four-figure sums. But a mysterious letter purporting to be from the pope urged them not to give. This may have been good advice, whoever it came from, because the main result was to make good, not especially godly men like Verney suspect that a papist plot lay behind the Scottish war. Madame de Motteville, Henrietta’s friend and confidante after the war, said Henrietta had told her that Charles was indeed trying to transform Scottish religion in order eventually to restore popery. It wasn’t likely, but she may have hoped it was true.

For the raggle-taggle army, it was hot and miserable on the way from Newcastle to Alnwick, thirsty and slow, and Alnwick was in a state of ruin, having been all but abandoned by the Percys for the urbanities of Syon House. The king tried to behave like a good commander. He lived under canvas with his men, he rode up and down to cheer his army, wearing out two mounts. At Berwick the rain set in.

People were, to say the least, sceptical – about the war itself, its causes, the army’s chances of success. George Puryer was hauled before the Yorkshire Justices for opining ‘that the soldiers were all rogues that came against the Scots, and if it had not been for the Scots thirty thousand Irish had risen all in arms, and cut all our throats, and that the king and queen was at mass together, and that he would prove it upon record, and that he is fitter to be hanged than to be a king, and that he hoped ere long that Lashlaye [David Leslie] would be a king, for he was a better man than any was in England’. This outburst aptly summarized the grievances of those unenthusiastic about the entire campaign, but there was another factor too; in fighting for the wrong side in matters of religion, the people of Stuart England feared not only that they were unjust, but that it might be a sign that they were damned, even a sign that God was deserting the nation.

The First Bishops’ War amply fulfilled the worst apprehension of Verney and the nation. The king’s army camped outside Berwick in May 1639, and on 3 June the Earl of Holland, too, managed to find in himself an even worse performance than the country had expected. He and his cavalry sprinted ahead of the disordered infantry. Late in a long afternoon, Holland suddenly saw his folly in leaving them behind. Eight thousand Scottish footsoldiers were closing in on him, in a wide sickle, as if his men were grass ripe for cutting. Holland halted, sensing disaster. He and the Scots gazed at each other in a deadly game of chicken. Blustering, Holland sent a trumpeter to ask for the Scots to withdraw. Leslie, the Scottish commander, sent the messenger back, with a cool request that Holland withdraw instead. Holland had his only flash of good sense for the day. He obeyed, and fled, pursued by the Scots’ cries of derision. They were in fine fettle after weeks of sleeping rough and singing psalms. The English were miserable; when it wasn’t raining, it was hot, and when it was hot there were midges, and what on earth were they doing here anyway?

The commanders were busy. They were not, however, busy safeguarding the army or doing the king’s bidding. Holland and Newcastle were expending their energies fighting a duel over an incident connected with the colours; colourful indeed, and full of musty rites of honour, but quite beside the point.

The king and the Scots managed a kind of peace in June 1639, signing a truce. But even while they were doing so, amicably enough, the first battle of the Civil Wars had begun, between Scot and Scot, between the Gordons, ardent supporters of the king, and the Covenanters under Montrose, at the Bridge of Dee.

The man in charge of the defence of Aberdeen had every reason to dislike Montrose, since Montrose had earlier been responsible for his captivity. Montrose had occupied the town before, on 25 May, but by then the Royalists had melted away. Montrose had marched north to besiege some local lairds, and in his absence the king’s ships, captained by Aboyne, had reoccupied Aberdeen on 6 June. By then Montrose had gone south to make sure his foe was not leading another, larger force. Finding this fear to be groundless, he marched north again.

The Dee was brimful of rain, swollen and impassable. The bridge was barricaded with earth and stones. Montrose’s guns pounded the bridge from the southern bank, but made no impact; the shot passed over the heads of the defenders. Some women came out with suppers for their men, a cosy domestic event which was to be repeated many times in the wars that followed. The day wore on till nightfall, with nothing done. Montrose knew delay would defeat him. He moved his guns, and next morning the bridge took a real pounding; nonetheless the defenders clung on to the north bank. So Montrose decided on a feint. He led his horse westwards, as if he meant to cross higher up. He set a trap with himself as the bait. The cannons kept up their pounding; one volley of shot took Seton of Pitmedden in the belly, cutting off his torso from his legs. Once enough defenders had been distracted into pursuing Montrose himself, the rest of the Covenanters charged the bridge, and the defenders retreated. Montrose marched into Aberdeen, refused to burn it, but allowed his troops to feast on its salmon and corn. But it was not subdued. As Montrose stood in the town centre, the man standing next to him was shot dead. The bullet was probably meant for Montrose.

For London it was calming and consoling when Charles finally returned from the Scottish wars, on 3 August 1639, but enthusiasm was damped by the fact that he arrived in his mother-in-law’s carriage; symbolically this seemed to signify that he was under her thumb. The arrival of a Spanish fleet was rumoured to be an instrument for invasion of Scotland, England, or both. Ballads and newsbooks stressed the Spaniards’ amazing wealth; they were said to have fired gold and silver from their cannons when they ran out of ammunition.

So in an atmosphere of fear, the stories and rumours circulated faster and faster in London and its environs. The rumpus over the prayer book was beginning to look to some ardent Protestants like the beginning of a war of Good against Evil. In June 1640, rumour tore through Woolwich and Plumstead that the high constable had searched the house of one Mrs Ratcliff, and found ten beds, still warm from their hastily-departed papist sleepers. The rumour reached the blacksmith, Timothy Scudder, in his shop at Plumstead; he passed it on to his customers, adding that he had heard that forty or fifty men had landed at Woolwich, heading for Mrs Ratcliff’s home, called Burridge House. A man named Allen Churchmen was loading his cart with bricks when he saw the men too. Meanwhile the maid at Burridge House had told the wife of the victualler that there was a vault being made at the house; could the missing men from the beds be hidden in it? At the local tavern, too, workmen from the house were questioned by townspeople eager for the latest news. The story flew from person to person, lighting up the social network as it went. As more and more stories of this kind were told, panic and terror spread. Fear is a solvent of social glues.

With the Scottish question unresolved, Charles sent for someone used to pacifying unruly Celts. He summoned Thomas Wentworth.

In the late summer of 1639, Wentworth was still in Ireland, where he had done his best to galvanize the tottering Church of Ireland as an advance unit in the onward march of civilization. Wentworth had managed to impose his own ideas on Ireland, but at the cost of alienating moderate Irish opinion, a policy whose drawbacks would become self-evident very shortly indeed. He had also become very rich through the normal joys of Stuart government: selling offices, taking over customs farms. He was distinctly reluctant to answer Charles’s command.

Perhaps Charles was a little afraid of this Yorkshire tough. ‘Come when you will,’ he wrote, with a mixture of autocracy and timidity, rather as he had once written to his elder brother, ‘ye shall be welcome to your assured friend, Charles Stuart.’ But Charles knew his man, perhaps informed about him by Henrietta, who in turn was briefed by Wentworth’s lover and court patron Lucy Hay. Charles at once granted him the earldom Wentworth badly wanted, so that he became Earl of Strafford; he also gave him command of the army. Wentworth’s plan was to use an Irish army to put down the Scots. But the situation was irretrievable. The Scots were all over Northumberland and Durham, and the English forces were the same poorly organized rabble; there was no chance of rounding them up. Wentworth kept hoping that English loathing of the Scots would galvanize them, but he underestimated the extent to which many Englishmen now felt that the Scots were their allies against enemies nearer at hand. So he was sent back to Ireland to raise money and soldiers. All this achieved was to create a panic in the already unruly troops about Catholics in their midst. Mutinies against ‘popish’ officers became common, and one officer was even set upon and beaten to death. Young Edmund Verney said he had to go to church three times a day to show his men that he was not Irish nor a papist.

In Ireland, there had been forty years of peace after Elizabeth I’s forces had finally defeated the Gaelic leaders in 1603. James could and did claim descent from the ancient royal houses of Ireland, which further strengthened London’s authority. The population expanded to around two million, and the economy grew too; there was now a small woollen industry, and some ironworks, but still to English eyes the majority of the people lived directly off the land, off bogs and forests. English-style landownership was slowly imported. Yet there were deep tensions. The largest group, three-quarters of the population, was the ethnic Irish, the Old Irish. Little has survived written by them, so it is hard to know how they saw themselves, but we do know that they were Catholic. Then there were the Old English, descendants of medieval settlers, also mainly Catholic but with a few Protestants like James Butler, Marquess of Ormond, mainly settled in the Dublin Pale, Munster and Connaught. Pushed out of high office by the Elizabethan regime to be replaced with Protestants despite their long loyalty to the Crown, they had begun to intermarry with and ally themselves to the Old Irish. The Old Irish were being pushed out, too – evicted from land their families had held for centuries by the Plantation Scheme, which took land from Irish Catholics and handed it over to Protestant settlers. Protestants knew how to farm properly – that is, in an English manner. There were 25,000 or so Scots among the settlers, because the government hoped that by encouraging this it would drive a wedge between the MacDonnells of Ulster and the McDonalds of Clan Ian Mor, both Catholic, both keen to form a single unit. Many Catholic Irish had begun to leave; some had left for foreign military service, and they were soon recruited by Spain to fight the Dutch, where they met the likes of London soldier Philip Skippon over the battlements, while Skippon in turn formed impressions of them, that they were part of a vast Catholic conspiracy to rule the world. Those who had fought against Spain in the Low Countries never forgot this.

When Wentworth had become Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1632, his job was to strengthen royal authority as much as possible. He wanted to civilize Ireland, but without spending any English money on it. He thought Ireland had had far too much English gold poured into it already; look at the fat cats among the Protestant landowners! Thus he alienated his natural allies. He planned a vast, money-raising plantation for Connaught. He also intended to put down the activities of the Presbyterian Scots in Ulster, a bunch of fanatics who stood in the way of Laudian reforms he hoped to spread. He also hated Catholics, and was determined to stop them appealing to the king for mercy over his head. There was a savage series of bad harvests and outbreaks of cattle disease in the 1630s, especially in Ulster. Soon, the only thing that everyone in Ireland could agree on was their loathing of Strafford. The Three Kingdoms were coming apart along the seams.

In the Bishops’ Wars, an estimated five hundred men died. Also lost was Charles’s personal rule. He had run out of money. He called Parliament on 13 April 1640, at Wentworth’s urging; Wentworth needed funds to pay his troops and to equip them. He promised that he could control an English Parliament just as he had Irish Parliaments. This was empty nonsense. Moreover, Wentworth was sick with gout and eye trouble; he had to be carried about in a litter.

Charles had a plan that he believed would help control Parliament. The Scots had written a letter – with Montrose among its signatories – sometime in February 1640 which was addressed to Louis XIII, King of France. It denounced Charles’s oppressive rule as the result of Spanish influence and Hapsburg power, and urged France to ally with the Scots against England. Charles was certain that Parliament would be so horrified by the letter that it would at once vote him the monies he needed to bring the renegade Scots to heel. But Parliament was not especially horrified, perhaps because better-informed members of the Commons knew that Louis’s adviser Cardinal Richelieu was unlikely to want to support the Covenanters. Stolidly, the Commons insisted on bringing a long list of English grievances to Charles before it would agree to vote him the money for the Scottish wars.

To grasp the transient drama of the Short Parliament it is necessary to understand what Parliament was in the seventeenth century. Although called by the same name and occupying the same site, it was very different from the body we know today. In the first place, a seventeenth-century House of Commons was not democratically elected. MPs were almost always from a particular stratum of society, the gentry or merchant class – the number of the latter among MPs was growing, but not at any breakneck speed – and most elections were not contested; rather, the MP stood before the assembled franchise-holders and was acclaimed. Even this very feeble democratic gesture was confined to men with property, characteristically landed property. Very occasionally a woman property-holder did try to exercise the franchise, but she was usually turned away by outraged males, and generally suffrage and being an MP were entirely landed male affairs. Women, servants and labourers were no more part of it than they were part of the monarchy – less, if anything, for a female ruler was more conceivable than a female MP. Like everything else in the seventeenth-century state, the vote was unevenly distributed, so that in some urban areas maybe as many as one-third of adult men could vote, but this was an atypical peak; in rural areas suffrage could fall below 5%. Then there was the problem of the Celtic kingdoms. Although the Welsh sent representatives, the Scots and Irish did not. Finally, the Commons’ powers were always bracketed by the power of the House of Lords, which represented the aristocracy and also the government of the Church of England.

Together with the monarch, the two houses were supposed to form a kind of snapshot of the nation’s various social classes, but in fact the result was a portrait-bust, showing the nation only from the chest up.

Secondly, Parliament could only be summoned by the monarch, and each time this happened a different body resulted, which then sat until the monarch chose to dismiss it. Finally, monarchs tended to see Parliaments solely as a way of raising money, while legal experts such as Edward Coke saw Parliaments as much more – vehicles of complaint, guarantees of justice if the courts failed, and – most controversially – sites of ultimate sovereignty, on behalf of the whole people. In fact most Parliamentary time was spent on local issues, often of soporific triviality to everyone outside the locale in question – deepening the River Ouse, for example. Men might become MPs because of an interest in some such local issue, or more simply and far more commonly to prove their status. Because becoming an MP was such a popular way to show yourself a proper gentleman, the number of seats kept increasing. Once elected, MPs tended to race up to London for as short a time as possible, since life in the capital was expensive and they had things to do at home. Divisions (actual votes) were fairly uncommon; mostly the goal was unity, ‘the sense of the house’, rather as in the elections themselves, where the goal was unanimity, participation, and not choice. Nor was there a great deal of talk or debate. Most country gentlemen were unused to speechmaking; only those who had been at university or the Inns of Court had the right rhetorical training. These were the same men who were charged with maintaining law and order when they got home to their counties – JPs, deputy lieutenants, tax commissioners, commissioners of array. So there were always plenty of other things to occupy time.

Parliament was supposed to act in an ad hoc manner, to fix things that had gone wrong, like a physician. So permanent alliances were rare and parties nonexistent. Parliament was also seen as ancient, part of an older way where the Commons spoke to the king: ‘We are the last monarchy in Christendom that yet retains our original rights and constitutions’, thought Sir Robert Phelips proudly in 1625. The antiquity of Parliament was reflected in the site where the House of Commons met. The Royal Chapel of St Stephen was secularized at the Reformation; before that, it had been part of Westminster Abbey, and by 1550 it had become the meeting-place of the Commons, which had previously been forced to cram itself into any old vacant committee room. The symbolism was obvious. The Commons was a true, redeemed fount of the virtue which the Catholic Church and its denizens had failed to acquire, and hence failed to infuse into the national fabric. Secular authority elbowed out spiritual authority while borrowing its prestige. The overlap between religion and politics was clear.

The chapel was tall, two-storeyed, and had long, stained-glass windows. The members sat in the choir stalls, on the north and south walls. As the number of MPs increased inexorably, these expanded to a horseshoe shape, four rows deep, and then an additional gallery was built in 1621 to house still more seats. It was like a theatre, thought John Hooker. The Speaker’s Chair replaced the altar, and his mace rested on a table which replaced the lectern. The antechapel acted as a lobby for the rare divisions; members who wished to vote aye could move out into it, while noes stayed inside. St Stephen’s Chapel was the seat of the House of Commons from 1550 until it was destroyed by fire in 1834. Parliament’s authority was enhanced by this spectacular setting, and from it the English developed the habit of housing important secular institutions in buildings of medieval Gothic design.

But the temple of democracy was surrounded by a den of thieves. Ben Jonson commented on how disreputable the little city of Westminster was. The Palace was surrounded by shops and taverns; it did not help the area’s reputation that the three best-known taverns were called Hell, Heaven and Purgatory. Hell had several exits, to allow MPs to make a quick getaway. The area around the Palace was crowded and crammed with hawkers’ stalls. Hoping to catch the eye of MPs and peers, were lobbyists; barristers, clerks, servants, messengers and other employees scurried down the many shortcuts that led from the street to the Thames, from the Commons chambers to the Lords. Printers congregated around the Palace, many specializing in printing petitions to the Commons, others documenting its activities, publicizing the Commons’ just discovery of the wickedness of this man, its fairness in helping that struggling local industry. When Parliament was sitting, its 450-odd Commons members, 50–70 peers and handful of bishops created an economic powerhouse for the entire area.

Parliament also had practical functions. It was supposed to make taxes honest. Chronically short of money, the monarchy got its income from rents, court fines, and a mass of funny, quaint revenue-raisers, including customs and excise (tonnage and poundage). What made for shortage was the Europe-wide economic crisis generated by inflation; taxes didn’t keep pace with the dropping value of money, and any attempt to make good the deficit by levying more of them led to political trouble. In theory, this grim scenario gave Parliament more power; any group of MPs could withhold money in exchange for concessions on whatever grievances they wanted to air. There were some Jacobean attempts at a settlement involving a fixed royal income, swapping taxes for redressed grievances, but they had always collapsed in the face of James’s apparently genetic difficulty in sticking to a budget for his own spending. Charles, sensibly enough, was trying to find a way around the entire creaky machine, a way that would allow him to make the English state modern, like France and Spain, its rivals. But some of the men who felt their local authority depended on Parliament knew they could use the House of Commons to stop him, and they did so without further ado.

They were helped by the fact that the House of Commons was not static. It was changing, evolving. Increasingly, local electors had begun to expect that MPs would deliver local projects; in exchange, they would agree to taxes without too much fuss. Conversely, if pet projects evaporated, they might grow restive. And it is easy to overstate the consensuality of Jacobean Parliaments. There was the particular case of the Petition of Right, produced by the 1628 Parliament, which announced roundly that there should be no taxation without representation, no taxes without the consent of the Commons. It also decried arbitrary imprisonment. As often, these were presented as traditional rights; actually, from the king’s point of view they extended Parliament’s powers, clarifying what had been gratifyingly murky, and he agreed to the petition only in order to ensure supply (a term which means the provision of money). The same 1628 Parliament, gratified, grew more and more determined to ensure the safety of Protestantism; indeed, its MPs felt they had been chosen for this very purpose. Amidst scenes of unprecedented passion, in which the Speaker was physically prevented from rising by Denzil Holles, who pinned him in his chair, the House condemned Arminians and the collectors and payers of tonnage and poundage as enemies of England, and deserving of death. What followed was dissolution, but the tantrum had its effect. Charles felt sure Parliament was a kind of rabble. It was its behaviour that made him grimly determined never to call one again. And when he did, having avoided doing so for twelve years, it turned out that its ideas had not changed.

Parliament met on 13 April 1640. At once it became apparent that little had changed since 1629; if anything the members were more anxious, more discontented, and more determined to be heard by the king. The personnel were different – one of the reasons for John Pym’s prominence was that virtually all his seniors had died in the long interval of personal rule – but their concerns remained the same. The stories of two MPs illustrate how Parliament came to be so intransigent. A member of the old guard from 1628, William Strode was well-known already for his radical activities in that year. Strode had played a major part in resisting the Speaker’s efforts to adjourn the House. He explained that ‘I desire the same, that we may not be turned off like scattered sheep, as we were at the end of the last session, and have a scorn put on us in print; but that we may leave something behind us’.

Summoned next day to be examined by the Privy Council, Strode refused to appear, and was arrested in the country, spending some time in the Tower after he had doggedly refused bail linked to a good-behaviour bond. He was still in gaol in January 1640, when he was finally released. This was supposed to be a reconciling, peacemaking move. In fact, he was a kind of living martyr for the Good Old Cause before it was properly formed. He was not a maker of policy, but he was exceedingly bitter against Charles. Clarendon calls him ‘one of the fiercest men of the party’, and MP Simonds D’Ewes describes him as a ‘firebrand’, a ‘notable profaner of the scriptures’, and one with ‘too hot a tongue’. Strode was also animated by the same sense of godly mission that was motivating the Covenanters themselves. Like their wilder spirits, he was fervently anti-episcopal. It was these godly views that led him to assert Parliamentary authority over prerogatives, the guarantee of religious rectitude and a bulwark against the crafts of popery.

One of the new MPs was Henry Marten, who was joining his father as an MP for a Berkshire seat dominated by the county town of Abingdon, later to become a godly stronghold during the war. He had already refused to contribute to a new Forced Loan to fund the Scottish wars. Marten was not, however, an obvious or orthodox member of the godly faction led by John Pym and his allies. Indeed, Marten was widely known as a rake and a rascal. Seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey called him ‘a great lover of pretty girls’, and he had been rebuked for it by the king himself, who called him ‘ugly rascal’ and ‘whore-master’. Aubrey claims Marten never forgot the insult, and it may have been this which made him different from his much more moderate father and brother-in-law. Marten emerged quickly as a radical voice and was to develop a career as a key man on committees later, but during the Short Parliament he was not an obvious leader. He was, however, one of many MPs who were determined to assert the Commons’ ‘ancient rights’ and restrain the king’s attempts to diminish them. He played no role; he made no speeches. But he was there, and his later career shows that he was convinced. The calling of the Short Parliament created an opportunity for men like Strode to win those like Marten to their view of events, and to make them allies. Led by Pym, those concerned about religion were able to do so very effectively.

Hence when the Commons met, and Secretary Windebank read the Scottish Covenanters’ letter to Louis XIII, he was met by an MP called Harbottle Grimston, who explained courteously that there were dangers at home that were even greater than those to which the letter referred. The liberty of the subject had been infringed, contrary to the Petition of Right. The king’s bad ministers were not giving him the right advice. All this was reinforced when John Pym rose for a two-hour speech in which he explained that ‘religion was the greatest grievance to be looked into’, and here he focused on what he described as a campaign to return England to popery. ‘The parliament is the soul of the commonwealth’, the intellectual part which governs all the rest. As well, he said, the right to property had been infringed. It was embarrassingly clear that he meant Ship Money, and when the Commons sent for the records of the Ship Money trials, it became even clearer. Finally, the Commons said firmly that it could give the king nothing until he clarified his own position.

After only a few days, it was evident to most that there was little hope of compromise. Charles offered a last-ditch deal; he agreed to abandon Ship Money in exchange for twelve subsidies for the war. This was less than he needed, but to Parliament it seemed like an enormous amount. MPs wondered about their constituents’ reactions. Charles could see there was no prospect that MPs would agree. Pym had been in touch with the Scots, and some whispered that he might bring their grievances before the House. Thus it was that by 5 May 1640 Charles had – equally hastily – decided to dissolve Parliament again. The Short Parliament was a sign of Charles’s short fuse, and a tactical disaster. The whole grisly mess to come might have been averted if Charles had only managed to endure people shouting critically at him for more than a month. But the insecure boy still alive and well in Charles Stuart simply couldn’t do it. He wanted to believe that Parliament would go away if he told it to, as it had in 1629. He wanted to believe that the problem was the rebellious Scots and their co-conspirators in London, and that defeating the former would put an end to the latter. He didn’t want to believe that John Pym, MP, had managed to talk others into sharing his own world-view. And so he couldn’t get together the money he needed to prosecute the Scottish war again.

But he was determined to try. On 20 August 1640 Charles left London to join his northern army, while the Scots crossed the Tweed and advanced towards Newcastle. The king had managed to scrape up around 25,000 men, but they were untrained, raw. And they were hungry; the army brought no bakeries, no brewhouses. And they were cold; no one except the senior officers had tents. Their pistols were often broken across the butt, making them more likely to explode.

They were explosive in other ways, too. They fired guns through tents, including the king’s tent. They were mutinous. They were beggarly. They were more fit for Bedlam (London’s asylum) or Bridewell Prison than the king’s service. They murdered a pregnant woman in Essex and beat up Oxford undergraduates. And some were vehement iconoclasts, which illustrated the incongruity of the war itself. In Rickmansworth, a quiet Sunday morning service was disrupted when Captain Edmund Ayle and his troop smashed the altar and rails. It was a taste of things to come; so too were the complaints from families whose larders were eaten bare by the hordes of soldiers, families who found themselves playing host to drunken soldiers.

When the hungry, ill-disciplined English clashed with the Scots at Newburn, on 28 August 1640, the Scots easily drove them back, securing their first victory over the English since Bannockburn. To the Scots, it was proof of their divine election. Bishops, thought one Covenanter, were ‘the panders of the Whore of Babylon, and the instruments of the devil’.

So when Charles had to call Parliament again, on 3 November 1640, John Pym had his chance, and he also had experience, allies, and knowledge of the system.

V Pym against the Papists

One of the first things done by the Parliament that opened on 3 November 1640 was to release William Prynne and Henry Burton from prison (John Bastwick came home to London a week later, to similar acclaim). All three had been imprisoned – Prynne first in Caernarvon, which the government hoped would be remote enough to allow the whole matter to be forgotten, then in Jersey when this hope proved vain – because of their vigorous objections to the Laudian Church and their agitation for godly reform. Prynne had first been gaoled for attacking the wickedness of stage plays, with a sly hostile glance at the queen, and from prison had written an angry denunciation of bishops; loathing of the episcopate was Bastwick’s and Burton’s crime too. All of them had become symbols of the sufferings of true Protestants under the regime of Charles and Laud.

Their release was therefore the beginning of a campaign against the personal rule of Charles, launched with a graphic political message. The release of the three was a sign that England was once more a nation fit for the godly, and that the Commons would keep it so. Prynne, Burton and Bastwick had all been sentenced during Charles’s personal rule to be mutilated by having their ears cropped, and then fined, and imprisoned for life for their writings in 1637. Each man, free but forever disfigured, was a walking advertisement for Parliament’s clemency and the king’s tyrannical cruelty.

They arrived in London on 28 November 1640, after a momentous journey. Their way was strewn with rosemary and bay, and they were greeted by bonfires and bells. It was an unusually warm day for November, tempting immense crowds out into its golden light. They stopped for dinner in the little town of Brentford, which was to be the scene of fierce fighting later in the war.

So thick was the throng that their progress slowed to one mile an hour. It was, thought some observers, almost like a royal procession. The living martyrs were home at last. In London itself, some three thousand coaches, and four thousand horsemen, and ‘a world of foot’ awaited them, everyone carrying a rosemary branch. Everyone noticed that the bishops were far from overjoyed. They had every reason for apprehension. Prynne’s warning to Laud that his own career was not immune from ruin was about to be as spectacularly fulfilled as the crudest tragedy.

And Prynne, like many a prophet, was himself one of the main causes of what he had cleverly foretold. On 18 December 1640, Laud was charged with high treason, and when he was removed to the Tower in the spring of 1641, Prynne gained access to his private papers, which he promptly published, carefully providing glosses. For Prynne – as for the young, clever John Milton – the bishops were nothing more nor less than ‘ravenous wolves’. It is fair to say that in bringing Laud to book, Prynne too was an iconoclast, and Laud an icon whose smash would prove his falsity. Just as early reformers had eagerly exposed Christ’s ‘blood’ of Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire to be a fake, so Prynne sought to open Laud to public inspection, to provoke healing ridicule and laughter. But there was always the risk that Prynne and Pym would come to resemble the men who, they felt, had persecuted them.

One of the new pamphlet plays, entitled Canterbury His Change of Diet, was composed to mark the occasion of the condign punishment meted out to the three. ‘Privately acted near the Palace-yard at West-minster’, said the title page. ‘The Bishop of Canterbury having variety of dainties, is not satisfied till he be fed with the tippets of men’s ears.’ Laud’s love of luxury, his links with the court, are turned into a kind of monstrous cannibalism.

The charges against Laud had to do with profound, deepening, widening dread of popery. It was this fear that animated the man who led the Commons, sometimes from the wings but increasingly from centre-stage. The man was John Pym, and his hour had found him. It was Pym’s task not only to reflect but also to whip up anti-popery, to turn headshaking dismay at the queen’s antics into shouting alarm. Only by generating a sense of national crisis – England was in danger, about to be swept away – could Pym hope to overcome the English political system’s tendency to right itself, to seek consensus and shun division.

The ground for his campaign had already been prepared. John Pym’s anti-popery was not unique to him, nor was his use of it in Parliament historically unprecedented. The Parliament of 1621 had been preoccupied with the idea that a Jesuit conspiracy was behind the fall of the Palatinate to the forces of Rome. The Parliament of 1628/9 was anxious that Arminianism was spreading. Arminianism was the belief that men and women could be saved by their own works, and by their own goodness and 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. As Pym’s stepbrother Francis Rous put it: ‘an Arminian is the spawn of a Papist; and if there come the warmth of favour upon him, you shall see him turn into one of those frogs that rise out of the bottomless pit. And if you mark it well, you shall see an Arminian reaching out his hand to a Papist, a Papist to a Jesuit, a Jesuit gives one hand to the Pope and the other to the King of Spain; these men having kindled a fire in our neighbour country, now they have brought over some of it hither, to set on flame this kingdom also.’ Arminianism was seen as a menace because it was believed to prevent the kind of real, passionate soul-searching, with real self-loathing and much anguish, that was needed for true repentance. As a result of heightened anxieties of this kind, becoming an MP came to involve a declaration of religious allegiance. When Richard Grosvenor made a speech in support of candidates in Cheshire in 1624, he roundly announced that they were staunch Protestants, ‘untainted in their religion’. The 1624 elections were especially dominated by anxieties about popery in the wake of the Spanish Match and its failure.

This dread of sneaking popery centred on the court, because it was the queen’s influence that was feared most. Sir William Bulstrode was horrified by the spectacle of people trooping off to Mass with the queen: ‘so that it grows ordinary with the out-facing Jesuits, and common in discourse, Will you go to Mass, or have you been at Mass at Somerset-house? There coming five hundred a time from mass.’ In this atmosphere, Pym scarcely had to work hard to rouse fears that were ever-present.

The fear was renewed by Protestant England’s consciousness of its own history. John Foxe’s book Acts and Monuments, known as the Book of Martyrs, which graphically described the burning of Protestants during the reign of Mary Tudor eighty years earlier, was widely read and highly influential. The godly iconoclast William Dowsing owned three copies of it for his own personal use. So eager was Ipswich for the book that a satirist invented a maiden who shaped her sweetmeats into figures from Foxe. More recent events also haunted the Protestant imagination. Dread was fanned every year in the fires of the fifth of November. The Gunpowder Plot made papists and Jesuits seem especially the enemies of the Houses of Parliament. The godly Samuel Ward always warned his congregations on 5 November of the terrible danger in which they stood. Every year the celebration of Bonfire Night, in which often the pope and not Guy Fawkes was burned in effigy, reminded everyone that Catholic conspirators might be in their midst, but that God had delivered them. In the 1630s, only Puritans celebrated, but by 1644 the whole nation adopted the festival; even Royalists tried to invoke it by claiming that it was Parliament that resembled the gunpowder plotters. November was, besides, a Royalist month; it embraced Princess Mary’s birthday on the fourth, and Henrietta Maria’s on the sixteenth, and the king’s on the nineteenth. Despite all this, spectacular fireworks displays marked the day in November 1647, celebrating Parliament’s victories. The celebrations were themselves a kind of elaborate allegory of popery, and included ‘fire-balls burning in the water, and rising out of the water burning, showing the papists’ conjuration and consultation with infernal spirits, for the destruction of England’s king and Parliament’. They also rang the church bells all over England every 5 November. They grew louder and louder as the 1630s went on, and somehow, in some places, the bells rung for the king’s coronation day become softer, less sustained. Catholic courtiers, Catholic nobles, and above all the queen: men and women began to wonder if they were poised to act, to use the king as their tool.

Everyone had noticed how many Catholics eagerly joined the king’s army against the Scots. All through the 1630s there were stories of plotting papists: a mole-catcher called Henry Sawyer was examined by the council for saying that when the king went to Scotland to be crowned, the Catholics would rise up and attack the Protestants. It was widely whispered that such campaigns would be led by Catholic gentry, but some suspected involvement at higher levels. The Earl of Bridgewater, the young John Milton’s patron, reported worriedly to Secretary Coke that there had been a violent incident; an elderly woman had begged alms of a young gallant on horseback, who had responded by offering her a shilling if she would kneel to the cross on the shilling itself. She refused, and the young man killed her. Terror was increased when the winter of 1638/9 saw freak storms, which contemporaries read as signs. Dennis Bond of Dorset reported in his diary that ‘this year the 15 December was seen throughout the whole kingdom the opening of the sky for half a quarter of an hour’. Henry Hastings reported that a vision of men with pikes and muskets had been seen in the sky. Brilliana Harley thought that in 1639 the anti-christ must begin to fall, while the armies themselves quailed at the spectacle of lightning and thunder. ‘Many fears we have of dangerous plots by French and papists’, recorded Robert Woodforde, while the alarm was such in Northamptonshire that some town marshals in Kettering set up a round-the-clock guard. On further rumours that papists were making ready to set fire to the town, the watch was strengthened. It was becoming clear that Charles couldn’t altogether control the situation. People began to wonder if he could guarantee the safety of the English Church and its members from the dreadful dangers besetting them within and without the kingdom. And Charles himself might be a danger.

The man who rose to greatness by exploiting those fears also believed in them; indeed, he was their creation. John Pym came from Somerset, from an estate which had been in the family for three hundred years. His father died when he was only a baby, and his mother married again. Later, Pym’s mother believed she was damned, a tragedy which often afflicted Calvinists. Her new husband was a godly gentleman of Cornwall, Anthony Rous, and Pym grew up in the area around Plymouth. In Armada year, he was five years old when Drake set sail, and perhaps he never forgot the fear, the beacons lit from end to end of the land, sending their smoke high up into the sky. Anthony Rous was not the man to let him forget; he was one of Drake’s executors, and was himself a red-hot Puritan, running a kind of house of refuge for godly ministers. However, his brand of austere Calvinism had not yet become a source of disaffection; indeed, it was the glue that kept godly left and Anglican middle together in the years of Pym’s childhood.

Nevertheless, Pym lived a comfortable gentleman’s life – Oxford, and then the Middle Temple. But his time there was disrupted by what might have seemed like a frightening recapitulation of his worst childhood fears; while he was in residence, in 1605, the Gunpowder Plot was discovered, proof that plotting Catholics were here, in England. The gentleman’s life resumed, but there was much evidence that it seemed fragile. He never really made headway in Somerset society; his circle of friends was solid but limited, and when drawn to the attention of the Commons, he was styled ‘one Pym, a receiver’, which meant he was deputed to collect the king’s rents, a process that got him involved in supplying timber for the repair of the coastal forts and thus discovering their parlous state for himself, something that horrified the man who had known the menace of the Armada as a boy. His job also involved disafforestation, an operation which meant that ordinary people lost the right to gather firewood in the forest and to pasture animals in it. This was felt as ruthless and unjust by its victims, whose livelihoods were thus destroyed, and though Pym did his best to defend his tenants on at least one occasion he was also the landlord’s man, not the tenants’ representative. What he wanted was plenty of money in the royal exchequer so that the darkness of popery could be repelled by shot and shell.

As an MP he was serious. He was unresponsive to the House’s mood, unwilling to joke and play, and poor at improvisation. He had his own ideas, and he had no wish to modify them. Yet this carried its own conviction in uncertain times. What helped to give credence to his vehement religious opinions and fears was his mastery of facts and figures in the labyrinthine areas of Crown finances. He was also exceptionally dedicated; he wanted his way more than most of the others, who preferred to adjourn and go off to a good ordinary. But he soon became a brilliant manipulator of the House’s amour-propre. Only the potential power of the Commons offered the frightened little boy that Pym had been safety from the popery he hated and dreaded. So in 1621 he was noticeably anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic, but had also begun to ruminate on Parliament’s role in safeguarding England against popery. ‘The high court of Parliament is the great eye of the kingdom, to find out offences and punish them’, he said. Already he saw the king as an obstacle to this safeguarding: ‘we are not secure enough at home in respect of the enemy at home which grows by the suspen[ding] of the laws at home’. He said papists broke the ‘independency upon others’ which loyal subjects owed, and that the king, by mistaken lenity towards them, was hazarding the state. His position had hardened further by 1624, when he urged a search for recusants who gave away their secret beliefs by their acts; this is anxious, even paranoid, and his subsequent job of hunting down popish schoolmasters increased his anxiety and reinforced his convictions. By 1628 he was in the thick of the campaign for the Petition of Right, and was the chief opponent of Arminianism, which for Pym was a way for the Devil to persuade people that they need not repent.

Like many godly men, Pym was also involved in New World colonization projects, often attempts to build beyond the seas the godly nation which was failing to materialize in the British Isles. Pym was on the Providence Company board, whose very name proclaimed its godliness. This also yielded valuable political contacts. Through it Pym kept in constant touch with his patron the Earl of Bedford, Lord Saye and Sele, and the Earl of Warwick. They met often at Saye’s London house. Pym was treasurer, and helped John Hampden prepare his case against Ship Money in 1638.

It was the opening debate of the Short Parliament that made Pym a national hero. It was not his first attempt to energize the nation by articulating its dread of papists, but the Laudian reforms and the Scottish wars meant that the nation had now moved into step with Pym’s own terrors. He summarized every grievance against the king, but the focus was on religion. Later, Oliver St John said that Pym and his friends had been determined to ensure that the Short Parliament failed.

When the Short Parliament dissolved, Pym began to negotiate with the Scots, bypassing the king, while during the election campaign for the Long Parliament Pym ‘rode about the country to promote the election of the puritanical brethren to serve in Parliament’. Once Parliament met on 3 November 1640, he moved at once to attack Strafford, and called him ‘the greatest enemy to the liberties of his country, and the greatest promoter of tyranny, that any age had produced’. In this he was acting for an alliance of English dissidents and the Scots, who knew Strafford had argued for the Anglicization of Scotland as a province of England, and that he had wanted to go on fighting the war after the Scottish victory at Newburn. The Irish, too, loathed Strafford, and in beginning impeachment proceedings, Pym was acting on behalf of interests in all three kingdoms.

During the next few months, Pym created the laws and institutions that were to govern the early Parliamentarian regime: the Militia Ordinance, the Nineteen Propositions, and above all the Committee of Safety. Its very name points to what had been important to Pym all along. He was not a radical; he believed that the Elizabethan constitution was being undermined by a popish conspiracy. In the Church, too, all he wanted was the Elizabethan black-and-white simplicity of his childhood and youth; he did not want anything truly radical. His own paranoia about papists within was widely shared, but partly because he made it so by voicing his fears eloquently and publicly. It was he more than anyone else who persuaded the men of the House of Commons that a popish conspiracy had entangled the king and his chief ministers, and posed an immediate threat. On 7 November 1640, Pym made a speech two hours long, claiming there was a design of papists to alter law and religion. Sir Francis Seymour voiced the ideas central to Pym: ‘one may see what dangers we are in for religion Jesuits and Priests openly to walk abroad and particularly what encouragement this is to our Papists. No laws in execution. For papists often to go to mass.’ Pym moved that a committee be appointed ‘to see that the papists depart out of town’. The committee was duly created on 9 November 1640, and was empowered to supervise and report on any dispensations granted to recusants. The king was regarded as ineffective because so many papists, it was said, were living round about and were protected by Letters of Grace, royal pardons-in-advance. So the committee began drawing up plans to constrain papists more tightly. Why shouldn’t the anti-recusancy laws apply not just to known recusants, but also to the secret and crypto-papists infesting the Church and the state? Why shouldn’t the laws be extended? Pym even suggested that Catholics should be forced to wear distinctive and recognizable dress, as if they were prisoners. He and the Commons then proposed that the queen should be deprived of all her Catholic servants. ‘We ought to obey God rather than man, and that if we do not prefer God before man, he will refuse us’, said Pym. This statement shows how radical thinking in religion could come to sound like – and to be – political radicalism. What was odd about Pym was shared by a lot of his contemporaries. They could act and talk radically while their reflexes remained conservative, even reactionary. They backed awkwardly into a revolution they did not intend.

The committee on recusants reported to the House on 1 December 1640. Sixty-four priests and Jesuits had been discharged from prison, on Secretary of State Windebank’s authority. Windebank had also written repeatedly to local authorities asking them to halt their proceedings against papists. The House ordered Windebank to appear, to explain himself, and Pym and the future Royalist general Ralph Hopton moved that ‘some course might be taken to suppress the growth of popery’. Then two days later the House ordered all JPs in Westminster, London and Middlesex to tell churchwardens to compile a list of known recusants ‘so that they may be proceeded against with effect, according to law, at the next session, notwithstanding any inhibition or restraint’.

For Pym, the papists were not only a problem in matters of religion; they had become a political menace as well, because they were organizing a conspiracy ‘to alter the kingdom in religion and government’. The country was awash with rumours of papists amassing arms; the House was told of a stabbing carried out by a popish priest because the magistrate in question was about to act against papists in Westminster. They worried that the army commanders were untrustworthy, and agreed to create another committee to look into ‘the state of the king’s army, and what commanders, or other inferior officers, are Papists’. Sir John Clotworthy, the tirelessly godly Ulsterman and Pym’s relation by marriage, reported that eight thousand of Ireland’s ten thousand soldiers were papists, ‘ready to march where I know not. The old Protestant army have not their pay, but the Papists are paid.’

The Commons began to take action to protect the realm. It purged itself of papists by deciding that all members must take communion and that the House should also make a confession of faith renouncing the pope. Meanwhile petitions complained that the government was too lenient towards papists. From the counties came stories of planned Catholic risings. John Clotworthy reported that there was a Catholic Irish invasion at hand. Pym told Parliament that divers persons about the queen were plotting a French invasion. In the Grand Remonstrance, too, plots were prominent, among Jesuits, bishops, prelates and popish courtiers. In reply, some hardy souls pointed out that nothing very much had happened yet, but this did not stop Pym or his followers from disseminating their fears. They may never have become majority beliefs, but they did become very widespread. The Declaration of Fears and Jealousies was especially fearful about Henrietta Maria, ‘a dangerous and ill-affected person who hath been admitted to intermeddle with the great affairs of state, with the disposing of places and preferments, even of highest concernment in the kingdom’.

So widespread was the fear, that ‘popery’ was coming to mean something close to ‘anything in religion or politics that I don’t approve of or like’, that though it extended itself from actual card-carrying Catholics to those in the Church of England suspected of an overfondness for ceremony, it remained firmly grounded in a clear if misinformed apprehension of Romish practices. In particular, popery was foreign, and especially it was Spanish, and hence cruel, or French, and hence silly and nonsensical. Or, to put it another way, the English – and for that matter, the Scots – increasingly developed their ideas of national identity in response to the perceived menace of popery. To be truly, properly English or Scottish was to stand against Rome, an idea that was promulgated by writers from Edmund Spenser to every grubbing pamphleteer. This was to cast a long shadow for Charles Stuart, for it was thus that he could come to seem a traitor to his own people. The flavour of foreignness was to be intensified by the stories from Ireland later in 1641.

In just the first few months of the Long Parliament, no fewer than five popish plots were reported and discussed. A papist army was thought to lurk in South Wales. In early May 1641, every member of the House pledged to ‘maintain and defend the true reformed Protestant religion … against all Popery and Popish innovations’. Pym himself was menaced personally, or so one newsbook thought. It reported on ‘a damnable treason by a contagious plaster of a plague-sore, wrapped up in a letter and sent to Mr. Pym; wherein is discovered a devilish plot against the parliament, Oct. 25 1641’. Two terrifying menaces to security combined: plague and popery.

Or was it the printer who deserves credit for ingenuity? There was a raging bull market for popish plots in 1641. There was A bloody plot, practised by some papists in Darbyshire, and lately discovered by one Jacob Francklin. There was Matters of note made known to all true Protestants: 1st, the plot against the city of London [&c.]. A most damnable and hellish plot exprest in three letters, against all Protestants in Ireland and England, sent out of Rome to the chief actors of the rebellion in Ireland. There was The truest relation of the discoverie of a damnable plot in Scotland. And A discovery to the prayse of God, and joy of all true hearted Protestants of a late intended plot by the papists to subdue the Protestants. And A discovery of the great plot for the … mine of the city of London and the parliament, a pamphlet sometimes attributed to Pym himself. There were dozens of pamphlets like these doing the rounds. One was Gods Late Mercy to England, in discovering of three damnable plots by the treacherous Papists, printed in 1641. It told a compelling story. On 15 November, a poor man named Thomas Beale lodged in a ditch near a post-house, and while thus concealed, he heard two men planning to surprise and take London for the papists, and to murder key MPs. They and their co-conspirators had been promised ten pounds and the chance to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist if they did so. Beale rushed to the Commons with his story, and the malefactors were arrested, but the author decided that ‘we have … as just cause to fear the papists in England as they did in Ireland’. The House agreed, and responded with ever-tougher anti-papist legislation. Another pamphlet, A True Relation of a Plot, told of Catholics in Derbyshire, amassing supplies of gunpowder – itself virtually a logo for Catholics after 1605 – and also old iron; they had planned to blow up the local church with the worshippers inside.

So readers could learn some simple lessons. For the pamphleteers, Catholics were people with gunpowder, people who plotted; traitors too. They had tortuous, devious minds. They were animated by hatred of the good and godly. And they were at this very moment menacing the country from within: why, any stranger at an alehouse might be a Jesuit in disguise. And from without, too: the Jesuit in the alehouse might be in touch with a vast army ready to sweep into England.

Into this dynamite came a spark. On 1 November 1641, news reached London of a major rebellion in Ulster. Many years later, one of the many Protestants terrorized by it recalled the fear. Alice Thornton was the daughter of Sir Christopher Wandesford, who succeeded his cousin Strafford as Lord Deputy of Ireland:

That horrid rebellion and massacre of the poor English protestants began to break out in the country, which was by the all-seeing providence of God prevented in the city of Dublin, where we were. We were forced upon the alarum to leave our house and fly into the castle that night with all my mother’s family and what goods she could. From thence, we were forced into the city, continuing for fourteen days and nights in great fears, frights, and hideous distractions from the alarums and outcries given in Dublin each night by the rebels. These frights, fastings, and pains about packing the goods, and wanting sleep, times of eating, or refreshment, wrought so much upon my young body, that I fell into a desperate flux, called the Irish disease, being nigh unto death, while I stayed in Dublin.

Stories of terrible atrocities committed by the insurrectionists circulated in London as well as in Dublin. This may have been the kind of thing Alice feared:

they [Irish rebels] being blood-thirsty savages … not deserving the title of humanity without any more words beat out his brains, then they laid hold on his wife being big with child, & ravished her, then ripped open her womb, and like so many Neros undauntedly viewed nature’s bed of conception, afterward took her and her Infant and sacrificed in fire their wounded bodies to appease their Immaculate Souls, which being done, they pillaged the house, taking what they thought good, and when they had done, they set the house on fire.

This horrible story may or may not be true: as in the Indian Mutiny in the 1850s, stories like this had propaganda value far in excess of any simple truth. But to a young English girl, fifteen-year-old Alice Thornton, crouching in Dublin, stories like this might seem a direct threat to her in particular. Immediately the news press went into overdrive, and tales of atrocities began to pour forth. There were descriptions of gruesome tortures, especially stories of unborn babies ripped from their mothers’ wombs, wives raped in front of their husbands, and girls in front of their parents. The rebels allegedly hanged a woman by her hair from a door; in Tyrone, it was said, a fat Scot was killed and rendered into tallow candles, in a grisly prefiguration of the Holocaust’s soap industry. Humble people lost relatives and friends too. Among the dead was Zachariah, the brother-in-law of London woodturner Nehemiah Wallington, though the news did not reach Nehemiah himself until almost two years later, in 1643. The story was horrible: Zachariah had been cut down while his children begged, ‘Oh, do not kill my father. Oh, do not kill my father.’ Two of those children also died that winter, of cold and exposure, and Zachariah’s widow, the sister of Nehemiah’s wife, had to scramble along in a desperate plight, so desperate that she eventually took an Irish Catholic as her lover and protector. This horrified Nehemiah, but it was a move born of dire necessity. She sent one of her surviving sons to her sister and to Nehemiah, where he was trained as a woodturner. At least she had managed to get him away.

Nehemiah knew by then just how to interpret Zachariah’s last words, which he carefully transcribed into his diary: ‘as for the rebels, God will raise an army in His time to root them out, that although for a time they may prevail, yet at last God will find out men enough to destroy them. And as for the king, if it be true, as these rebels say, that they have his commission … to kill … all the Protestants … then surely the Lord will not suffer the king nor his posterity to reign, but the Lord at last will requite our blood at his hands.’ They were to be the instruments of God’s vengeance. This idea, piled on top of months of anxiety and panic, created a mentality which led people to think that the king needed to be restrained. After the war, clergyman and chronicler Richard Baxter said the rising was one of the main causes of the Civil War: ‘the terrible massacre in Ireland, and the threatenings of the rebels to invade England’; Royalist historian Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon also thought it a key factor. John Dod told the Commons Committee that ‘he saw a great number of Irish rebels whom he knew had a hand in the most barbarous actions of the rebellion, as the dashing of small infants and the ripping up of women and children and the like’. Joseph Lister, a boy of twelve at the time, never forgot his terror that he and other Protestants were about to be set upon as the Protestant Irish had been: ‘O what fears and tears, cries and prayers night and day!’ he recalled, ‘was there then in many places, and in my dear mother’s house in particular!’

London still retained some sense about nonsense. In January 1642, a tract entitled No pamphlet, but a detestation against all such pamphlets as are printed, concerning the Irish rebellion, denounced the ‘many fabulous pamphlets that are set out concerning the rebels in Ireland’ as forgeries. But similar accounts of the Thirty Years War made them seem likely. John Erwyn led a party of Scots soldiers to Edward Mullan’s house in Ireland on Sunday 2 February 1642. He drew his sword ‘and wounded the said Mary Mullan in her head, and forehead, and cut her fingers, at which time she cried out, “Dear John, do not kill me, for I never offended you”, repeating this to him two or three times, whereupon he thrust her under the right breast and she gave up the ghost … And after a time the said Erwyn took a mighty lump of fire and put it on the said Mary Mullan’s breast, expecting she was still living.’

Mary’s words sound like the desperate self-defences of women accused of witchcraft by violent neighbours. Particularly telling is the test to see if Mary is really dead; it sounds as if Erwyn expects Mary to be impervious to weapons. A pamphlet called Treason in Ireland told typical stories, and invited its readers to see the sponsors as traitors of the worst and cruellest kind:

Henry Orell, when they slew his wife an ancient woman, and ravished her daughter in the most barbarous manner that ever was known; and when they had done pulled her limbs asunder, and mangled her body in pieces without pity or Christianity … The woman and her maid a brewing, for it was an alehouse, where they brewed their own drink. The maid they took and ravished, and when they had abused her body at their pleasure, they threw her into the boiling cauldron.

The terror in England was almost a panic. On one public fast day at Pudsey the congregation was thrown into turmoil because of reports that the Irish rebels had invaded the West Riding and had reached Halifax and Bradford. ‘Upon which the congregation was all in confusion, some ran out, others wept, others fell to talking to friends, and the Irish massacre being but lately acted, and all circumstances put together, the people’s hearts fainted with fear.’ Fears were not allayed till it was discovered that the supposed rebels were actually refugees. Elizabeth Harding testified that her lodger had remarked, on hearing of the Irish rebellion, that ‘the worst of the plot was not yet discovered there, and that the Protestants heels would go up apace’. Devonshire petitioners were terrified when refugees told them of ‘their wolvish enemies, that the bounds of that kingdom shall not limit their malicious tyranny’. Many Londoners, like Nehemiah, believed that ‘he that will England win/ Must first with Ireland begin’. Wallington added, ‘now, all these plots in Ireland are but one plot against England, for it is England that is that fine, sweet bit which they so long for, and their cruel teeth so much water at. And therefore these blood-thirsty papists do here among us in England plot what may be for our overthrow, to bring in their damnable superstition and idolatry among us.’ Parliament thought that the English Catholics were to have risen at the same time. The counties that felt especially exposed – North Wales, Cheshire and Lancashire – began asking London for help.

People felt they were already at war, and believed that the rebels would find a fifth column of supporters poised to help them. In Parliament ‘new jealousy and sharpness was expressed against the papists’, said Clarendon, ‘as if they were privy to the insurrection in Ireland, and to perform the same exploit in this kingdom’. Considerable numbers of English Catholics were said to have gone over to Ireland to help the rebels. Jesuits were (as usual) thought to be behind it all. Pym was quickfooted as ever, and managed to make political capital from it all: ‘the papists here are acted by the same principle as those in Ireland; many of the most active of them have lately been there; which argues an intercourse and communication of counsels’. One pamphlet revealed a plan to blow up and burn the chief English cities and to land an army. When another plot was revealed in London, ‘the poor people, all the countries over, were ready either to run to arms, or hide themselves thinking that the Papists were ready to rise and cut their throats’, wrote Richard Baxter. Some counties asked for help in rounding up the local Catholics who were believed to be on the brink of helping to launch an invasion.

There is no evidence that English Catholics had any such intentions, and most of them probably shared their countrymen’s dislike and fear of the Irish; one, John Carill, of Harting in Sussex, actually sold lands to raise money for an army to suppress the rebellion, a tactful move to appease his neighbours. But it made little difference. Ardent Protestants saw events in both Ireland and England as signs of a general European Catholic conspiracy to eradicate Protestantism. The worst-case scenario envisaged the Irish landing in England, backed by Spain and France; then they could turn against the Dutch too. It was believed that the pope was behind this, for he had given plenary indulgences to all those who made war on his behalf. As fears of a Catholic invasion spread, England was seen as a tiny, gallant Protestant nation, encircled by conniving Catholic superpowers keen to blot it from the earth.

As with more recent conspiracy theories, the immediate result was loss of civil liberties. Trunks and possessions of suspected persons heading for Ireland were ordered to be searched. Letters were intercepted and read. Even foreign ambassadors’ reports came under scrutiny. Irish soldiers returning home from fighting for the kings of France or Spain were detained at the ports and questioned. A register of Irish residents in Middlesex and Westminster was drawn up, and all over England and Wales Irish Catholics and priests were arrested. English and Welsh Catholics found themselves secured and disarmed too. Catholic peers and bishops in the House of Lords came under renewed political attack. And yet another army began to be raised to put down the rebellion.

The question was, could the king be trusted with such an army? What if it were used against the king’s critics at home? After all, the rebels themselves unhelpfully claimed to be fighting for the maintenance of the royal prerogative against the Puritans in Parliament. They also claimed they held the king’s commission under the great seal. In London the queen and other advisers were openly attacked as the authors of the rebellion; at the beginning of 1642 Pym claimed that the king had granted passes to the rebels. Clarendon claimed in his History of the Rebellion, written after his exile from court in 1667, that some chose the Parliamentarian side because they saw the king as the ally of the Irish rebels; he also thought that the idea of the king as a secret supporter of Catholicism was a key factor in dividing the nation. It was not only the godly who were terrified by the Ulster Rising. Royalists were also revolted; Wales, for example, suffered more Irish invasion panics than most areas, but eventually became staunchly Royalist. It seems as if the rebellion in Ireland only galvanized anti-monarchical spirits when added to a premix of godliness, dislike of Laud and anxiety about the Catholics at court. Parliamentarian propaganda sought to link Laud with popery, tyranny and barbarity, while Parliament fashioned itself as the upholder of traditional liberties. For the rest of the war, Parliament would harp on this note, constantly pointing to papists within Royalist circles or forces, asserting that some Irish rebels had been recruited into the king’s armies, while Royalist forces were compared with the rebels at the taking of Marlborough, at which the prisoners ‘were used after the manner that the Irish rebels used the Protestants in Ireland’.

Late in 1641 and for the first months of 1642, Protestant Irish refugees flooded into England and Wales, seeking aid from relatives, poor relief, or Parliament. Edmund Ludlow noted that everywhere they went they told stories of the brutalities they had endured, sometimes in a bid to gain relief. Many arrived at Chester and Milford Haven, and more in Lancashire and the Isle of Wight in March 1642 and February 1643 respectively. The earlier refugees were mostly women and children. They told their stories to eager, frightened audiences.

One account given by Richard Baxter summed up the intense propaganda appeal of the Ulster Rising:

This putteth me in mind of that worthy servant of Christ, Dr Teat, who being put to fly suddenly with his wife and children from the fury of the Irish Rebels, in the night without provision, wandered in the snow out of all ways upon the mountain till Mrs Teat, having no suck for the child in her arms, and he being ready to die with Hunger, she went to the brow of a rock to lay him down, and leave him that she might not see him die, and there in the snow out of all ways where no footsteps appeared she found a suck-bottle full of new, sweet milk, which preserved the child’s life.

The helpless women and children, at the mercy of their enemies but cared for by God, were truly iconic for all Protestants in all three kingdoms. If anyone who could read was not afraid of Catholic plots in 1640, a diet of this kind of print ensured that they were terrified by 1642.

Part of the Commons’ efforts to save the kingdom from being engulfed by popery was the prosecution of Strafford, who had come to seem symbolic of the worst aspects of the personal rule. Loathing Strafford was a way of complaining about Charles. Traditionally, grievances about monarchs expressed themselves as dislike of the monarch’s councillors. More importantly, Strafford was the direct enemy of Pym and his supporters. He had tried to get the Commons to impeach them for their correspondence with the Scots Covenanters; now they turned the tables on him.

Pym had thought of Strafford’s trial as an obvious case of treason. But treason had to be a crime against the king. It was widely known that Charles had trusted Strafford completely and was still refusing to get rid of him or to back away from his policies. So Pym said that Strafford was guilty of treason not against the king, but against the constitution. Here again, Pym seems to have reversed accidentally into radicalism because of expediency. Strafford sensibly pointed out what a dangerous idea this was, but by then he was so hated that the London crowd simply wanted him dead, and was not over-particular about the means. The case began with Pym’s sizzling attack on Strafford’s activities in Ireland, another Pym theme. But things didn’t quite go to plan. At his trial, Strafford remained brave and calm, and even those who loathed him were moved to grudging admiration. His worst crime, which was to have said that an Irish army might be brought over to reduce Scotland and then England, was poorly evidenced – only Henry Vane the Elder could be got to say that he had heard Strafford actually say it, and the law required two witnesses. Nonetheless, Strafford’s indictment allowed the Commons to practise talking as if they and not the king embodied English sovereignty. It was to become an acceptable rather than an unthinkable idea.

Now it was another MP, godly Arthur Haselrig, who had a clever new notion, though not one congenial to Pym, who was hoping for a show-trial. Why not drop the cumbersome impeachment, which actually required tiresome amounts of proof? Why not simply introduce a Bill of Attainder? All this required was a Commons vote. At first Pym was against it, but came around to the idea once he saw that it was the only sure-fire way to bring Strafford to the scaffold. Strafford’s final speech in his own defence, made on 13 April, was a gallant attempt to rebut the charges in the name of the very traditions the king had violated: ‘I have ever admired the wisdom of our ancestry, who have so fixed the pillars of this monarchy that each of them keeps their measure and proportion with each other … the happiness of a Kingdom consists in this just poise of the king’s prerogative and the subject’s liberty and that things should never be well till these went hand in hand together.’

It was Pym who stood up to refute Strafford, and he said that ‘if the prerogative of the king overwhelm the liberty of the people, it will be turned into tyranny; if liberty undermine the prerogative, it will grow into anarchy’. This scarcely answered Strafford’s charge that laws could not be set aside. Prophetically, he argued that ‘You, your estates, your posterities lie all at the stake if such learned gentlemen as these, whose lungs are well acquainted with such proceedings, shall be started out against you: if your friends, your counsel were denied access to you, if your professed enemies admitted to witness against you, if every word, intention, circumstance of yours be alleged as treasonable, not because of a statute, but a consequence, a construction of law heaved up in a high rhetorical strain, and a number of supposed probabilities’.

Thanks to this powerful appeal, fifty-nine people voted against the Bill of Attainder at its third reading, and found their names on a list posted outside the Commons, headed, ‘These are the Straffordians, the betrayers of their country.’ Things were turning nasty.

The same mood prevailed in the streets, and newer and more radical voices emerged from the hubbub. Rude Henry Marten, certainly no Puritan, was among those who produced the Protestation, which was an imitation of the Kirk’s Covenant, and toughly vowed to crush all who threatened true religion, especially priests and Jesuits, ‘and other adherents of the See of Rome [that] have of late more boldly and frequently put in practice than formerly’. It did offer allegiance to the king as well, but like Pym, Marten had come to think the king was the problem in guaranteeing true religion. As early as 1641 Marten confessed to his friend Sir Edward Hyde that he did not believe that one man was wise enough to rule a whole nation. By 1642 he was identified as a key figure among those Sir Simonds D’Ewes referred to as the ‘fiery spirits’ who used language disparaging towards the royal dignity. Having proclaimed kingship to be forfeitable he was excluded from pardon for life or estate by Charles I in the same year. Later he was to go further. In support of the Puritan divine John Saltmarsh, the author of a pamphlet proposing the deposition of the king, Marten stated in the Commons on 16 August 1643 that ‘it were better one family be destroyed than many’. He was asked who he meant, and at once said he meant the royal family. For this the Commons sent him to the Tower; they were not yet ready to hear what he had to say.

In the meantime, a group of writers had vowed to free Strafford; borrowing a none-too-plausible plot from the stage, they planned to seize the Tower and help Strafford to make his getaway, while bringing the army south. The group included William Davenant, who had long claimed to be Shakespeare’s illegitimate son, and the elegant and intelligent Sir John Suckling. Also involved was George Goring, later a Royalist general of notoriously undisciplined troops and himself a wild card. Charles, who always loved a play, was privy to their counsels, but may also have urged Goring to leak it to the Parliamentarian leadership. He was attempting to convince them not to pursue Strafford to death, trying to frighten them off. It didn’t work. The Lords passed the attainder by a slim margin, with many bishops and all the Catholic peers missing. An armed mob accompanied those taking it to the king for signature.

And the next day, on Sunday 9 May 1641, after hesitating all evening, Charles signed his chief counsellor’s death warrant. He did it to save his wife, who would certainly have been next, and his frightened children. But he never forgave himself. Strafford was to face the executioner’s axe on 12 May 1641, before a huge and joyous crowd. ‘I do freely forgive all the world,’ he said on the scaffold, ‘I wish that every man would lay his hand on his heart and consider seriously whether the beginnings of the people’s happiness should be written in letters of blood.’ But London was glad to have it so, and as Strafford’s bloody head was lifted, bonfires flamed across the country, and at dusk candles were lit in windows to celebrate his fall.

It was in this atmosphere of tension and violence that on 7 November 1641 Pym began formally to connect ‘the corrupt part of our clergy that make things for their own ends and with a union between us and Rome’. This is close to what Milton wrote in a sudden outburst of passionately anti-Laudian fervour in Lycidas: the spineless clergy do not feed their hungry sheep, and so Rome, ‘the grim wolf with privy paw’ carries off more of them every day. But Pym meant more. For him, increasingly influenced by the Scots, bishops themselves were coming to seem central to the problem. And Parliament was the centre of the solution: ‘the parliament is as the soul of the commonwealth, that only is able to apprehend and understand the symptoms of all such diseases that threaten the body politic’. He spoke for two hours. He connected the religious menaces of popery with menaces to Parliament, to property. That afternoon, although this was not obvious to him or to anyone else, Pym created the Parliamentarian cause that was to be disputed so bloodily over the next nine years.

The Grand Remonstrance was Pym’s powerful statement of a political credo that demanded reform on a grand scale indeed. The elections to the Common Council a month later, in December, provided a very comfortable majority of Pym’s supporters, and from January 1642, the older and more conservative councillors were systematically replaced by those who served Pym. The Grand Remonstrance was not a Declaration of Independence, or a Declaration of the Rights of Man, much less a Marseillaise. It was still couched in the conservative rhetoric of days of yore, asking the king in fulsome terms of grovelling humility to redress grievances. But even that rhetoric had begun to fall away, and some at least of it was addressed to the people, not the king. It was first read on 8 November 1641, and finally passed in the middle of the night on the 22nd. In it Pym’s exceptionally vehement anti-popery and his concerns about the state came to seem one and the same issue. It contained long low moans about the Jesuited papists: ‘the multiplicity, sharpness and malignity of those evils under which we have now many years suffered … and which were fomented and cherished by … those malignant parties whose proceedings evidently appear to be mainly for their advantage and increase of popery’. They, it seemed, and not Strafford, were responsible for everything that had gone wrong in the past fifteen years. Like Hitler’s anti-Semitism, Pym’s anti-popery was both a genuine moral passion and also a card he played to try to bring the public into sympathy with his plans.

The phrase Grand Remonstrance is still used for any rebuke, though few today have much idea of what was in the original. The Remonstrance was a multipurpose affair. It was a discontented history of the personal rule of Charles I, minute and even fussy. Every grievance of the personal rule found a place. But its main concerns were large. Its announced goal was to restore ‘the ancient honour, greatness and security of this crown and nation’. It was to expose the ‘mischevious designs’ that had tried to drive a wedge between the king and his people, forcing them to argue about liberty and prerogative. It was also supposed to expose those who intended to drive Puritans out ‘with force’ or root them out by violence. It demanded that the king employ only ministers ‘as the Parliament may have cause to confide in, without which we cannot give his Majesty supplies for the support of his own estate’. It demanded that bishops be deprived of votes in the Lords, ‘who cherish formality and superstition’ in what came to seem an ‘ecclesiastical tyranny’. It complained of illicit revenue-raising through Ship Money and the Forced Loan. It objected to the imprisonment of members of the Commons. It protested very strenuously at the destruction of the king’s forests, a matter near Pym’s heart, and to the selling of Forest of Dean timber to ‘papists’, ‘which was the best storehouse of this kingdom for the maintenance of our shipping’. It also tried to reassure everyone that it was not a blueprint for religious radicalism. There would be, if anything, more discipline than before. Similarly, it closed with a ringing avowal, explaining that all its creators wanted was ‘that His Majesty may have cause to be in love with good counsel, and good men’.

The debate was the most passionate the House had ever seen. The final exchange, on 22 November 1641, was especially fierce, and here the shadowy outlines of Royalist and Parliamentarian became briefly visible. Many spoke against the Remonstrance. They disliked its peremptory procedure, the refusal of its creators to consult the Lords. Pym and his chums were becoming starkly visible as a powerful clique, and some members of the Commons were not eager to expel one clique in order to have another in its place. Those who disliked the Remonstrance complained that it dragged old skeletons from their graves. Pym retorted that the country’s plight was desperate. Popery was about to destroy everything. But some were beginning to wonder if there really were evil Jesuits lurking behind every tree. A moderate group containing future historian and Earl of Clarendon Edward Hyde and the brilliant young humanist Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, were among the doubters. They worried, too, that Pym and his faction were encouraging sectarians and godly fanatics. One dissenter was Sir Edward Dering, and his concerns show what was truly radical about the Grand Remonstrance, though not everyone noticed at the time. There was something big at stake here: ‘When I first heard of a remonstrance, I presently imagined that like faithful counsellors we should hold up a glass unto his majesty; I thought to represent unto the king the wicked counsels of pernicious councillors; the restless turbulency of practical papists … I did not dream that we should remonstrate downward, tell stories to the people, and talk of the King as a third person.’

For Dering, the Remonstrance was radical and entirely unacceptable not for what it said, but to whom it was said. Parliament was no longer addressing its grievances to the king, but to the people. Sovereignty and the definition of who guaranteed the people’s rights had shifted. Pym responded, though, with the glorious plainness which kept him in his place as leader: ‘It’s time to speak plain English,’ he said, ‘lest posterity shall say that England was lost and no man dared speak truth.’ The debate went on until after midnight, when there was – at long last – a division. Over three hundred MPs were still present. The Remonstrance was carried, on a majority of just eleven votes. This tiny margin helped convince the king that strong action against a little faction would settle things. He was wrong, as the Remonstrance itself showed. But it also showed that the nation’s representatives were beginning to divide. So too would the nation.

VI Stand Up, Shout Mars

Already, as the Commons debated, the city of London was reflecting the turbulence of its governors. Two years of disorder and riots – outbreaks in which those ordinary people who could not speak in Parliament or even in church demanded a voice. Hostile crowds attacked Lambeth Palace in May 1640, demonstrated in large numbers during Strafford’s trial in the following spring, and took to the streets in the winter of 1641–2. Conservatives were alarmed by the coincidence of these demonstrations with Pym’s assaults in the House of Commons, thinking that the radicals in Parliament were orchestrating the mobs. But Pym and the crowds were engaged in a kind of dance in which neither led, but each responded to a music of discords in Church and state. Huge numbers signed petitions – 15,000 signed the Root and Branch Petition, which urged the abolition of bishops, deans and chapters, tendered in December 1640; 20,000 Londoners signed a petition against Strafford, and 15,000 ‘poor labouring men’ signed a petition complaining about the faltering economy on 31 January 1642. Thirty thousand apprentices – nearly all of those in London – signed a petition presented in the violent demonstrations of Christmas 1641. However, this must be seen in context. London’s apprentices had always been inclined to riot. Fisticuffs and shouting were good entertainment for boys.

London was wild with rumour and story. The undercurrent of dread, that sometimes threatened to rise and swamp the city, was the fear of popery. ‘Prentices and clubs’ became the call. The London apprentices in May 1640 threatened to rise against the Queen Mother Marie de Medici and Archbishop Laud. They marched, with a drummer at their head. Placards materialized everywhere, calling the apprentices to rid the city of the curse of bishops. Everyone was on holiday for May Day, so when the crowd of apprentices reached St George’s Fields, Southwark, it was augmented by sailors and dockhands, idle through lack of trade. They decided to hunt for ‘Laud, the fox’, and 500 of them marched on Lambeth Palace. The apprentices, balked because Laud had escaped, went instead to break open prisons, and to attack the house of the Earl of Arundel. A rumour swept London that 50,000 Frenchmen were already hidden away in the city’s suburbs, ready to spring out and support the king, and overthrow true religion. On 21 May, the judges declared the disturbances were high treason, and John Archer, a glover of Southwark, was brutally tortured before his execution. The justices were hoping to make him an example, but the effect was the reverse of what they had in mind. This did not give the crowds much reassurance about the government’s intentions. Finally, the following year, the crowd’s hunger for a scapegoat had been rewarded by the spectacle of Strafford’s severed head, but this had not so much placated as excited them further.

Since the fall of Strafford, events stood on a knife edge, and were served by rumour, gossip, personal contacts. It is said to have been Henrietta herself who, Lady Macbeth-like, urged her husband to aggression. She is supposed to have told him, ‘Go, you coward, and pull those rogues out by the ears, or never see my face more.’ And Henrietta may have had reason to fear that Parliament was preparing to move against her, personally. It had removed Strafford; it had attacked Laud. Of its great enemies, only she was left. And Charles may have seen himself in nightmares reluctantly signing her death warrant too.

Charles became convinced that strong action against a tiny band was all that was needed to give him back his life, his court, his rule. He was a knight-errant. He was, it turned out, Don Quixote, living in a world that did not exist. Like other mildly stupid people, he gave no thought to what would happen if his plans went awry and the bold action failed. He only saw the dazzling sun of success.

On 4 January 1642, the king set off at about three o’clock for Westminster. He had decided to arrest his five worst enemies, those wretched fellows, Pym and his junto. He had identified the men he thought most dangerous – Pym; John Hampden, his old foe, who had spoken so stoutly for the Remonstrance; Denzil Holles, another Ship Money refuser; young Arthur Haselrig, who had suggested the plan to attaint Strafford, and (unexpectedly) William Strode. They were all men with a history of opposing him, but his shortlist of ringleaders omitted many key figures, including all Pym’s supporters in the Lords. Even if his expedition had been successful it would not have silenced all his critics.

Charles knew he could find his quarries in the Commons. Accounts differ as to whether the king advanced on Parliament with his guards, or on his own, but it seems unlikely that even Charles would have set out to face a defiant House with only Prince Rupert for company. Bulstrode Whitelocke says ‘the King came, guarded with his pensioners, and followed by about two hundred of his courtiers and soldiers of fortune, most of them armed with swords and pistols’. Whoever he took with him, he was too late. The birds had flown, as he himself later quipped. The phrase shows that he saw himself as a hunter, a role in which he felt at home.

For a moment he could not believe his failure. Charles looked desperately around the chamber for the men he wanted. He called their names, unable to give up hope that they were there. Then he asked the Speaker for his chair, with careful courtesy. It was like Charles to say ‘By your leave, Mr Speaker, I must borrow your chair’; the politeness and deference of his words emphasized rather than concealed the gross disregard of the Commons’ independence implied in his entry with armed guards. He knew how they might feel: ‘I must declare’, he said carefully, ‘that no king that ever was in England shall be more careful of your privileges’, but he went on, ‘yet you must know that in cases of Treason no person has a privilege’.

The House was not impressed. As Charles left, in defeat, the Commons roared ‘Privilege! Privilege!’ The cry was echoed by the London crowds next day.

Historians do not quite like the idea that it was Lucy Hay who warned the Five Members, but this is no mere fantasy invented by romantic lady novelists. There are contemporary voices who believed it to be true. Philip Warwick saw Charles’s plans frustrated by the countess personally: ‘Yet his coming to the Lower House, being betrayed by that busy stateswoman, the Countess of Carlisle, who has now changed her gallant from Strafford to Mr Pym, and was become such a she-saint, that she frequented their sermons, and took notes, he lost the opportunity of seizing their persons.’ Thomas Burton, for example, in his diary of Cromwell’s Parliament, quotes Haselrig himself as the source for Lucy’s intervention:

The King demanded five members, by his Attorney-General. He then came personally to the House, with five hundred men at his heels, and sat in your [the Speaker’s] chair. It pleased God to hide those members. I shall never forget the kindness of that great lady, the Lady Carlisle, that gave timely notice. Yet some of them were in the house, after the notice came. It was questioned if, for the safety of the house, they should be gone; but the debate was shortened, and it was thought fit for them, in discretion, to withdraw. Mr Hampden and myself being then in the House, withdrew. Away we went. The King immediately came in, and was in the house before we got to the water. The queen, on the King’s return, raged and gave him an unhandsome name, ‘poltroon’, for that he did not take others out, and certainly if he had, they would have been killed at the door.

Similarly, the poet John Dryden remarks that ‘Mr Waller used to say that he would raze any Line out of his Poems, which did not imply some Motive to virtue, but he was unhappy in the choice of subject of his admirable vein in poetry. The Countess of C. was the Helen of her country’ – as if the war had been fought over Lucy herself. Bishop Warburton called her ‘the Erinnys of that time’, and claimed that she was the source of information and intelligence ‘on his majesty’s intentions’.

It was not only Restoration writers who saw Lucy as the chief instrument of knowledge. Henry Neville, republican intellectual, portrayed her as Pym’s lover in 1647: ‘first charged in the fore-deck by Master [Denzil] Hollis, in the Poop by Master Pym, while she clapped my Lord of Holland under hatches’. Astrologer William Lilly, though he names another party as the direct source of Pym’s warning, provides information about leakages from the king’s secret councils via the queen’s circle: ‘All this Christmas, 1641, there was nothing but private whispering at court, and secret councils held by the Queen and her party, with whom the King sat in council very late many nights.’

Lucy was certainly still a visible member of the queen’s party, but events show that her heart by now lay elsewhere. Lucy liked and embraced change. While her sister, equally ambitious, married a staid aristocrat of whom her father thoroughly approved, Lucy had married a young man of fashion. Tiring of him, she fell in love with an authoritative statesman of pronounced political philosophy. Neither choice was remotely snobbish; if anything, Lucy seemed particularly attracted by men with more than a touch of the people in their makeup. When her statesman fell, Lucy seems to have fallen in turn for his intelligent foe, John Pym, another change for her. Here was a man who was like her previous lovers in intelligence and power, but who was capable of showing her quite another world, a world to which she was attracted by its very difference.

It is also quite possible that Lucy – just like the rest of Pym’s followers, and a strong minority of the nation – was outraged by Charles’s behaviour. No Catholic, she disliked the influence exerted by Laud on the Church. Her personal attraction to Strafford may have been strong, but she may not necessarily have sided with him on questions of absolutism, and his fall and the king’s willingness to sign his death warrant may have done something to put her off the absolute power of monarchy, as well as forcing her to realize that it was not in fact absolute. This may not have been a matter of direct personal vengeance either. Lucy had just seen a great self-made man struck down by the king. To a woman who had spent years trying to advance herself and her family in the eyes of a monarch, this cannot have been very reassuring. It might have reminded her of her father’s fate, or even of the entire history of the Percys, a family struggling to maintain a powerful aristocratic position without monarchic interference, which had seen several members executed for treason. Strafford’s death confirmed in Lucy Hay an ideology of monarchy limited by strong Protestantism and aristocratic counsel, an ideology she was to adhere to throughout the Civil War years. And odd as it may have seemed, Pym and the saints offered a more rational path to that goal than did any of those remaining about the king.

Self-preservation, too, was always a central plank in Lucy’s motivation. If Lucy knew anything of Pym’s plans to impeach the queen, she may have become anxious that she would herself be implicated.

Strafford’s death was a warning that no one could escape by virtue of position or rank. It may have seemed sensible to have a foot in both camps. And since she was almost certainly not the only one who disclosed the king’s plans, it was sensible. Strafford’s fall from power was a warning. It might have looked like the beginning of the end for everyone in the king’s and queen’s immediate circle.

Ironically, too, if Lucy did send a message to Pym, it may suggest that he was more circumspect with her than others had been, for some historians think that Pym lured Charles into the rash invasion of the House, that the whole attempted arrest was a trap. If so, Pym may have been making use of Lucy, knowing only too well that she had a foot in both camps and an eye on the winning side. If Lucy was lurking in Pym’s camp to gather information, then he may have used her to leak unreliable information to the queen’s circle, even to bait the trap he was setting for the king. Is it significant that it was Henrietta’s urgings which sent the king to the House, her interests which prompted him to act so rashly? Perhaps Lucy Hay betrayed her friend the queen not by giving away her plans, but by unwittingly giving her false information. Who was using whom?

Somewhere, Pym and the other members hid while Charles and his men burst into the Commons. Rumour said that they took refuge in the Puritan stronghold of St Stephen’s Coleman Street, very near the Guildhall. It was ominous that the new state wrapped itself protectively in the folds of the church, ominous and predictive of what would become a Parliamentarian theocracy of sorts. They were able to enter the Guildhall the next day, to cheers.

These events left Charles and Henrietta thoroughly scared, and after a failed bid to persuade the London aldermen to give up the errant members, on 10 January 1642 they packed their bags and abandoned Whitehall for Hampton Court. It was Charles’s second disastrous mistake in under a week. The king and queen knew that when the House reconvened it might go on to impeach the queen as the one who had invited the ‘Jesuited papists’ who threatened the nation into the country in the first place. They had sensed the mood of London when Charles rode to the Tower the day after his disastrous invasion of the Commons. ‘Sir, let us have our liberties,’ cried someone in the crowd, ‘we desire no more.’ The Christmas holidays meant that London’s apprentices, always volatile, were available to demonstrate. On 6 January there was a panic in the City as vast crowds thronged public spaces; a fight broke out between the king’s supporters and demonstrators at Westminster Abbey, and Sir Richard Wiseman was killed. The demonstrators took up a collection to pay for Wiseman’s funeral, though, and the French ambassador commented on how calm the crowds were in comparison with crowds in Paris.

In the Guildhall it was the same. ‘Parliament, Privileges of Parliament’, shouted some. Others shouted back ‘God bless the king’. But there were not enough of them, and – with no military effort at all, without even a show of real opposition – Charles’s opponents achieved the tremendous victory of persuading him to vacate London.

In doing so, Charles lost prestige. He lost credibility as the inevitable, the unconsidered government. And he lost the Tower, with its mint and its armoury, and the London militia. Perhaps the capital had become peripheral to him. He had had dreams of a new London that would reflect the order and ceremonial he loved, but it had failed to materialize from the mongrel old city, crowded with unregulated houses of worryingly diverse and muddled shapes. Early in his reign, Charles had grandiose schemes for London; he issued proclamations to regulate new building, enforce the use of better materials, and impose some semblance of town planning. He wanted to rebuild and beautify Whitehall itself, but also the great cathedral of St Paul’s, so tumbledown and so given up to profane activities that Charles felt it was unworthy of his capital. He wanted to demolish the existing jerry-built medieval housing to forward these schemes. He wanted London to reflect his own ordered family, his well-regulated court. He disliked the continued residence in London of those who, he felt, should be in the provinces looking after their tenants; the gentry were strictly prohibited from neglecting their estates in the country and the duties they should be performing there by residing in London all year round.

The problem with all this was that the London corporation was unenthusiastic. And as often, when Charles couldn’t realize his fantasies, he turned his back. During the period of his personal rule, Whitehall had become just another palace, like Hampton and Oakley and Greenwich. He knew nothing first-hand of the vast activity that surrounded his court – the trade, law, business, finance, the sheer human pressure of what was in a few short years to become the greatest city in Europe. He had always avoided it. He hated the London crowds that reached out to him, hoping his touch would heal their sores. He had not visited the great shipyards at Poplar that had loomed over Anna Trapnel’s childhood, nor seen the first ships of the East India Company dropping anchor in Poplar docks laden with luxuries. He had seen only the luxuries. Now this city, invisible to Charles, was to be his downfall. He had refused to see it, and London, not the city to take a slight lightly, never forgave him.

Like all wars, the Civil War was expensive, and the money to pay Parliament’s army came from the public. London alone provided between a quarter and a third of all the money spent by Parliament. And yet at the same time business was down; with the court gone the trade in luxuries, which had been booming, collapsed. And with the king away, Parliament at once acted to alter the social fabric of the city. The theatres were closed, the traditional holidays abolished: this threw still more people out of work.

Not everyone was miserable as the conflict deepened. Woodturner Nehemiah Wallington was happy, because his London was a godly city once more. For him, all events were a rich source of moral lessons. This was a man who, when his house was burgled in August 1641, tried to see in it the correcting hand of God’s providence: ‘because the Lord doth see the world is ready to steal away my heart, therefore, he doth it in love to wean me from the world’. But Wallington, like other godly folk in London, lived in terror that his bounty of spiritual surroundings might be taken from him. He was also a workaholic who adjured himself to wake at 1 a.m. to write, and who decided to miss a spring expedition across the fields to Peckham with his wife and daughter in order to stay at home and worry about ‘the sadness of the times’.

Even before the war, London had outgrown law and order – the king’s palace at Whitehall, like some manor surrounded by new estates, was now at the heart of a troublespot. The Middlesex suburbs contained a high proportion of the disorderly poor – to the north and west, as well as to the east. The large number of apprentices and other migrants – young, poor, male and single – meant that turbulence within the city was endemic; the rallying cry ‘prentices and clubs’ symbolizes that threat. London was huge. It was constantly growing. And it was noisy: its streets resounded with pealing bells, the cries of street traders, the songs of buskers, the news cries of ballad-singers. Some traders made sure they were noticed with bells, horns and clappers. Every time you sat down in a tavern a fiddler and a flautist or two would appear, and expect to be given a fee for cacophonous playing. Alehouses were noisy. But almost all houses in London except the very grandest were right on the street. The clatter of carts, and of water-carriers on cobbles was almost constant. Dogs barked and howled. There were more and noisier birds: rooks and jackdaws were once common in the city. And London talked; from the upper storeys Londoners could eavesdrop on neighbours or shout abuse at them.

It wasn’t just the noise of London that a countryman might have found surprising. London was also smelly. If we could travel back in time and sniff the London air, we would be suffocated not by the smell of sewage, but the pervasive acrid reek of coal fires. As the seventeenth century progressed, industry moved into the East End and Southwark, and the smells it produced lessened. When slaughterhouses were moved out in the 1620s and 1630s, the city lost the noise and mess of pigs, cows and sheep driven through the centre. There was also less noise from smithies, tanneries and the like, but the shouts of those advertising bear-baiting and prize-fights went on. So did town-criers, shouting the time, the news, the dead, the ‘For Sale’ notices. The noise did have a term: there was a curfew, and the nights were much quieter.

In the period of personal rule, Charles had relied on the London money market as well as on his subjects for forced loans, and in the crisis of 1640, when the royal forces’ defeat in war coincided with a widespread refusal to pay outstanding taxation, the City’s financiers declined to continue to support the regime. Some rich men were ruined in Charles’s fall, which may have made the others less keen to bail him out. Once the Scots were seen successfully to resist the king, some of the discontent that had been bubbling beneath the surface in London, repressed by Laud, became visible. After all, in 1637 John Lilburne had been whipped at the cart’s tail for publishing an attack on the bishops, and in the ‘liberties’ outside the jurisdiction of the City, there were separated congregations, church groups that had declared their independence of bishops and priests. Cheaper, open-air theatres staged plays openly critical of the court.

The intermittent swirls of London’s rage finally eddied into a new whirlwind of riot over the appointment of a Lieutenant of the Tower. On Monday 27 December 1641, Londoners marched to Westminster, demanding to know what had happened about their Commons petition. Were they to be landed with Charles’s unpopular and corrupt appointee Colonel Lunsford as Lieutenant of the Tower? When they heard that he had been removed, they did not go away, but hung about asking what had happened to their petitions on ecclesiastical matters. They made a lane in both Palace yards, ‘and no man could pass but when the rabble gave him leave to . . . Soon they set up the cry of “No Bishops! No Bishops!”’ There was an undignified tussle between the Archbishop of York and a boy whom he unwisely tried to arrest. A near-riot began when Lunsford himself appeared in Westminster Hall, and he and other citizens tried to drive away the angry protesters with swords: ‘then David Hyde began to bustle, and said he would cut the throats of those roundheaded dogs’. With that, Hyde, Lunsford and some others attacked the protesters, ‘and cut many of them very sore’. They were driven back by a hail of hurled stones. Then came the indefatigable John Lilburne, with ‘about a hundred citizens, some with cudgels, some sailors with truncheons, and the rest with stones’. Under the assault, half the gentlemen fled. The rest fought on, but were finally routed by citizens who fought ‘like enraged lions’.

On 28 January 1642 Captain Philip Skippon ‘marched very privately when it was dark to the backside of the Tower, and stayed at the iron gate with his men … he sent one into the Tower to the serjeant, who commanded the Hamleters, that he should march out of the Tower with his men and come to him. But the serjeant desired to be excused.’ Skippon, snubbingly described by Clarendon as a ‘common soldier’, was actually the son of a minor Norfolk gentleman, who had fought as an officer for the Elector Palatine and then in Holland against the Spanish – two Good Old Protestant wars, giving him plenty of practice for a third. His toughness as a trainer of troops was vital in moulding the London trained bands into the crucial fighting force they became, and he was to become one of Parliament’s most stalwart and sensible soldiers, a major-general of infantry in the New Model Army.

When Nehemiah Wallington described the serjeant’s refusal to obey Skippon’s order as a plot by ‘malignants’ to take over the Tower and the City, he saw such incidents as standing in the way of the political and spiritual rebirth of the nation: ‘you see many an excellent blessing and mercy in this very birth’, he wrote, ‘for this honourable parliament (as the Mother) to bring forth, and cannot’. This defined all the conflicts so far as an effort to turn England into a godly nation.

The king’s departure left Parliament free to begin to gather troops from Anna Trapnel’s East End. A militia committee was established in Tower Hamlets – authorized to assemble and train men and to suppress riot and trouble, and to collect a rate to finance the troops. The Tower Hamlets militia were strongly Parliamentarian, refusing to unite with city regiments whose loyalty to Parliament they suspected. (In 1662 Charles II refused to attend a muster on Tuttle Fields because of a rumour that the Hamleters would shoot at him.) So it came to seem appropriate that at any rate by February 1642, the Tower had come into the hands of the city authorities, its ramparts guarded not by royal troops but by the trained bands of the East End that Charles so hated, the Tower Hamlet bands. Anna Trapnel’s world had triumphed, in London, at least.

London was not the only place with unruly crowds. Many other areas saw violence erupt. In the early months of 1642, some rebellious energies were contained by traditional means. The majority of locales drew up and presented petitions to Parliament, opening with fulsome praise of the institution. Many expressed concern about the king’s evil councillors, by whom they largely meant Laudians and papists. Still others blamed the universities as nests of papistical and Arminian thought. Most expressed dread of a popish invasion; nineteen counties demanded that all papists be disarmed, while others expressed doubts about strict measures already taken. Oxfordshire begged Parliament to administer oaths to those searching recusant houses for arms to prevent them from concealing what they found. But fear of popery also provoked extreme violence. On 13 May 1642, a year after the London crowd had been gratified by Strafford’s death, an Essex village saw a crowd of over a hundred gathered at the blowing of a horn, before marching out to the heath of Rovers Tye, where they tore down a series of enclosures that had been built by the Lucas family. All through Essex, Parliamentarians had rushed to fill the army of Robert Rich, first Earl of Warwick, known as a political activist and as a patron of sermons fervently denouncing popery, just as they had stayed away from the king’s army gathered to fight the Scots two years before. Local Roman Catholics were disarmed, and fortifications built around Colchester. Laudian ministers were quickly silenced. But local magnate Sir John Lucas was determined to bring aid to the king. He gathered horse, arms and men at his residence just outside Colchester’s walls. But his plans were known to his enemies. A night-watch set by the mayor spotted him as he left his house by the back gate. A musket was fired, the local beacon was lit to alert the villages. The trained bands and the Parliamentary volunteers besieged his estate, even bringing two pieces of ordnance. Men, women and children gathered, forming a crowd of around two thousand all told. The attack on Sir John Lucas’s house included an assault on the ladies’ chamber. There, tireless collector (and inventor) of atrocity stories Bruno Ryves tells us, a naked sword was set to Sir John’s wife’s breast. To Clarendon’s later horror at the disregard of rank implied, Lucas ended up in the town gaol, and he was glad enough to be there.

Observers thought this outbreak of rage looked exactly like the ‘inundation of the vulgar’, the rising of the belly against the brain, which had been predicted by the Cassandra-like MP Simonds D’Ewes as the inevitable outcome of civil war. Though the rioters themselves sought to justify their actions by claiming support for Parliament, even Parliamentarians among them spoke of the violence of ‘the rude people’: ‘we know not how to quiet them’, muttered the mayor of Colchester, ‘we could not repress them if we had five trained bands’. In parts of Suffolk, where there were further disturbances, the rioters were said to have denied any religious motivation, saying they were for the king, and would not be governed by a few Puritans.

The Essex-Stour valley mob initially confined itself to attacking the local Catholic community, but soon everyone got a taste for the fun, and the violence became less discriminating. ‘As well Protestants as Papists’ were plundered; similar unpolitical incidents involving the ‘lewd and disorderly people’ were reported in the area in the last three months of the year. ‘Forasmuch as at this present there are disorders and distempers … and evil affected persons who hunger after rapines and spoilings and plunder of men’s houses.’ It was an excuse for a spot of vandalism, but it might be premature to assume there was no class distinction behind the plunder of the houses of the rich. There is some shaky evidence from the inexhaustible Ryves that locals picked out as targets families who were already disliked. Ryves shapes his account around the attack on Countess Rivers because it violates codes of honourable conduct in war: ‘And you may guess what spiritual men they were, and likewise what danger this honourable person was in, they express themselves in rude unchristian language, that if they found her they would try what flesh she had?’

The Rivers family felt menaced from the beginning. Lady Rivers’s sister Lady Penelope Gage wrote anxiously from Hengrave Hall, north of Bury St Edmunds, at the very beginning of 1642, that ‘we are daily threatened by the common sort of people’. Living in St Osyth, the Rivers’s Catholicism had long made them the object of local suspicion and dislike. Ryves claimed the Colchester attackers began a kind of cat-and-mouse game with the countess. They pursued her as if she were a comic-book villain. The crowd reached St Osyth only a few hours after she had made her escape; they were joined by sailors and what one local Catholic called ‘the whole army rout’. At once, wrote a contemporary, they ‘enter the house, and being entered, they pull down, cut in pieces, and carry away her costly hangings, beds, couches, chairs, and the whole furniture of her house, rob her of plates and monies’. Her servants were attacked. She made it to her house at Long Melford in Suffolk, but the crowds followed her there, gathering support en route, especially from seamen, a group especially noted for their strong anti-popery. Countess Rivers was understandably afraid. She sent for help to the Earl of Warwick, but he was at sea, Lord Rich was at Oxford, and Charles Rich was out hunting. So Arthur Wilson, steward of the Earl of Warwick, travelled through the Stour valley on his master’s instructions during the riots, hoping to rescue the recusant Lady Rivers from the fury of the mob. Wilson was a Puritan and a Parliamentarian, but he thought very little of the crowd:

With difficulty I passed through the little villages of Essex, where their black bills and coarse examinations put us to diverse demurs. And, but that they had some knowledge both of me and the coach, I had not passed with safety … When I came to Sudbury in Suffolk, within three miles of Long Melford, not a man appeared till we were within the chain. And then they began to run to their weapons, and, before we could get to the market-place, the streets swarmed with people. I came out of the coach, as soon as they took the horses by the heads, and desired, that I might speak with the mayor, or some of the magistrates, to know the cause of this tumult, for we had offended nobody. The Mouth cried out, This coach belongs to the Lady Rivers; and they are going to her, for he had recognised her steward in the coach: and some, who pretended to be more wise and knowing than the rest, said, that I was the lord Rivers. And they swarmed about me, and were so kind as to lay hold on me. But I calmly entreated those many hundreds which encircled me, to hear me speak, which before they had not patience to do, the confusion and noise was so great. I told them, I was steward to the Earl of Warwick, a lover of his country, and now in the parliament’s employment. That I was going to Bury [St Edmunds], about business of his. And that I had letters in my pockets (if they would let any of the magistrates see them) which would make me appear to be a friend and an honest man. That said, the Mouth cried out, Letters, letters! The tops of the trees, and all the windows, were thronged with people, who cried the same. At last the mayor came crowding in with his officers: and I showed him my letters … The mayor’s wisdom said, he knew not my lord’s hand; it might be, and it might not. And away he went, not knowing what to do with me, nor I to say to them.

But the town-clerk, whose father was a servant to the Earl of Warwick, ‘told them I was the Earl of Warwick’s steward: and his assurance got some credit with them. And so the great cloud vanished. But I could go no further to succour the Lady Rivers. For I heard, from all hands, that there was so great confusion at Melford, that no man appeared like a gentleman, but was made a prey to that ravenous crew.’ So he left the coach at Salisbury, ‘and went a bye-way to Sir Robert Crane’s, a little nearer Melford, to listen after the countess’. He thought he was witnessing the actions of an ‘unruly multitude … the rabble’, not those of ‘honest inhabitants’. He thought that they only pretended to religious fervour, while in fact ‘spoil and plunder were their aim’ and that they acted as if ‘there had been a dissolution of all government’; he concluded that ‘so monstrous is the beast when it holds the bridle in its teeth’.

Countess Rivers’s ordeal was not yet over. On Wednesday 24 August, a multitude of like disposed persons, threatening her death’ nearly caught her; they entered the house ‘before she had fully escaped their sight’ (perhaps she had been loath to use the ‘back gate for beggars and the meaner sort of swains to come in at’, noted by James Howell when he visited the house). So the crowds ransacked the house. John Rous reported that ‘the Lady Rivers house was defaced, all glass broken, all iron spoiled, all likely places digged where money might be hidden. The gardens defaced. Beer and wine consumed and let out (to knee deep in the cellar) The deer killed and chased out.’ She may have been helped to escape by Sir Robert Crane; she sought sanctuary at Bury St Edmunds, thirteen miles away. It shut its gates against her. Eventually she was allowed in, but was forced to flee to London the next day.

The crowds, unsatisfied, moved on to other targets: the Audleys, a Catholic family within the liberties of Colchester, who had already been the subject of a panic in 1640 when it had been said that Catholics were assembling for an insurrection. The family’s house and cattle were plundered. On his funeral monument, Sir Henry had written Non aedes (belli civilis furore diructas) (He did not rebuild his house, destroyed by the fury of the civil war); the doggy, compressed Latin suggests some haste. A clergyman called Gabriel Honeyfold was set upon by ‘a multitude of boys and rude people’ who ‘throng about him … throwing stones and dirt at him’. Another minister, Erasmus Laud, lost his cattle too, and the attackers also took all his wife’s spare clothes. He was attacked solely because his name was the same as that of William Laud, the hated Archbishop of Canterbury. All across the east, local Catholic gentry were assailed; the landed Martins whose chapel was itself a provocation; the house of Carey, a steward to the Rivers family. The riots spread to neighbouring locales, including Maldon, where a Catholic landowner named Edmund Church came under attack; ‘the poor people of the neighbourhood pulled down and carried away a barn and an oxhouse, declaring that Edmond Church was a papist’, and that they would pull down his house if any opposed them. As in other civil wars, people who had been warily tolerant neighbours for years suddenly turned on the minority in their midst. Wherever there was a Catholic family, the crowds gathered: the Petres, the Southcotts. The trouble only stopped when Parliament implemented a vigorous programme of Catholic-watching and sequestration.

Historians have disagreed violently about whether the rioters were motivated solely by religion, or whether class hatred played a part too. For many in the swirling, angry crowds, the war was, precisely, a war on the papists, and the goal was to prevent them from carrying out the hideous designs they were believed to be nurturing. In its paranoia this enabling narrative of recruitment does strongly resemble Nazi anti-Semitism, and like Nazi anti-Semitism it could easily tip over into corruption, profiteering and simple looting. Unlike anti-Semitism, however, it was elastic, able to embrace people (ultimately including Charles himself) who were clearly not Catholic nor even particularly sympathetic to Catholicism, but who were not godly enough, who did not share the culture and aspirations formed among the godly and the indefatigable tellers of their story, the London press. People who said ‘damme me!’ or ‘sinke me!’, people who fought alongside the Royalists or supplied them willingly, could come to be seen as near-papist because they were assumed to be part of a vast and secret conspiracy or else the dupes of that conspiracy. As well, England was swayed by rumours of prominent conversions; Laud was said to have been present when ‘Doctor Prince’ received extreme unction; an Essex man thought most of the bishops were secret Catholics; Suffolk parishioners began to suspect their ministers of Catholicism. Fears centred on the queen; at Bures a local gentleman said that ‘the king hath a wife, and he loves her well, and she is a papist and we must all be of her religion, and that’s the thing the bishops aim at’.

But many of those accused of popery were merely Arminian or not sufficiently godly to abhor Laud’s reforms. No one even knew how many Catholics there were in the Eastern Association, and as some of the stories above make clear, locals were not always sure about who counted as Catholic; there were probably only 30,000 Catholics in the whole country, in a population of around four million. But prejudice was deaf to statistics. The queen’s activism and the Laudian reforms made it seem that Catholics were gaining in strength. So did the rising number of Catholic peers: in 1603, there were nine, and in 1625 eighteen; the number of active, visible priests rose too, and Jesuits went from nine in 1593 to around 180 by 1641. The people of Essex and Suffolk had no direct knowledge of these alarming statistics, but they may have picked up a general and accurate sense that Rome was on the rise.

Dreadful as it seemed for Countess Rivers, worse fates awaited others. In Dorchester, in August 1642, two Catholic priests disobeyed a royal proclamation of 8 March 1641 which had tried to placate the public by insisting that all priests leave the country. They were arrested; one recanted, and the other refused to do so. His name was Hugh Green, and he was fifty-seven years old. He had been making for the ports to try to leave the country when he was arrested by a customs officer. He spent five months in gaol, was tried and convicted.

Green was to be executed on a Friday, by his own desire. They brought the furze for the fires to Gallows Hill, outside Dorchester, on Thursday. Green himself was taken to Gallows Hill on 18 August 1642. A crowd was waiting for him. It was eager and hopeful; after the terror of the Irish, after all Pym had said, it seemed obvious to the spectators that traitors like this one were behind it all. Three women were being hanged, too, for various crimes, and two had sent him word the night before that they would die in his faith. He absolved them with a sign, because he wasn’t allowed close to them. ‘God be with you, sir!’ they cried.

Green gave away his things – his beads, his crucifix, his Agnus Dei, his handkerchief, his book of litanies. However, he would not apologize for what everyone knew to be his treachery. He made a long speech, denouncing heresy. Sir Thomas Trencher’s chaplain, who had once been a weaver, was angry, shouting ‘He blasphemes. Stop his mouth!’ So the sheriff told Green to stop. Then he prayed instead for unity, for peace, and for the king, and forgave everyone. He called a Catholic woman, Elizabeth Willoughby, to him and she came, and he asked her to say goodbye to his fellow-prisoners, and he blessed her and five others.

He prayed for half an hour. No one could be persuaded to turn the ladder and make him fall. Finally, the hangman, sitting astride the gallows, persuaded a country clown to turn the ladder, and Green dropped. He made the sign of the cross three times. And they cut him down with a knife at the end of a long stick, handed up to the hangman by a constable, ‘although’, said Elizabeth, ‘I and others did our uttermost to have hindered him’. Their courage was wasted. ‘The man that was to quarter him was a timorous, unskilful man, by trade a barber, and his name was Barefoot. He was so long dismembering him that he came to his perfect senses and sat upright.’ Elizabeth Willoughby managed to write down her horror:

Then did this butcher cut his belly on both sides, and turn the flap upon his breast, which the holy man feeling put his left hand upon his bowels, and looking on his bloody hand laid it down by his side, and lifting up his right hand he crossed himself, saying three times, Jesu, Jesu, Jesu Mercy! The which, although unworthy, I am a witness of, for my hand was on his forehead … all the Catholics were pressed away from him by the unruly multitude except myself … Whilst he was thus calling upon Jesus, the butcher did pull a piece of his liver out instead of his heart, and tumbling his guts out every way to see if his heart were not among them; then with his knife he raked in the body … Methought my heart was pulled out of my body to see him in such cruel pains, lifting up his eyes to heaven, and not yet dead. Then I could no longer hold, but cried, Out upon them that did so torment him. His forehead was bathed in sweat, and blood and water flowed from his eyes and nose. And when on account of the gushing streams of blood his tongue could no longer pronounce the saving name of Jesus, his lips moved, and the frequent groans which he uttered from his inmost heart were proof of the most bitter pain and torture which he suffered.

Hugh Green lingered in the hands of the local barber for half an hour or more. When another Catholic woman pleaded with the sheriff, he was finally put out of his agony. After he had died at last, his heart was cut out and held up on a spear point, then flung into the fire where a minute before, his genitals had been burned. Some Catholic bystanders, including Elizabeth, tried to take the torn body away for burial, but the crowd stopped them, angrily, and it was all Elizabeth could do to get home without being torn to pieces herself.

Then Green’s head was cut off, too, and the crowd kicked it about like a football. As a football, in fact; they went on playing till four o’clock – which proved that the man had no power – but since they believed Catholics were in league with the powers of darkness, they put sticks in the eyes, nose, and mouth, and buried the head near the scaffold. They had thought of putting it on one of Dorchester’s gates as a trophy and a warning, but they had been put off, Elizabeth said, because a previous priest had been so displayed and God had punished the town with the onset of plague.

Others suffered the same fate. In July 1641, a Douai priest named William Ward who had spent twenty years in prison was suddenly dragged off to be hanged at Tyburn. In December, Parliament wanted to hang another seven priests. Charles refused the petition – courageously, if rashly, given that half the nation was by now wondering if he was not a papist himself – but two more priests were nonetheless executed in January 1642, and another seven in 1642 alone. Parliament, when ruling alone, went on to put to death twenty-four priests between 1641 and the end of the First Civil War, simply because they were priests. Eager claims for Parliamentarian tolerance and enthusiasm for liberty were liable to skate over the horrible deaths of these men, victims of a holy crusade and a paranoid terror that had little to do with liberal values. Rather, the English Civil War would not have occurred without the hysterical dread of popery which provoked the kind of violence Lady Rivers and Hugh Green experienced. Liberty was what had to be defended from papists like them, by truly godly people. In this way, a nation came to define itself against some of its own citizens. Civil war was bound to follow.

VII The Valley of Decision

The king had set up his standard before London had begun to gather troops. It was 22 August 1642, as a newsbook reported:

His Majesty came weary out of Warwickshire to Nottingham, and after half an hour’s repose, commanded the Standard to be brought forth, which was carried by a Lord, His Majesty the Prince, the Duke of York, and diverse Lords and Gentlemen accompanying the same, as soon as it was set up, his Majesty called for the printed Proclamation, mended with pen and ink some words misprinted, or not approved of, and caused the Herald to read the Proclamation three times, and so departed.

The same newsbook went on to say, ‘They plunder all men’s houses whom they please to call roundheads, and bring in cartloads of household stuff and sell them before the court-gate.’

The contrast between the king’s standard-raising and the murky behaviour of his troops is clear. What the newsbook writer didn’t know was that even the standard-raising was something of a public relations disaster. For one thing, it was pouring. For another, the standard had to be planted in a hole scraped out of the mud with knives and bare hands. Finally, not many had as yet rallied to the king, and the standard was unfurled before a meagre assortment of three cavalry troops and one infantry battalion. Worst of all, the wind blew the standard down into the mud during the night. For a people saturated in Biblical portents, it was a sign of doom. For a man like Charles, to whom ceremony was the vessel bearing the precious liquor of authority, it was ominous. But he was committed, now, to war. Charles longed for military settlement, for a simple battle where he could beat his foes and show them to be traitors, treat them as the rebels they were. ‘I am going to fight’, he said, ‘for my crown and dignity.’

And blood had already been shed. When William Brereton tried to raise troops for Parliament in Chester, he and his men were set upon by an angry mob. The Earl of Bath got a similar reception in Exeter. When Ralph Hopton rode into the small town of Shepton Mallet, he was hoping to recruit more men for the king. It was 1 August. But a thousand or so men turned out to stop any recruitment. Both Hopton and his foes withdrew to gather their forces. Three days later, the two troops met at Marshall’s Elm. It was a Royalist victory, and twenty-seven Parliament-men lay dead. Only a skirmish, it was nevertheless the first real fighting of the war.

‘Are you for the king, or Parliament?’ schoolboys used to cry. In the war years, soldiers stopped all comers and asked them, ‘King or Parliament?’ But when conflict first began, it did not begin with the choice of sides, but with their formation from much more inchoate and various positions.

Before Charles raised his standard at Nottingham in August, it only became obvious as the months of late summer slid by that there were any sides to take, and even then it was not at once apparent that there were only two; at first there was room for many sides. Caught up in the unfolding events and in the hot tide of feelings running through the three kingdoms, the people did not know that they were about to fight an ‘English Civil War’. Some thought that they were beginning a religious war against the Antichrist. A subset of these thought that they were fighting against a vast conspiracy of Catholics who were plotting to subvert Church and state, others that they were fighting to protect Church and state against a vast rebellion against just and legitimate authority. Still others thought the war was merely a simple and obvious matter of honour, which required that obligations to those higher in the hierarchy be observed at the price of blood. Still others thought they were witnessing a kind of rebalancing, where Parliament was about to curb the excesses which had grown upon the king and his counsellors of late. Others thought that what was happening was a chance for regions normally excluded from the processes of government to make their voices heard. Some people thought it an ideal chance to make war on neighbours that they had always disliked. Others thought it a chance to get rich quickly, with plenty of plunder available. A few – not many – thought that England would do better as a republic like Rome or Venice. A very few thought the end of the world was coming.

Because men and women thought in these diverse ways, the ‘English Civil War’ was not one war, but many; within each ‘side’, there were ancillary struggles to define that ‘side’s’ purpose. Labels like ‘Royalist’ and ‘Parliamentarian’ describe coalitions of difference, coalitions that sometimes broke under pressure. These same pressures would break many men and women, and because choices were often so finely balanced, families broke too.

Two hundred and fifty years or so before the king abandoned London, Geoffrey Chaucer had described a group of pilgrims gathering there, all sorts and conditions of men and women, their various statuses, professions and trades. His diverse men and women were to share a journey to redemption, and exchange stories. In 1642, the social hierarchy and many of the conditions of men he described still existed, though some of the clerical orders had been swept away by the Reformation. But all three kingdoms were still societies of sorts and conditions, societies in which people’s choices and tales were shaped by the place they occupied. In 1642, these sorts and conditions of men and women were to share a different and more painful journey, not towards redemption, but to the perdition of war. And they all had stories to tell on the way. Every kind of person in 1642 had to make their own sense of what was happening. Powerful nobles like Lucy Hay, gentlemen like Ralph Verney, tradesmen like Nehemiah Wallington, serving-women like Anna Trapnel – all were united and divided by the terrible choice before them. Like Chaucer, we can ride swiftly past a representative few of those estates and persons, and hear fragments of their stories. But unlike Chaucer, we do not have equal access to every estate. Most – though not all – of those who wrote down their decision-making and its origins were the better-off, with leisure, literacy and ambitions. We do not have anything like as many stories from the lower orders as we would wish, though we have some, and as we shall see, one good effect of the war was to enable ordinary soldiers to find a voice that would be heard. But for now, before the war has begun, we will be hearing mainly from what Chaucer would have called the gentil, the nicely born and bred.

We may begin with The Gentlewoman’s Tale, the story of the choices made by Brilliana Harley. The Harley family of Brampton Bryan, Herefordshire, were an especially united family due to their shared beliefs. Brilliana’s father was Sir Edward Conway, Governor of Holland and Zeeland during their revolt against Spanish rule in the 1570s, so uncannily predictive of the Civil War in its anti-monarchic violence, iconoclasm, and cries of ‘liberty!’ Born in 1598, she was in early middle age when the conflicts began, forty-four or so. Anne Fairfax, the wife of Parliament’s most important general, was her cousin.

Until the war, Brilliana’s life was dominated by family life and religion. Early modern women dreaded infertility because they were usually held responsible for it, and once pregnant they feared miscarriage and stillbirth because they were considered the fault of women too. It was widely believed that the mother’s imagination could act upon the child during conception or pregnancy, causing deformities. Looking at a picture of John the Baptist at the moment of conception could create a child covered in hair, while gazing at a hare might cause a hare lip. Birth, too, was dangerous for mother and child. Women feared the death of the child: Alice Thornton dreamt of lying in childbed with a white sheet spread, but drops of blood sprinkled on it. ‘I kept the dream in mind till my child died’, she wrote. Lady Eleanor Davies was haunted by the image of a dead child which she saw in her dreams. Women also feared that they might die themselves. Elizabeth Joscelin was not the only pregnant woman to compose a loving letter of advice to her unborn child in case she was not available to guide the child in person. In her case her fears proved well grounded, and she died soon after giving birth. Lucy Hutchinson’s grandmother lost her wits after a difficult birth.

The ceremony of childbirth was a women’s affair. Birth took place in a room from which all light was excluded; most air too. Only women could be present, and the labouring woman’s mother was usually with them. All the women, including the one giving birth, drank caudles, often a kind of eggnog with milk, wine and spices. But there was no anaesthesia available, and births did go catastrophically wrong from time to time.

After the birth, the woman remained in the birthing room for ten days, lying on the same linens on which she had delivered. After this time had elapsed, her ‘upsitting’ occurred; the linen was changed and she sat up and could show off the baby to its father and to other male visitors. But she and in particular the baby traditionally did not leave the home until a month had passed, during which time she would if reasonably off be cared for by a lying-in maid. At the end of the month, she and the baby would go to church for the churching ceremony, though a godly woman like Brilliana Harley might well find the ceremony offensive. Women from lower social strata would then feed their babies themselves. Some better-off women expressed the wish to do so but were sometimes forbidden by their husbands. The frequent remedies for sore and dry breasts in early modern commonplace books suggest that the process was not trouble-free, certainly not pain-free.

Historians used to think – rather arrogantly – that parents in earlier periods minded less about the deaths of children because such tragedies were much more frequent. Recent research strongly suggests that this was not the case. If anything, children were even more valued then than they are today because they represented prosperity and hope for a better future economically. And Brilliana, who certainly didn’t need her children’s labour, nonetheless adored her eldest son Edward, whom she called Ned. It was Ned who was the centre of her emotional life, not his father Robert. Brilliana sometimes asked Ned to tell Robert things or to ask him for things, but she also relied on him directly for love and comfort.

Brilliana’s other emotional centre was her religion. She was a very godly woman, alert and curious within a framework of strong, severe Calvinism. For Brilliana faith, good works and respect for God are not the means to salvation, but outward signs of election. From the beginning of time, God knows exactly who will ultimately join him in heaven, and who will be damned. This cannot be changed. Free will does not exist. So Brilliana wrote in her commonplace book that ‘man can not move it [his will] once to goodness, for moving is the beginning of turning to God … It is God that first turns our will to that which is good and we are converted by the power of God only, it is God that works in all of us.’ This could make life very difficult, for godly people were prone to terrifying bouts of introspection, examining themselves for signs that their faith was adequate enough for election. This was made all the more troubling because even those who were not truly elected could show some signs of faith; Brilliana, quoting directly from Calvin, wrote that ‘those that are not elect have some signs of calling, as the elect have, but they never cleave to Christ with that assurance of heart with which the assurance of our election is established, they depart from the church because they are not of the church’.

One of Brilliana’s servants, Blechly, decided that she was not saved in May 1640: ‘[and] has these 2 days been in grievous distress, and is in grievous agony of conscience and despair; she says she shall be damned’. Brilliana urges Ned to ask his tutor to pray for Blechly. Doubt and despair could themselves be outward signs that one was not a member of the elect, which made them even more terrifying. At the same time, complacency was a bad sign as well, so those cast temporarily into despair could revive themselves and experience a new birth of faith. Brilliana reminded Ned of the need for self-examination.

The Harleys made sure the vicar of their local church at Brampton was of their kind. At the end of the 1630s a man called Stanley Gower was the incumbent; on arrival in 1634 he had set about overlooking those regulations of the Laudian Church offensive to the godly. He wouldn’t let his parishioners stand during the gospel, nor bow at the name of Jesus; he left the absolution out of the prayer book’s service, he refused to rail the altar, still treating it as a movable communion table, and he told his congregation not to kneel in prayer, and not to remove their hats.

Robert Harley was part of the godly power network that was eventually to ensnare the king. He was accused of allowing Gower’s offences, harbouring Richard Symonds, a radical separatist who was also his son’s tutor, and creating special fasts for his own household, usually a sign of radical Puritanism. Harley was also in touch with that godly powerhouse and eminence grise Lord Saye and Sele, a distant cousin, and with his son Nathaniel Fiennes, with whom he exchanged godly books. He was also in contact with Prynne and Burton, visiting Prynne during his imprisonment, and sometimes meeting Burton bound on the same errand. It was Harley who moved at the start of the Long Parliament that all three should be invited to put their case to Parliament, which found in their favour and offered them compensation. During the Short Parliament, Robert Harley urged that bowing to the altar was idolatrous, and, with Pym, wanted it named a crime. At the same time, Brilliana disliked independents like the Brownists; she would not have seen eye to eye with Anna Trapnel. What she and Robert wanted was not innovation, but the retention and modest extension of what she saw as the normal practices of the Calvinist Elizabethan Church.

The Harleys saw the events of the 1620s and ’30s as a sign that the final struggle between the people of God and the Antichrist had begun. Brilliana wrote to Ned that ‘this year 1639 is the year in which many are of the opinion that the antichrist must begin to fall. The Lord say amen to it.’ The Harleys firmly believed in a sophisticated conspiracy of Catholics who manipulated Charles and would eventually convert him. It was against this background that news of the Ulster Uprising broke in November 1641. The belief that the same things could happen at any moment in England was fuelled when a tailor named Beale claimed on 15 November that he had overheard a design to kill 108 MPs, followed by a general Catholic rising. Robert Harley promptly wrote to John Aston: ‘look well to your town, for the Papists are discovered to have a bloody design, in general, as well as against the kingdom, as elsewhere’. At Brampton they were all in arms in the castle, ‘and took up provisions with them there in great fear’, wrote Brilliana.

To keep abreast of the ‘real’ news, suppressed by the government, the Harleys tried to get hold of printed news-sheets called corantoes and of manuscript news-sheets, called separates, which reported such events as speeches in Parliament and state trials. Sixteen-year-old Ned kept Brilliana supplied with separates during the Short Parliament. But personal letters were still the main source of news. The risk that they might be intercepted encouraged writers to be circumspect, however. Brilliana warned Ned about this risk: ‘when you write by the carrier, write nothing but what any may see, for many times the letters miscarry’. Some letter-writers used codes (Charles was especially fond of them). But the practice increased both paranoia and a sense that one was surrounded by spies and foes, plotting. Brilliana was delighted to hear of the abolition of the Court of High Commission, which had been the instrument of silencing many godly ministers, but not everyone in Herefordshire or the Marches was equally delighted to see godliness return. Brampton’s own vicar, Gower, reported glumly that ‘the vulgar comfort themselves with assured confidence that the bishops will get up again. I tell you but the language of Babel’s bricklayers’, while Thomas Harley, in Brampton, reported to his brother Ned in London that ‘some men jeer and cast forth reproachful words against the Parliament, and others that might forward the work of the Parliament are very backward’.

When Parliament went into brief recess in September 1641 Robert returned to Brampton and tried to enforce the Commons’ resolution to remove all crucifixes and images from churches, not only purifying his own church at Brampton, but all those in surrounding villages. At Leintwardine he broke the windows and smashed the glass with a hammer, throwing it into the Terne ‘in imitation of King Asa 2 Chron 15:16 who threw the images into the brook Kidron’, but at Aymestrey the minister and the parishioners withstood him. Harley wrote angrily to churchwardens in Leominster asking why they had failed to take down the crosses he had seen passing the church.

For most of 1642 to 1644, Robert was away from home, serving as an MP at Westminster. In his absence his wife Brilliana took charge of the Harley estates. She disliked it when he was away because she felt miserably isolated: writing to Ned, she complained that ‘now your father is away, you know I have nobody that I can speak to’. But she knew it was her duty. Robert Harley often criticized her management: ‘what is done in your father’s estate pleases him not, so that I wish myself with all my heart in London, and then your father might be a witness of what is spent: but if your father think it best for me to be in the country, I am well pleased with what he shall think best’. This sounds submissive, but the note of anger is unmistakable.

For Brilliana her connectedness with her son became a way to imagine herself escaping from the dangers that enclosed her more and more tightly. In theory, Oxford was a world that Robert knew and she didn’t, a man’s world. Robert had been to Oxford, to Oriel College in 1597, graduating with a BA in 1599; his tutor Cadwallader Owen was a powerful godly influence on the young man. Robert was also in charge of the boys’ education, searching for a tutor for them in 1631, but they were eventually sent away to school, to Shrewsbury. Ned went up to Oxford in 1638, just before his fourteenth birthday. He went to Magdalen Hall, where the principal John Wilkinson was a solid Calvinist, and where he would be taught by another staunch Puritan, Edward Perkins. Brilliana, however, took a strong interest in Ned’s godly tutors. She was worried when William Whately died and his living became vacant; she feared they might lose the services of Mr Perkins, too, since ‘as soon as any man come to ripeness of judgement and holiness he is taken away, and so they still glean the garden of the ripe grapes and leave the sour ones behind’. She also worried, like any other mother seeing a child off to university, that he would be exposed to moral danger. She wrote in a letter, ‘now I fear you will both see and hear men of nobility and excellent parts of nature abandon themselves to swearing and that odious sin of drunkenness’. Robert also wrote that ‘the universities do too much abound with such pigs’. The larger world beyond the family was menacing. But it was also enticing. Brilliana’s letters betray twin yearnings; to enclose Ned in the safety of family holiness, and to catch a glimpse of his larger world through him. She sent him reams of advice and torrents of home-made medicines:

13 November 1638. I beseech the Lord to bless you with those choice blessings of his spirit, which none but his dear elect are partakers of. I have sent you some juice of liquorice, which you may keep to make use of, if you should have a cold.

17 November 1638. I am glad you find a want of that ministry you did enjoy: Labour to keep a fresh desire after the sincere milk of the word, and then in good time you shall enjoy that blessing again.

She worried all the time about Ned’s health and well-being: ‘Pray send me one of your socks, to make you new ones by’, she wrote; and ‘You did well to take some balsam; it is a most sovereign thing, and I purpose, if it please God, to write you the virtues of it’. Sometimes she was tentative: ‘Dear Ned, if you would have anything, send me word; or if I thought it a cold pie, or such a thing, would be any pleasure to you, I would send it to you. But your father says you care not for it, and Mrs Pierson tells me when her son was at Oxford, and she sent him such things, he prayed her that she would not’ (14 December 1638). But at heart she was a generous provider. She also kept her husband supplied, writing that ‘I have sent your father a snipe pie and a teal pie, and a collar of brawn, or else I had sent you something this week’ (December 1640).

She also liked to supply spiritual food. She urged holy books on Ned, as part of their literary discussions: ‘I believe, before this, you have read some part of Mr Calvin; send me word how you like him.’ With almost every letter a present or a small piece of advice arrives: ‘I have sent you a little purse with some small money in it, all the pence I had, that you may have a penny to give a poor body and a pair of gloves; not that I think you have not better in Oxford, but that you may sometimes remember her, that seldom has you out of my thoughts.’

Ned also sent her things, including books. She wrote to thank him: ‘I thank you for The Man in the Moon. I had heard of the book, but not seen it; by as much as I have looked upon, I find it is some kind of Don Quixote. I would willingly have the French book you write me word of; but if it can be had, I desire it in French’ (30 November 1638).

The Man in the Moon was an imaginative choice. It was actually an early work of science fiction: the hero, Gonzales, is on his way home from Spain when he falls ill, and is put ashore on a desert island. Here he soon trains a pair of swans to be his servants, and eventually through the use of complex machinery they fly him to the moon, where he finds an ideal society in which there is no war, no hunger, a cure for all illnesses. This society does not lack hierarchy, however; there is a system based on height, and the king is the tallest man. There’s an element of Swiftian satire of learning, but also a critique of contemporary politics; if Ned sent his mother this book, it shows that she was herself an adventurous and curious reader, interested in unfeminine topics like political theory. It is also suggestive that Brilliana knew about Don Quixote, that great debunking of the chivalrous romances to which Charles and Henrietta and their court were so addicted.

But Brilliana was no bluestocking; she was keen on the emerging commodity culture of the late 1630s, and wanted to furnish Brampton in style. She often asked Ned to shop for her: ‘If there be any good looking glasses in Oxford choose me one about the bigness of that I use to dress me in, if you remember it … All my fruit dishes are broken; therefore good Ned, if there be any such blue and white dishes as I used to have for fruit, buy me some; they are not porcelain, nor are they of the ordinary metal of blue and white dishes’ (19 November 1639).

Another fashionable commodity was news: ‘I should be glad to hear from you how the King went to Parliament’ (23 April 1640). Brilliana didn’t only ask for news: she passed it on eagerly, showing that her choices were based on a careful attempt to keep abreast of things. She wrote to Ned about the army gathering for the war against the Scots (3 July 1640). She liked to pass on news from others to Ned; ‘The last night I heard from your father. He saw Mr Prynne and Mr Burton come into London; they were met with 2000 horse and 150 Scotch, and the men wore rosemary that met them.’ Rosemary for remembrance.

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