Welcome! Before I begin this I want all of you to know that my main source of information was revolutionspodcast.com and most of this information was taken directly from the podcast. For the pictures, I mostly went either to Wikipedia or got them off revolutionspodcast.com. For a few of them I took them from Google Images. With that done, let us begin!
Introduction
The English Revolution or the English Civil War can easily be summed up as Monarchy vs. Parliament but of course, it was not as simple as that. What were the reasons that led to this revolution? Who were the people involved in all this? What was the outcome? Read on to find out.
Charles Stuart
King James VI of Scotland was born to Mary, Queen of Scots (a.k.a. Mary Stuart) and was the great-great-grandson of Henry VII, King of England and Lord of Ireland. This put him in a unique position to ascend to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland. He had 3 children – 2 sons and 1 daughter. The two sons, in order of birth, were Henry Frederick and Charles Stuart and his daughter was Elizabeth.
Charles Stuart, who upon succeeding his father would become Charles I of England, spent a sickly childhood overshadowed by his elder brother, Henry Frederick, and his older sister, Elizabeth, both of whom thrived in the public spotlight. The spotlight got brighter in 1603 when Queen Elizabeth died and James VI of Scotland became James I of England, uniting British crowns for the first time in history. Charles meanwhile grew to be a reserved and solitary young man, ill at ease with the loose commotion of his father’s court. The commotion being due to James attempting to bring back episcopacy. But that was alright. As the second son, he could afford to fade in the background.
Then in late 1612, 18-year-old Prince Henry died of typhoid fever and Charles became heir to the throne. He knew what his responsibilities were and decided that when he became king, he wouldn’t have the sort of commotion in his court as his father had. . When James died in March 1625, 24 year old Charles, ready or not, became the ruler of the three kingdoms.
![Charles I]()
Charles I
The Three Kingdoms
Of the three kingdoms, England was the largest and wealthiest. She had a population of 5 million while Ireland and Scotland had two million and a million respectively. London was the political capital, the conduit for all trade and the cultural heart of England. Scotland, the ancestral home of the Stuarts, was divided by the classic line between the Highland North and the Lowland South, which served as not only the major geographic divide but also the major cultural, linguistic, political and religious divide. The lowlanders were Anglo centric, settled and radically protestant. The highlanders were fiercely independent, spoke Gaelic and remained Catholic. Ireland was composed of 3 main groups: The old Irish (Celtic, Gaelic and Catholic), the old English (the descendants of Anglo Norman settlers who had come over during the Middle Ages and were Catholic) and then finally there were the New English (They were uniformly protestant and represented a threat to the old English and the old Irish). ![Map]()
The First Parliament
Getting Off on the Wrong Foot
One of the first things Charles did after ascending to the throne was to call a Parliament. Not only was he just getting started with his own reign but war with Catholic Spain was brewing and that meant that the King needed to get his financial house in order. Calling a Parliament was the only way to do that. There were only two ways for the king to have a revenue stream – The ‘Tonnage and Poundage’ and taxes that were approved by the Parliament.
Now it was customary that in the first Parliament of a new reign the king would be voted something called Tonnage and Poundage for life. Simply put, Tonnage and Poundage was a collection of import export duties that the king would use to finance the routine organs of government. Granting it for life meant that no matter what, the king would have an independent financial base from which to run his administration. It was traditional, it was expected, and it was a respectful little tip of the cap.
The first Parliament of Charles’ reign however got together in May 1625 and decided to vote him Tonnage and Poundage for one year only. The historical consensus appears to be that this stinginess was simply a maneuver to get the young King to approve of some much-needed reform but Charles took that as a slap in the face. In short, Charles and the Parliament got off on the wrong foot.
The 1st Duke of Buckingham
Parliament followed up on this insult to Charles’ royal dignity with a second one, when they started openly attacking George Villiers, the 1st duke of Buckingham.
Buckingham had been rapidly elevated up the peerage after the charismatic young man had caught the eye of King James the decade before. He was created duke of Buckingham in 1623. The bond between the duke and prince was sealed during an ill-fated trip to woo the infanta of Spain in 1623. The reckless wooing of the Catholic princess had failed. Protestant England rejoiced at this but the event had cemented Buckingham as one of the few men Charles called friend. Handsome and selfish, Buckingham provided a crutch for Charles to lean on as he made the transition from prince to King. Buckingham had managed to convince, both, himself and the Stuarts that he was a wizard of finance, diplomacy and war but everyone thought he was a corrupt blunderer who was going to bring the kingdom to ruin.
So, the Parliament of 1625 started making noise that they intended to impeach (crime done while in office) Buckingham and get him away from the levers of power but Charles had very few men he called friend, none he trusted more than Buckingham. The Tonnage and Poundage vote had put him on edge, the attacks on Buckingham pushed him over, and in August 1625, he dissolved Parliament. As was absolutely his legal right.
The Second Parliament
Dissolving Parliament may have been emotionally satisfying but it did nothing to set the royal finances in order so in 1626 Charles called for a new Parliament. This time he made sure that the outspoken MPs from the last session were appointed sheriffs of their respective counties so that they were ineligible to sit again. The maneuver had little effect and the new Parliament picked up where the last one had left off. They voted the King for subsidies but kept the bill locked in committee while they renewed their complaints against Buckingham. The Parliament of 1626 then started harping on another point near and dear to everyone’s heart – Religion. Religion is gonna be a huge deal in what's coming so pay attention.
A Little About Religion
Martin Luther kicked off the protestant reformation about 100 years before Charles became king. The reformation hit England a few years later when Henry VIII decided that he wanted to divorce his wife and marry his mistress. In 1534, the Church of England with the King as its supreme head was formally separated from the Catholic Church. After Henry died and during the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I, there was a tug of war between the Protestants and Catholics. When Elizabeth became queen, the Protestants established permanent ascendancy but not without compromise. The Church of England wound up maintaining a semi Catholic form with 26 bishops and 2 archbishops. Elizabeth wanted religious peace and so she was never interested in pursuing rigid uniformity.
In short, The Church of England had its Protestant side and its Catholic side and the monarchy was Protestant.
Meanwhile, up in Scotland, the reformation followed a different course. The Scottish monarchy was a Catholic monarchy and so kings and bishops were not defenders of the reformation but rather its archenemies. After Mary, Queen of Scots (Catholic) was forced to abdicate, her infant son - James (Protestant), Charles’ father, was crowned king. But during his minority reign, the protestant nobles who had overthrown Mary pursued reformation to the hilt. Establishing what became known as Presbyterianism, which massively decentralised the Churches structure, put powers in the hands of late elders and abolished episcopacy i.e. the bishops. So as of now Scotland’s church was protestant.
When James emerged from his minority in the 1580s he moved to reinstate the bishops. It was seen as an attempt to align the Scottish reform church with the Church of England in anticipation of Elizabeth’s call to James to be her heir which finally came on her deathbed in 1603.
Back in England, the combination of loose discipline and the example of the Scottish church allowed for the growth of Puritanism. The Puritans, they did not call themselves that, were not united of mind or purpose but they did hold some general principles in common. They were mostly Calvinist and believed that the reformation was thus far, a deed half done. They were rigid, austere (strict in manner), convinced that only a select community would find salvation and believed in a literal reading of the scriptures
The Puritans hated the loose morality and corruption of the Episcopal hierarchy, with its lazy ministers and corrupt bishops growing fat on forced tides from their ill served parishioners. They were never aiming to overthrow the Church of England or set up a rival church. They simply wanted to see the reformation through to its logical conclusion.
Back to 1626
The issue facing the Parliament of 1626 was between Puritans and Armenians. Armenians took their name from a Dutch theologian who went by the Latinised name – Armenius. Unlike the Puritans who looked at the reformation and thought, “Hey, this doesn’t go far enough.” Armenians looked at the reformation and thought, “Well how do we pull back from this.” They were clearly protestant but danced as close to the edge of Roman Catholicism as you could get without falling in. They loved the fancy ceremonies and they reject Calvin’s rigid theories on predestination. There were other differences but what it added up to was a doctrine that to a Puritan, basically rejected everything that they thought distinguished them from the evil Roman Catholics in the first place.
Unfortunately, for the Puritans, Charles seemed inclined to favor an Armenian outlook, which developed due to his close association with Bishop William Laud. Laud was an angry little man, literally, who seemed to stand for everything the Puritans hated. Politically, Laud was a staunch defender of the King’s rights and happily lectured both of Charles’ Parliaments that their sole duty was to vote the King whatever money he asked for and then go home. Laud was deeply unpopular but he wasn’t yet the most despised man in the kingdom. That title was still reserved for Buckingham, whom once again the Parliament tried to impeach. This time harping on the embarrassingly inept assault he had just led on the Spanish port of Cádiz which turned out to be less an assault and more of a ‘his men getting drunk and refusing to fight’.
So, in June 1626, Charles dissolved his second Parliament in a row.
The Third Parliament
Charles Needed Money
By dissolving Parliament, Charles abandoned the four subsidies that had been buried in committee and he had still not been granted Tonnage and Poundage. Buckingham, the brilliant diplomatist that he was, somehow managed to get England into a war with France to go along with its war against Spain. A move that would’ve been catastrophic if France and Spain hadn’t been distracted by real problems. Whatever the attitude of France and Spain, England was taking these wars seriously except that Charles was operating these without any money to pay for all of it.
First, he just started collecting Tonnage and Poundage without any official parliamentary grant. This ruffled some feathers but most let it pass since they had been paying Tonnage and Poundage to their kings and queens forever. Then Charles started issuing what became known as forced loans. He, or most likely Buckingham, came up with a number which they thought some individual peer or county ought to produce to keep the crown solvent and then they simply demanded it. This ruffled more than a few feathers and the irritation was compounded by Buckingham taking the money and using it to botch a naval assault in support of French Protestants besieged at La Rochelle and losing half his men (you see a pattern here now?).
Even still, given the circumstances, most people complied. A few resisted saying that what the king was doing is illegal. Charles responded by locking up those who didn’t pay. The issue of forced loans came to a head the next year when five knights, imprisoned for their refusal to pay, sued for writ of habeas corpus (unlawful detention or imprisonment of a person). The subsequent case, dubbed ‘The Five Knights case’, questioned the right of king to imprison by his own special command. The judges found out that Charles did indeed have wide discretion to imprison. Charles was extremely happy. He got his extra parliamentary revenue and he could lock up people as he saw fit but his subjects were rapidly losing faith in him as a king they could trust.
Third Times the Charm...?
By 1628, it was clear that the Parliament and the King were going to have to come to some sort of understanding. So Charles agreed to call another session and keep it sitting until it could complete its business, as long as they refrained from attacking Buckingham. The disgruntled MPs who assembled for Charles’ third Parliament did indeed refrain from attacking Buckingham but they let fly on everything else that had been bugging them – forced loans, forced billeting (forcing civilians to house Charles’ soldiers and provide them with food), arbitrary imprisonment and martial law in general. A back and forth with Charles over his conduct resulted in Parliament passing the ‘Petition of Right’. In form, the Petition of Right was a declaration of rights Englishmen already enjoyed. Specifically, the non-parliamentary taxation was illegal, due process of law must always be observed, habeas corpus must always be granted and soldiers could not be billeted without consent.
![Petition of Right]()
Petition of Right
Charles accepted the petition and promised that he would observe it. Parliament side had voted the king five subsidies. For the first time since Charles had become king, a session of Parliament was seen through to its conclusion. Charles was evidently satisfied enough by their conduct that he invited them back for a second session after the New Year. In the meantime, however, one of the major sources of tension between King and Parliament was removed from the picture. In August 1628, the duke of Buckingham was stabbed to death by a disgruntled officer, angry at being passed over for promotion.
![A moment of silence for George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham]()
A moment of silence for George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham
It should have been a time of peace - The King had a parliamentary approved revenue stream, the petition of right had been accepted and the hated Buckingham was dead but it was not to be. The next session of Parliament wound up being the last Charles would call for 11 years. Instead of reconciliation, the assassination of Buckingham angered Charles, while the emboldened MPs decided to press for further reforms. They decided to raise the old issue of Tonnage and Poundage that they had still not officially granted and denounced the imprisonment of merchants who refused to pay, as was their right. They also got back on the horse about encroaching Armenianism. Weary of the carping MPs, Charles decided to once again dissolve Parliament in March 1629. But a group of agitated MPs decided that it was time for a demonstration. When the last session met, the speaker took his place and was about to rise to formally dissolve the body when he found himself literally held down on his chair until the house was able to officially register its disapproval of Charles’ illegal collection of Tonnage and Poundage and the whole Armenian establishment that seemed to be destroying the Church of England. Charles was not amused. When the speaker was finally allowed to dissolve Parliament, the hostile MPs were locked up and left to rot. Thus began the personal rule of King Charles.
Life Without Parliament a.k.a. Personal Rule
Ending Wars
Now, Charles had to find ways of getting money without levying taxes. The first thing Charles did after closing his Parliament was end all the wars he and Buckingham had gotten into during the first years of Charles’ reign. If there were no wars, the King wouldn’t need funding and so Charles would have a shot at continuing his reign without a Parliament. He worked out a treaty with France in April 1629 and then concluded peace with Spain in November 1630. What Charles had to do now was not get into more conflict but with the 30 Years’ War (1618 – 1648) going on in the continent it was somewhat unlikely. Charles managed to avoid getting dragged into the 30 Years’ War but then picked up a fight with the Scots in 1637. More on that later.
Charles' Group of Counselors
With Parliament out of the way, Charles governed his domains through a semi-formal group of counselors. Some of them sat on the more formal Privy Council – the standing body of peers who advised the King, but other counselors where men of lower rank who simply held positions in the royal household. Some of these advisors where dependable administrators, some courtiers but two men were by far the most talented in terms of intelligence, drive and ambition - Bishop William Laud and a tall Yorkshiremen named Sir Thomas Wentworth. Wentworth was born in 1593. He sat in the first of Charles’ parliaments but famously distinguished himself as the outspoken member of the opposition. So much so that when the second Parliament was called, Wentworth was one of the sheriffs to keep troublemakers outside. When Charles issued the forced loans in 1627, Wentworth refused to pay and he was locked up for 6 months. So far, he’s not really a guy who Charles would like.
The break came when Buckingham was assassinated in 1628. Unlike other members of Parliament who seemed to using Buckingham as a proxy through which they could wedge wider economic, political and religious reforms, Wentworth just hated Buckingham. He thought Buckingham was bad for England and didn’t pay the forced loans because Wentworth believed that Buckingham would squander it all… which was true. So when Buckingham was killed, Wentworth was satisfied.
Charles was alerted to the fact that this smart, energetic and capable member of the opposition could probably be bought at the right price. So, he made Wentworth a Viscount (a courtesy title for the heir of an Earl or Marquess) then appointed him Lord President of the North in 1628. Wentworth whipped the North into shape and was named to the Privy Council in 1629. He would’ve risen much higher, much faster but as talented as he was, he was also harsh and he alienated subordinates and colleagues wherever he went. Some of those alienated rivals on the Privy Council convinced Charles that Wentworth was the best man to run Ireland. Technically, being made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1633 is a promotion but it also meant being shipped off to Dublin, which is very far away. He managed to stay in contact with the court thanks to his friend, Bishop Laud. The two most friendless men in England had become friends.
Thorough Policy - The Religious Side
They hammered out what is now known as the ‘Thorough Policy’. It was a scheme to establish absolute monarchy in Britain. The religious aspects of this policy were spearheaded by Laud from his new position as Archbishop of Canterbury. King Charles and William Laud saw eye to eye on religion – it should be formal, it should be ceremonial, it should be exalted and it should be uniform across all of the King’s domains. With Charles’ blessing, Laud launched an effort to bring some uniformity and order to the Church of England. No more of turning a blind eye to local customs as had been the norm ever since the Elizabethan settlement. Through the 1630s, Laud slowly but surely started to establish a harder principle of one set of religious practices for everybody.
![William Laud]()
William Laud
First, he focused on the easy prey – e.g., congregations of expatriates living in Holland who had started adopting the practices of their Dutch neighbours. Then, he focused on foreigners living in England who had been allowed to maintain their forms of worship. He demanded that both follow the liturgy (a form in which worship is conducted) of the Church of England or face prosecution. This process then extended out to various English counties where Puritan leaning congregations faced demands that were basically a slew of ceremonial tweaks that the more Puritan congregations had ditched a long time ago because it all smacked of Popery.
The idea, as stated before, was to bring uniformity. To many people it came across as an attempt to undermine the reformation and paved a way for a return to Catholicism. It didn’t help that during this period Charles was indulging the Catholicism of his French born wife, Queen Henrietta Maria.
![Queen Henrietta Maria]()
Queen Henrietta Maria
On one hand you had Godly Protestants being prosecuted for resisting Laud’s popish innovations and on the other you had the Catholics practicing right out in the open. It did not look good, especially to the Puritan leaning lords who were also getting pretty ticked off at Charles’ batch of illegal fund raising schemes. They would form a majority of the opposition when Charles would be forced to call a Parliament in 1640 after trying to extend his policy of religious uniformity up to Scotland.
The Providence Island Company
So, who were these Puritan leaning lords who formed the opposition? In a few years there is going to be a civil war. So, who formed the core of what became the Parliamentary cause? First off, we have the Earl of Warwick, who was one the largest landowners in England and whose great grandfather had been one of the key figures in the English reformation. After being raised to the peerage in 1619, Warwick had focused a great deal of his time and money on privateering expeditions against the hated Spanish and colonisation projects in the New World. Then, there was the Earl of Bedford, who had been a strong supporter of the petition of right and stood as one of the main centers of gravity around which this network of dissenting Puritans swirled. Lord Brooke for example, an up and coming Puritan peer, married Bedford’s daughter in 1631 and began working closely with his father-in-law on various commercial projects. Viscount Saye and Sele (yes it is just one person) formed another centre of gravity. He was a staunch Puritan and a clever politician whose home at Broughton castle became something like a home base for Godly dissidents. Saye and Brooke were also heavy investors in New World colonisation (Saybrook in Connecticut is named after them). Finally, there was young lord Mandeville, who married one of Warwick’s daughters in 1626.
As depressed as these lords where about the state of true religion in England they looked to the Americas as a place where the Godly could build communities untainted by heresy. There was one colonisation project in particular that kept them tied together during the long years of personal rule – The Providence Island Company. The point of the company was to set up a community in the West Indies that would be run on strict Godly principles and maybe engage in a little anti-Spanish piracy on the side. Most of the Puritans lords just mentioned were shareholders and company business was a reason for them to stay in regular contact.
Of the men of business who were brought into the dissident Godly circle by the Providence Island Company, two deserve special attention – Oliver St John (apparently pronounced Oliver Sinjin), he was brought in by Bedford to serve as a lawyer for the Providence Island Company and he distinguished himself as a brilliant attorney. The other man is John Pym. Pym was born in 1584, so he’s older than the other men who were mentioned. He had been a member of all three of Charles’ first parliaments, which would distinguish him from his colleagues in the upcoming Short and Long parliaments, the vast majority of whom were sitting for the first time. The Earl of Warwick took notice of Pym and hired him to serve as a treasurer for the Providence Island Company through the 1630s, where he earned the trust and loyalty of the Godly peers. Even though the attempt to establish a Puritan commonwealth in the Caribbean wound up a failure, the company formed a critical link between the men who would emerge as the leaders of the parliamentary opposition in both, the House of Commons and the House of Lords in the 1640s.
![Oliver St John by Pieter Nason]()
Oliver St John by Pieter Nason
Charles' Money Grabbing Schemes
Besides their obvious beef with Archbishop William Laud for giving Satan the keys to the Church of England, the other thing these men complained about was the obnoxious schemes Charles and his royal treasurers had dreamed up to fund the monarchy without Parliament. If something could be exploited for profit, the King was all for exploiting it. While Charles slept peacefully, satisfied that he was within his rights, his subjects grew annoyed at what they considered were a batch of unjust and illegal money grabs. For example, there were monopolies. Monopolies were royal grants giving a corporation exclusive rights to trade or manufacture something. These monopolies could apply to practically anything like salt, coal, wine, soap. Charles made money by selling the monopolies and collecting portions of the profits, the soap monopoly alone brought like 30,000 pounds a year, which was big money in those days. It also ticked off all the merchants cut out of the loop because they did not have the right connections at court.
Besides the monopolies, Charles revived long dead medieval laws and started applying them in twisted ways. Example, once upon a time gentry worth more than 40 shillings annually were supposed to be knighted so that they would be ready for service in case the Vikings ever invaded. If they skipped knighthood, the King levied a fine. The fine was supposed to prod the unwilling in the direction of doing their duty to the King. When Charles revived the fine, it wasn’t to ‘prod the unwilling in the direction of doing their duty to the King’. He wanted them to stay unknighted so that he could collect the fine every year. The spirit of the law was being upended to service the lucrative letter of the law. It may have been technically legal but it felt unjust.
Another major feud was over the despised ‘Court of Wards’. In the sub tedium of English property law, some states were held by families through a grant from the King. This grant had long since ceased to mean anything except that if a family held one of these properties and the head of the household died and left only a minority heir, the land technically reverted to the crown from whom the family had to repurchase it. So, Charles sent out royal agents to hunt around in county records digging up properties that were technically royal grants despite the fact that no one was aware of it anymore.
The most infamous of Charles’ financial expedients was a thing called ‘Ship Money’. In theory, ‘Ship Money’ worked like this. There was a national security crisis, the Spanish are on their way or something similar, the King goes to the coastal counties and says, “We need to build a navy in a hurry and there’s no time to call a Parliament. Each of you owe me one ship. If you don’t have the facility to build a ship then you owe me enough money to build a ship and hurry because the Spanish are on their way.” The two key points here are 1) It’s an emergency. 2) It applies to the coastal counties. In 1634, Charles revived Ship Money and in 1635 he started applying it to all counties. This struck to everyone as a little crazy because 1) There was no emergency 2) People not living near the coast were also paying it. Charles gave the reason that there were no coastal counties and inland counties, they were all in this together (very patriotic I’d say). However, there was still no emergency. For that, Charles’ lawyers produced a body of precedence establishing that it was the King alone who decided what did and didn’t constitute an emergency. The people were like, “Fine, here’s your stupid ship money.” The Ship Money came back the next year and that was a problem. Ship Money was supposed to be only for emergencies and if it was going to be collected on a regular basis then it was a tax. Taxes could be approved only by the Parliament and Charles had no Parliament.
Tensions Bursting Out
In 1637, the two main sources of tension during personal rule came to a head. The religious tensions burst out in June 1637 with the very public punishment of 3 radical Puritans who had been found guilty by the Star Chamber, which was controlled by Archbishop Laud. The particular beliefs and crimes of William Prynne, Henry Burton and John Bastwick are not nearly as important as the sentence that was handed down on them. They were marched through the streets of London surrounded by large sympathetic crowds, tossed into the stocks with pillories thrown across their necks. After a couple of hours the executioner came along and cut their ears off. Then, Prynne had the letters ‘SL’ standing for Seditious Libel (speech and organization that is deemed, by the legal authority, to tend to cause rebellion against the established order) branded onto his cheeks. The three broken men were exiled to distant castles with the idea being that they would never be heard from again. The crowd roared with sympathy for the suffering of the three men. An underground circular started getting passed around wondering what kind of kingdom England was becoming. The Catholics walked free and Godly men suffered such gruesome punishment.
![Charles signing a bill agreeing that the present parliament should not be dissolved without its own consent]()
Charles signing a bill agreeing that the present parliament should not be dissolved without its own consent
![Complaint about Ship Money, 1639]()
Complaint about Ship Money, 1639
The political tension burst into the open when John Hampden was brought to trial in November 1637 for refusing to pay Ship Money. Hampden was the son of a Puritan landowner and he had inherited the family estates at the age of two when his father died. He, like Pym, served in all of Charles’ initial parliaments and had garnered a reputation as a man of strong will and strong principle. He refused to pay the forced loans and was imprisoned but was released on the eve of Charles’ third Parliament. He kept his head down through the 1630s but when Charles rolled out Ship Money, Hampden decided to take a stand. Even though his share of Ship Money was 1 measly pound, he refused to pay it. This wasn’t just for his pride. The network of dissident Puritans were looking for a test case to run through and Hampden seemed like the right person for the job. Now, Hampden was not the only guy refusing, Viscount Saye and Sele for example was also refusing in hopes that the King would prosecute him. Charles let him go because he didn’t want to give him the spotlight. This annoyed Saye.
![John Hampden]()
John Hampden
So, in November 1637, John Hampden was brought in front of the court of exchequer and tried for his refusal to pay. The case was a national sensation and crowds in London thronged to hear the arguments of both sides and then waited for the verdict. Hampden was represented by a group of lawyers but the most famous of them was Oliver St John whose arguments that Ship Money was a tax and therefore illegal without parliamentary approval were convincing. On the other side, the attorney general himself prosecuted Hampden. The 12 judges of the exchequer listened carefully to both sides and then retired to come upon a verdict. In the following weeks, their decisions were published one by one with the crowds of London hanging on every ‘Yay’ or ‘Nay’. In the end, the court found 7 to 5 against Hampden which was a win for the King by the narrowest possible margin. It was another pyrrhic victory for Charles. Just as the King was reveling in joy with the legalization of Ship Money, the number of people unwilling to pay shot up dramatically. The revenue dropped. The irony was that Ship Money was about to die right when England was about to face a national emergency because in between the punishment of Prynne, Burton and Bastwick in June and the Ship Money trial in November, Charles had shot himself in the foot up in Scotland.
War is Coming
Revolt in Churches
Scottish Presbyterianism was laced with distrust of the state. So, when the King and William Laud tried to impose their religious revisions on them, they went to an open rebellion in just about 6 months. The trigger for this rebellion was the decision to introduce the Anglican Book of Common Prayer into the Scottish churches. The Book of Common Prayer was, and is, a collection of services and prayers for the Church of England. Every parish was supposed to use it in the same way but the question of how to use it was one of the reasons for the many battles between William Laud and everyone else. The Scots had their own version called the Book of Common Order and they were attached to it.
![William Laud's Book of Common Prayer]()
William Laud's Book of Common Prayer
On Sunday July 23, 1637, by order of the King, the dean of St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh began to read from the Book of Common Prayer. Everyone went crazy. The ladies of the congregation took the lead, barraging the assembled nobles sitting in the front row with anything that wasn’t nailed down. There was pushing, shoving and shouting. The crowds gathered in the streets joined in by beating the doors and throwing rocks. The bishop of Edinburgh was stoned as he tried to flee. The dean locked himself in the steeple. This incident was not isolated. All across Scotland, parishioners were very angry about the new services. Through the summer, petitions flooded in demanding the King to leave the Scottish church alone. The King’s own allies in Scotland begged him to reconsider what he was doing but he refused to listen. All he did was send back messages to the Scots telling them to get on board.
![Riot against Anglican Prayer Book(1637)]()
Riot against Anglican Prayer Book(1637)
Riots hit Edinburgh up to the point where Charles ordered his ruling council to get out of the city taking with them one of the key economic pillars of the capital which led to yet another riot. By winter, the Scots began to organise a formal nationwide resistance. In February 1638, the King’s treasurer for Scotland, The Earl of Traquair, told the King that if he wanted to persist in this policy then it was going to take 40 thousand soldiers to do it. By that, Traquair meant to discourage Charles but Charles, as stubborn as he was stupid, started building that army of 40 thousand. While Charles was being told that an army would be required, the Scots were preparing to prevent such a military occupation.
The National Covenant
On February 28, 1638, the first batch of angry Scottish lords signed a document called ‘The National Covenant’, which was a pledge to uphold true religion in Scotland at all cost. The men who signed the covenant went out of their way to swear loyalty to the King but it was pretty clear that the pledge promised a national rebellion if Charles persisted in his religious innovations. Throughout the spring of 1638, the covenant then circulated Scotland and everyone signed it. Most signed it because they believed in the cause but a few signed because they did not want to be targeted by harassment.
Charles Wants to 'Negotiate'
Charles was building his army, which was taking time. In May, Charles sent James Hamilton, the 3rd Marquess of Hamilton, up to Scotland to open negotiations with the Covenanters (name for the rebellious Scots). Charles didn’t want to negotiate a settlement, he just wanted Hamilton to buy some time. Hamilton was a Scottish lord who had been raised in England alongside Charles. He was absolutely loyal to the King but as soon as he arrived he got the sense that 40,000 soldiers would not be enough. Even a 100,000 might not be enough. So, hopping back and forth between Edinburgh and London, Hamilton managed to convince the King to call a church assembly and try to work through the issues peacefully. Calling an assembly served Charles’ goal of keeping the Scots occupied until he was ready but Hamilton was hoping that maybe he could control the assembly and defuse the situation before it got out of hand.
![James Hamilton, 1st Duke of Hamilton]()
James Hamilton, 1st Duke of Hamilton
The Glasgow Assembly
In late November 1638, the Glasgow assembly, so called because it met in Glasgow, opened for business but it immediately slipped out of Hamilton’s control. First off, the leading Covenanters, through a mixture of coercion and general popularity secured practically every seat in the assembly for themselves. Then they barred the Scottish bishops, the one major group who supported Charles, from entering the hall. So, when Hamilton entered the hall, he was faced with a mob of overheated Scotsmen and he didn’t have an ally in sight. Ignoring Hamilton’s attempts to guide the proceedings, the Covenanters went far beyond simply repudiating Charles’ recent innovations and started stripping up every reform made to their church since King James had emerged from his minority back in the 1580s and that included tossing out the entire episcopal hierarchy. Hamilton had no choice but to admit that he totally lost control and after a week, he marched in and announced that the Glasgow Assembly was hereby dissolved. This is when he found out how totally he had lost control. The assembly ignored the order and sat for another 3 weeks in violation of a royal command to disperse which was basically treason. When they finally adjourned in late December, everyone knew that come the spring it was going to be war.
Meanwhile, down in England, Charles was busy preparing for that war but he was having a bit of trouble turning his royal decrees into a functional army. He had already settled for an army of 25,000. 20,000 of them would march north and meet the Covenanters head on while the remaining 5,000 would flank them by sea. But Charles was discovering that just because a plan is written on paper, it won’t magically appear in reality. As it turned out, the English were pretty ambivalent about what Charles was doing in Scotland and they weren’t eager to risk their lives on something they didn’t care about. The English Puritans were not only ambivalent but they actively sympathized with the Scots. So the Scots spent the winter building an army of people willing to risk their lives while Charles built an army of vagabonds who were ready to run at the first chance they got. Despite all these problems however, Charles was still convinced in the spring of 1639 that victory would be his. After all, the Scots, with all their zeal, had only 12,000 men and were outnumbered. The general of the Scottish army, Alexander Leslie, clearly saw this. It was clear that invading England was out of the question. It was best to use the sabre-rattling as a negotiation tactic rather than actually pulling out the sabres. King Charles had other ideas.
The First Bishops' War
Charles Wants to 'Negotiate' 2
The first Bishops’ War (as it is called now because it would determine whether the abolishing of episcopacy, which was pushed for the Glasgow Assembly, would stick or not) got started in May 1639 when the Marquess of Hamilton attempted to land that English flanking force of 5,000 men. As it turned out a) Hamilton’s men were untrained and unequipped and b) well-trained and well-equipped Covenanters were sitting there, ready to meet them. Famously, Hamilton’s own mother came out with a pistol and promised to shoot her son dead if he tried to land. So, Hamilton didn’t try to land and this threw the whole English strategy into disarray.
Charles decided that now wasn’t the best time to fight. So, he and the Scots got together at Berwick-upon-Tweed in June 1639 to talk truce. The resulting pacification was no one’s idea of a treaty. The Scottish commissioners made the unmeetable demand that the acts of the Glasgow Assembly be ratified while Charles was once again negotiating just so that he could buy some more time. He agreed in principles that church assemblies ought to be the conduit for church reform but said nothing about ratifying the decision of the Glasgow Assembly. Instead, the King called for another church assembly to meet in August and then a Scottish Parliament to meet in September. If he could control those bodies and get them to revoke the work of the Glasgow Assembly, it would be good for him. If not, this would buy him time until he was strong enough to crush the Scots in battle. The Pacification of Berwick (also called Treaty of Berwick or Peace of Berwick) was signed on June 18, 1639 and everyone got to work making sure that they were better prepared when the war inevitably started again next year.
First Drops of Blood
Ironically, the first bloodshed of the Bishops’ Wars and thus the first bloodshed of the whole series of revolts and civil wars that engulfed the British Isles for the next 20 years, took place a day after the Pacification of Berwick was signed. Up in Aberdeen, a force of Scottish royalists pushed the local Covenanters out of town for a little while. On June 19, 1639, the Covenanters came back and in a bloody skirmish seized the nearby “Bridge of Dee” paving the way for the retaking of Aberdeen. This skirmish is also notable because the Covenanter force was led by the Marquess of Montrose, a popular Scottish lord who was about to become the King’s best friend in Scotland. For now, he was a staunch Covenanter. This is where the first Bishops’ war ends.
![Bridge of Dee by Peter Ward]()
Bridge of Dee by Peter Ward
Preparing For the Next One
Charles returned to London in July and set to raise, equip and finance an army. His biggest problem now was financing. He was barely scrapping by for the last decade and the only reason he had his head above water was that he avoided getting into wars. Charles had managed to get through the skirmishes of 1639 by pushing his credit to the breaking point and securing loans from sympathetic nobles. Unfortunately, all those who provided loans were Catholics, which did nothing to ease anyone’s fears that Charles was intent on undoing the reformation in Britain. With his first run with the Scots having gone nowhere, the money was all dried out. So, if he wanted to keep the conflict going he had to call another Parliament.
Back up in Scotland, over the summer and fall of 1639, the new Church Assembly met in August and simply ratified everything the Glasgow Assembly had ever done. The Scottish Parliament met shortly thereafter and they started pushing through constitutional reforms to go with the religious reforms. They somehow managed to keep themselves in session through September and October but were finally broken up by the King in November. Whatever thin hope remained that the war would not start in spring, died when the Scottish Parliament disbanded.
The Short Parliament
One of the primary advocates for calling a Parliament was Sir Thomas Wentworth. Sir Thomas saw one thing clearly – there was no way to fund an aggressive war without parliamentary subsidies. He also believed one thing very much – the Parliament could be controlled. Wentworth, who is about to become the Earl of Strafford, had mastered the art of controlling the Irish parliaments (he had been sent there, remember?) and he couldn’t see why an English Parliament could not be just as easily manipulated. Unfortunately, he had underestimated the anger that had built up during the 11 years of personal rule and he had overestimated Charles’ willingness to even pretend that the anger was legitimate. The King decided that he wanted a war with the Scots more than he didn’t want to call another Parliament. So call another Parliament he did.
On April 13, 1640, after 11 years, the first English Parliament met in Westminster. The attending MPs were filled with a mix of excitement and suspicion. They were eager for the opportunity to get back in the game but wary of the intentions of the King. Charles needed money and they wanted some issues to be addressed so there had to be some sort of agreement that they could come to… right? Sadly, from the first day of Parliament the two sides were having stubborn disputes.
The opening session began with a speech delivered by the King’s messenger, Lord Finch, which was a provocative act on its own given that he had been the messenger in the last Parliament (the guy who was held down in his chair). He bluntly informed the members that they had been called to vote the King money to prosecute a war against rebels in Scotland. Once they had voted that money, the King would hear their complaints. But, anyone with half a brain knew that once Charles got the money he would be free to ignore those complaints. So, the emerging parliamentary leadership responded, “No, first we take care of the complaints and then we vote the money.” They backed this up by launching into a series of speeches headlined by John Pym who was one of the few parliamentary veterans returning from the sessions of Charles’ first parliaments. He ticked off a laundry list of grievances – illegal taxation, unjust imprisonment, creeping popery and demanded action because the members could not be expected to just return home and say that after 11 years they had dealt with exactly none of the things their constituents sent them to deal with.
![John Pym]()
John Pym
While the House of Commons was getting revved up, rumors trickled down from Scotland that shots had been fired and that the war in the north was starting back up. Charles seized on the news to press Parliament to give him the money and that he would deal with their petty businesses after the rebels had been subdued. Pym and his colleagues remained unpersuaded by the King’s arm waving and held their ground. Not only were they unpersuaded but there were hardliners (members who followed a set of ideas or policies uncompromisingly) in the House of Commons and the House of Lords that were actually engaged in some treasonous correspondence with the Covenanters. They wanted the Scots to win and so they were happy to deny Charles the means to fight them. Those hardliners were not a majority and finally the Commons told the King that they would drop a few of their bigger complaints if the King would agree to drop his illegal taxes, especially the Ship Money. The King, after much cajoling, agreed to the terms. But when Charles asked for an unprecedented 12 subsidies, they hesitated even with the Ship Money deal in place. So, instead of just voting Charles the money, the Commons instead started debating whether they should give him the money on May 4th. They wound up talking all day and adjourning for the night without coming to a decision. Charles, outraged at the Parliament’s dilly dallying, apparently snapped at this point. He called his Privy Council on May 5th and told them that he planned to dissolve the Parliament. The only pushback to this decision came from the Earl of Northumberland, who was about to have to lead the army that the King was apparently giving up on funding properly, and the Earl of Strafford (Thomas Wentworth) who thought the King was being short-sighted. Charles had made up his mind. On May 5th 1640, Parliament was dissolved after lasting a session of only 3 weeks. That is why we call this Parliament, “The Short Parliament”.
Too Many Catholics
Having given up on parliamentary subsidies, Charles went right back to the illegal taxes he had recently promised to abandon. Ship Money was back and so was the resistance against it. Then the King compounded his PR problems by trying to arrange loans from the hated Spanish while simultaneously ordering Strafford to organise an army in Ireland composed mostly of Catholic levies.
So here, we have the King Taking Catholic money to pay to the Catholic troops to go fight good and honest Protestants. More people began thinking that the greatest threat to England was not the Scottish rebels but King Charles himself.
The Second Bishops' War
In August, the English army mustered in York but, like last time, it was hardly a functional army. The soldiers weren’t being paid, there was no equipment, a third of the men didn’t even have weapons, and there were desertions and mutinies. It was a mess. Yet, Charles set off on August 20th convinced that he would win this. That same day, the Scottish general, Alexander Leslie, far more confident since his army had grown to 20,000 men, crossed the river Tweed and entered England starting the second Bishops’ War. Leslie maintained strict discipline after the crossing because he knew that in the end this was going to come down to a political settlement, so he strictly forbade any sacking or looting that might sour any potential English allies.
The English army, that attempted to stop the Scots, was hopeless. They had spent their limited time, energy and resources fortifying Berwick which they assumed the Scots were headed to first. Leslie simply bypassed Berwick and headed for the relatively undefended Newcastle upon Tyne, which no one thought of fortifying even though it was necessary because of its critical coal supply. The only spot that he could cross the river Tyne is at a bridge that is in fact well defended but there was a place just a few miles off Newcastle in Newbern from where Leslie could safely cross. Leslie crossed through there.
There were only a couple thousand English troops available to try to fend off the crossing but the fort at Newbern was like a natural barrier which helped the English repel the first push of Scottish cavalry... for a short while only. Unfortunately for the English, as soon as Leslie set up his guns… it was all over. He and his officers had mastered artillery while serving in the Continental Wars while the English soldiers had never even seen a cannon being fired. The English ran off as fast as they could. This was the first Scottish victory on English soil since 1388. Leslie occupied Newcastle and its coal supply 2 days later.
Just as Charles was being dealt with these blows from without, he was being undermined from within by dissension in his own ranks, specifically, dissension within the Puritan lords – Bedford, Warwick, Saye and Sele etc. They were still ticked off about the Short Parliament being cancelled. They had dug up a precedent from the middle ages that said, “If the King refused to call a Parliament, the 12 peers of the realm could get together and call one on their own authority.” So, they drew up a statement pointing this out to Charles and it was signed by the 12 peers of the realm. Their ultimatum was simple, “Call another Parliament or we will call one under our own authority, which will create a constitutional crisis and destroy any hopes you have of winning any war.” It looked like Charles was boxed in until he pulled out a medieval precedent of his own – instead of calling a Parliament, he could call a Great Council that precursored a Parliament. When that Great Council gathered in York in September 1640, they advised Charles to first, make a truce with the Scots and then… to call a Parliament.
Charles couldn’t put it off any longer. In October, unable to do anything about the Scottish army occupying Northern England, the King and Covenanters agreed to the ‘Treaty of Ripon’. This treaty was a major setback for Charles and its terms were humiliating. It stipulated that the King would pay for the Scottish occupation calculated at 850 pounds/day. In return, the Scots would not plunder the countryside. To meet this demand, and as a precondition to every other demand the Scots might make, Charles had to immediately call a Parliament. That Parliament would come to be known as “The Long Parliament”.
The Long Parliament
The Early Sessions
Except for a few die hard royalists, the members who showed up for the opening session of the Long Parliament, on 3rd November 1640, were ready for a reckoning with the King. That unity could not withstand the enormous pressure that was about to force everyone to choose a side during the civil war. Although, in November 1640, the 450 odd MPs who came together in Westminster were fairly united in purpose and fairly represented by the collective will of the voters.
As had been the case in the Short Parliament, the first order of business for the Long Parliament was venting frustration for the last 11 years, mostly about religious innovations and unconstitutional taxation. The common theme linking the two was that the evil counselors, specifically Archbishop William Laud and Thomas Wentworth, the Earl of Strafford, had led the King astray. The time had come for them to go. After being summoned back to England by King Charles, Wentworth was impeached by Parliament on November 11. Two weeks later, he was formally charged with traitorously trying to undermine the powers of the fundamental laws and government of the realms of England and Ireland and instead introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government against law. Archbishop Laud was impeached on December 18 for subverting true religion, assuming tyrannical powers and causing the war with the Scots. With those Scots occupying the North, there was nothing Charles could do to prevent these bold attacks.
The early sessions of the Long Parliament were absorbed in a lot of negativity like accusing royal counselors with treason and declaring Ship Money unlawful but there was a positive agenda in the mix that started to take form after all the preliminary complaints were out of the way. For the dissident Puritans (Bedford, Warwick, Say and Sele in the Lords and John Pym and Oliver St John in the Commons), the positive agenda was to force Charles to transfer the power to them and to this end they had two central demands. First, Parliament must meet at regular intervals whether the King called for them or not and second, Parliament was going to have veto power (to stop an official action) over whom the King selected as royal counselors. Both these demands deeply hurt Charles’ powers and there was no way he was just going to give them what they wanted. That is where things like impeachment of Strafford came in. It was all about leverage. Trapped between an English Parliament he couldn’t control and a Scottish army he couldn’t beat, King Charles had to do the one thing that he seemed to hate the most – giving in to other’s demands.
In February 1641, he accepted the Triennial bill. The bill stated that if 3 years passed without the King calling a Parliament, elections would be held anyway. In return for this enormous concession, the leaders in Parliament promised to vote Charles 4 subsidies, bury radical Presbyterian Church reforms that were starting to gain traction and consider leniency for the Earl of Strafford.
John Pym, who had established himself as an effective parliamentary leader, delivered on the first two promises in the Commons but the third promise (leniency for Wentworth) exposed a split among the Puritan lords. The moderate faction was led by the Earl of Bedford and they were willing to spare Strafford’s life if Charles gave in to their demands but a hardline faction led by the Earl of Warwick were adamant that Strafford must die.
![Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick by Daniel Mytens]()
Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick by Daniel Mytens
Strafford's Court Battle
Why must Strafford die? In ‘The Noble Revolt’, John Adamson proposes a theory. As mentioned before, the Puritan lords had been in continuous contact with the Scottish Covenanters throughout the Bishops’ Wars and there is good evidence that they had invited the Scots to invade which was obviously treason. Warwick and his faction believed that Strafford knew all about it and he was collecting evidence against them. So, for Warwick and his group, killing Strafford was not just about leverage but also about self-preservation.
The trial of the Earl of Strafford was the climax of the first phase of the Long Parliament. It was also a complete joke. When Strafford was finally presented with the 28 articles of impeachment against him in February 1641, he breathed a sigh of relief. He knew that his enemies in the Parliament had nothing on him. It was just a bunch of petty complaints brought together that was supposed to add up to treason. So, rather than approaching his defense with a sense of foreboding, Strafford set to work with relish. He was going to slaughter his accusers in court and when his trials started… that’s what happened.
![Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford]()
Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford
The procedure for impeachment was that the House of Commons would prosecute the defendant and the House of Lords would act as judges. Pym and his colleagues ensured that the trial was turned into as huge a spectacle as possible - the proceedings were thrown open to the public and risers were set up to accommodate as much audience as possible. The idea was to demonstrate to as many people as possible that Strafford was evil and through him prove that the whole reign of King Charles up to this point had been one injustice after another. As the prosecution got started, it became clear that it was not clear what their case was. Their accusations were met at every turn by Strafford who appeared to have total mastery over the facts despite not working from notes. Soon the audience, who were invited to bear witness to Strafford’s guilt, was eating out of his hands. The lords meanwhile started shifting uncomfortably in their seats. Why had this impeachment been called?
![The Long Parliament source: revolutionspodcast.com]()
The Long Parliament source: revolutionspodcast.com
Then came the supposed coup de grâce. At the May 5th meeting of the King’s Privy Council, where it was decided to dissolve the Short Parliament, Strafford had allegedly said, “You have an army in Ireland that you may employ here to reduce this kingdom.” It was obvious from the context that Strafford was talking about using the Irish forces he had raised against the Scots because that is what the Privy Council had been discussing at the time but the prosecution launched into an utterly contrived attempt to convince everyone that Strafford was talking about using his forces against England. Therefore he was guilty of treason. Sadly, the only evidence for this accusation was the memory of Sir Henry Vane and as soon as he was put on the stand, he started back peddling. Then, no other person on the Privy Council could recall such an event. Proving treason required two witnesses and the prosecution had only one that wasn’t even that good. The offense, meanwhile, had half a dozen people who said that this never happened. With that, the case against Strafford disintegrated. Charles was happy. It was only a matter of time now before an acquittal came through.
Then things took an ugly turn.
The Bill of Attainder
Strafford’s enemies feared what he may have found out about their treasonous conversations with the Covenanters, so they changed their tactics and presented a Bill of Attainder to the Commons. A Bill of Attainder is basically a legislature declaring you guilty of some crime by a straight majority vote. They needed no evidence except that they took a vote and found you guilty. These bills are so scary that the US constitution explicitly forbids them in two separate places. With the legal prosecution of Strafford in shambles, a Bill of Attainder was introduced in the Commons to simply declare him guilty of treason.
At this point, it felt that the Bill of Attainder was introduced just so that the pressure on Charles didn’t let up but in early May 1641, two things happened that sealed Strafford’s fate. First was a bungled (clumsy) attempt by Charles to rescue Strafford from the Tower of London where he was being held for the duration of his trial. This didn’t do anything except alienate moderate members of the Commons just as they were starting to think that maybe the anti-Strafford types were getting out of hand. The second thing happened on May 9, 1641, the Earl of Bedford suddenly died. He had been the weight keeping the extremists in check and keeping the King at the negotiating table.
The Bill of Attainder was passed and all that was left was for Charles to sign the death warrant. Until the very end, Charles remained adamant that whatever the outcome, he was going to pardon his loyal advisor. But after the revelation of the Army Plot, which is what we call the attempt to break Strafford out of jail, the mobs of London turned on the King and started demanding Strafford’s head. Almost certainly, these mobs were organised by Warwick and his allies but Charles was now more fearful for the safety of his family and the borderline riotous capital so he gave in and signed the death warrant. On May 12, the Earl of Strafford was executed on Tower Hill. Charles never forgave himself and came to believe that the horrors of the civil war was divine retribution for Strafford’s death.
![The execution of the Earl of Strafford]()
The execution of the Earl of Strafford
In the aftermath of the execution, the relationship between King and Parliament was so strained that Charles decided to change political trajectory. Thus far, the King had been trying to get the Parliament to align with him against the Scots but what happened was that Parliament had aligned itself with the Scots against Charles. Beyond furious with the parliamentary leadership, Charles turned on a dime in the summer of 1641 and announced that he was headed to Scotland. He believed that if he couldn’t get the Parliament to help defeat the Scots, then he could get the Scots to help defeat the Parliament.
Charles Goes to Scotland
The official details of the trip was to finalise the Treaty of London signed between the King and the Covenanters in August. Charles, in pursuit of his new political strategy, had hastily given into most of the Scottish demands paving the way for their immediate withdrawal from the English soil. It was doubtful that Charles had intended to bind himself to the terms of the treaty because Charles, like always, was convinced he was about to get the upper hand on everyone and once he had the upper hand, he could do whatever he liked. So he and his entourage headed north in August 1641.
The key to Charles’ strategy in Scotland was the Earl of Argyll, specifically, detaching him from the Covenanter cause. Argyll was a young man, still in his early 30s but he was by far the largest landowner in Scotland and the leader of the powerful Clan Campbell. He had aligned himself with the Covenanters but according to the King’s sources, he was not a true believer. So breaking Argyll away from the Covenanters would deprive them of a powerful ally and simultaneously give the King a native force strong enough to protect his interests in Scotland.
![Archibald Campbell, 1st Marquess of Argyll, 8th Earl of Argyll]()
Archibald Campbell, 1st Marquess of Argyll, 8th Earl of Argyll
Charles launched a charm offensive. He promoted Argyll to Marquess and started hinting that more was on the way if Argyll left the Covenanters. Then the damnedest thing happened, something that has become known as ‘The Incident’. The Incident is the attempted kidnapping of Argyll by royalist Scotsmen (yup that’s right). Not just Argyll but also the Marquess of Hamilton – the King’s point man in Scotland. Behind the plot, we find the Marquess of Montrose who is the same person who led the Covenanters and retook Aberdeen. Since the Bishops’ Wars, Montrose had moved decisively and secretly over to Charles. There were a couple of reasons for this but for now we’ll just name one – he and Argyll were bitter rivals and because Argyll had emerged as leader of the Covenanters, Montrose switched sides. The kidnapping plot was supposed to be about Montrose exposing a secret alliance between Argyll and Hamilton against the King but the plot was betrayed just as it was about to be carried out, so Argyll and Hamilton got away.
Unfortunately for Charles, The Incident destroyed his credibility with the Scots. Also, Montrose was working closely with one of the King’s most trusted secretary. So, the idea that Charles didn’t know something was up, was pretty farfetched. This means that the King was busy pursuing two contradictory strategies in Scotland – one sweet and one sour and when the sour one was exposed the sweet one was ruined. Charles left Scotland in November 1641 having achieved nothing except that the most powerful man in Scotland was still his enemy.
The Grand Remonstrance
When Parliament returned from the recess in the autumn of 1641, half the Commons was ready to resume the attacks on the King while the other half thought the work was done and it was time for rapprochement. It was noted by SR Gardiner (an English historian) that when the Restoration Settlement comes along in 1660, it will be based on the work the Long Parliament had accomplished up to about August 1641 and everything that came after will be swept away and only regained by later generations.
The fight over the Grand Remonstrance demonstrates this breakdown of parliamentary unity. The Grand Remonstrance was to be a tally of every single grievance anyone ever had against Charles. John Pym and his allies planned to write it up and then use it as a basis for extracting further concessions from the King. It was supposed to be introduced to the Commons on October 30 but that same day news came that changed everything. News that temporary shelved debate over the Grand Remonstrance and swerved everyone’s attention (including ours) over to Ireland. On October 23 a rebellion had broken out over there.
If the Bishops’ Wars were the bigger picture trigger for the English Civil Wars because they forced Charles to call Parliament, then the Irish Rebellion is the more direct trigger because it was the question about what to do with Ireland that finally broke the government in half.
The 'Horrors' of the Irish Rebellion
The rebellion was initially launched by Old Irish landowners centered around the province of Ulster. Ulster had a history of being pretty staunchly anti-English and so had become a major target of Protestant colonisation projects organized by for example the late Earl of Strafford. With the King bogged down in a conflict with the Scots and his Parliament, old Irish leaders hatched a plot to simultaneously seize Dublin and major northern forts hopefully securing everything before the English knew what hit them. Then the King and English Parliament would really be in a bind and maybe decide that Ireland wasn’t worth the trouble. But, apparently like all secret plots these days, the planned rebellion was exposed literally the night before it was set to launch and the English leaders had just enough time to prepare. So, Dublin held out. For the rest of the year, stories trickled over from Ireland carried mostly by English refugees of the atrocities committed by Irish rebels up to and including the murder of babies, which didn’t actually happen. Given the English prejudice against Catholics in general, the Irish in particular, everyone was ready to believe the worst. Something had to be done. Reinforcements had to be sent. But, with the King and Parliament locked in a power struggle, really important questions were now being opened up that had no real answer – On whose authority would these troops be raised? Who would pay them? Whom would they answer too? Who would appoint the officers? What if the King and Parliament started raising separate armies and claimed that the other side’s army is illegitimate? These are the kind of questions that lead directly to Civil War.
Back to the Grand Remonstrance
Compounding the animosity between King and the Parliament, reports started coming over that the Irish rebels were claiming to be acting on the King’s instructions. A lot of the rebels were drawn from the idol ranks of the army Strafford had built to go fight in Scotland and so, as ready as parliamentary leadership was to believe the Irish butchery, they were also ready to believe that Charles was somehow behind it. That he was finally coming clean about his closet Popery and launching the final assault on Protestantism in Britain. So, as the Irish rebellion heated up, so did parliamentary anger at Charles. It is critical to note that as the temperature of Parliament rose, the heat was coming from fewer and fewer sources. Instead of closing ranks with the King to put down the rebellion in Ireland, those fewer and fewer sources led by John Pym returned to the Grand Remonstrance. This turn back to the cataloguing of grievances struck more moderate (and increasingly Royalists) members of the Commons as pointless, off topic and less dangerous than what’s going on in Ireland. However, Pym and his increasingly parliamentary allies were looking to keep Charles’ feet to the fire.
Now, a Remonstrance is technically a private letter from Parliament to the King but Pym had much grander plans for the document. He wanted it printed, circulated and stirring up trouble. He didn’t want the public to forget why Charles was so bad just as he and his allies were getting ready for the next move – seizing control of the armed forces.
The Remonstrance was narrowly passed on November 23rd but, because of the divide in the Commons, the vote to publish the document went against Pym. This was a setback as publishing the Remonstrance was kind of the point of the whole exercise but then a few careful leaks later, it was sent to the underground presses. This further offended the moderates who started to think that this was all getting out of hand and were like, “Look, at the end of the day we owe our loyalty to the King whether we like him or not and now you don’t even play by your own rules anymore.” Pym and his circle quickly regained balance when Charles once again shot himself in the foot.
Charles Does What He Shouldn't
On January 4, 1642, King Charles paid an extremely ill-advised trip to the House of Commons. The King was fed up and decided that if he could not dissolve Parliament, his best play would be to lock up the opposition leaders. He ordered the arrest of five MPs – John Pym, John Hampden (for the Ship Money stuff), Arthur Haselrig, Denzil Holles and William Strode (the latter two had been among those who held the speaker down at the end of the third Parliament). He also ordered the arrest of one peer – Lord Mandeville. Locking up MPs is a pretty provocative business and at first the arrest order was resisted. So, Charles decided to march into the Commons and arrest them personally. Unfortunately for Charles, the secret plan to arrest the members was revealed to Pym the night before (why are secret plans made again?) so when the King, backed by 400 soldiers, dramatically burst into the chamber to arrest them, they were not there. Charles demanded they come forward. Charles demanded the speaker, William Lenthall, to tell him where they had gone whereupon the speaker famously replied, "May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here." Now Charles was just standing in a room he really shouldn’t be standing in trying to do something he really should not. Then he had to leave empty handed, his power, visibly rejected.
![Charles' attempt to arrest the five members]()
Charles' attempt to arrest the five members
On January 10, 1642, King Charles, once again afraid that he and his family were about to be engulfed by the parliamentary directed mobs of London angry at the attempt over the 5 members, left the city for Hampden court. Three days later, they moved on the more defensible Windsor Castle. Charles will not return to his capital until 1649.
No Hope For Peace
Raising Armies and the Propaganda War
The early months of 1642 were tied up in an acrimonious (bitter) exchange of letters between the King and Parliament full of unreasonable demands and barely concealed paranoia of the intentions of the other side. Then, the King made a tactical blunder by summoning the Lords to attend to him personally. He was trying to shift the center of political gravity away from London but of course, the only peers who responded were his allies, which meant that the only resulting shift in political gravity occurred in the House of Lords, which now skewed decisively radical. In simple terms, the House of Lords was not completely hostile to the King because he had a few allies in there but now, since there were no allies, the House of Lords was totally hostile.
As previously mentioned, the Irish Rebellion still loomed all over this but Parliament was now firmly convinced that any army the King raised would be used against them first and half of them actually believed that the rebellion had been orchestrated by Charles to justify raising an army to crush them. So, in March, Parliament unilaterally attempted to take control of the situation by passing the ‘Militia Ordinance’. The Militia Ordinance authorised Parliament, on its own authority, to raise an army, pay for it and appoint its commanders. The reason it was called a ‘Militia Ordinance’ and not a ‘Militia Law’ is that laws have to be signed by the King while an ordinance does not.
By mid-March, the King had moved up north to York where he planned to regroup and launch his triumphant return to London. Although he didn't move on it right away, the key to this triumphant return would be controlling the arsenal in the northern port city of Hull. There were only a few of these major powder and weapon caches scattered across England. So, making sure the Hull arsenal was firmly in hand was pretty important. But, the King was still affecting a conciliatory posture, so, he didn’t attempt to lock down Hull till mid-April. When the King did make his move, the parliamentary leaders were tipped off that the King was leaving York and so they ordered Sir John Hotham to ride north as fast as he could and lock the gates to the city. When Charles arrived on April 23, he discovered that the drawbridge was raised. This led to an absurd exchange where Hotham told the King that he couldn't lower the drawbridge without an order from the King. So, Charles ordered him to open the door but Hotham replied that he meant an order from a sovereign authority of the King. This ultimately meant Parliament. Flummoxed (baffled) by this novel political theory that ‘the King’ and the King were not necessarily the same thing, Charles was forced to withdraw.
All this public posturing was really about trying to win the propaganda war. As Charles headed back to York he was able to argue that he was a victim while Parliament was able to argue that Charles wanted to make war on his own people. The flurry of public letters, pamphlets, and declarations reached its peak in early June when Charles asked Parliament to send him a list of final demands. Parliament responded by drawing up the 19 propositions. The 19 propositions, which included things like approval of Privy Councillors and the right to appoint Tudors for the Kings children to keep them from being brought up Catholic, were not the basis for negotiation. Mainly because, we are at the point where both sides are trying to make sure that the other side is blamed when armed conflict inevitably breaks out. This is also the point when the so called constitutional royalists in the House of Commons, the guys who initially supported clipping the King’s wings, started slipping out of London and physically joining the King’s side. The King welcomed them but unfortunately, the withdrawal of the constitutional royalists only made the House of Commons a more extreme body (because the supporters had left the House). This pushed a peaceful settlement off the table. With these two opposing sides coalescing, it makes an opportunity to introduce some terms – Cavaliers and Roundheads. They did not call themselves this. These names were insulting names supplied by the other side.
Cavaliers and Roundheads
The stereotypical royalist Cavalier had long flowing hair, fancy clothes, a plumed hat and a carefree aristocratic manor (total disregard for commoners). He was also portrayed as a hard drinking, frivolous atheist, a corrupt dilettante who hated God almost as much as he hated the poor.
![Prince Rupert - A Cavalier]()
Prince Rupert - A Cavalier
The stereotypical Roundhead was an upstanding Puritan defending the rights of freeborn Englishmen. If talked to a royalist, a roundhead is mocked for his ridiculously short cropped hair (hence the name), his joyless Puritanism, his desire to undo the natural order of things and put the kingdom of England in the hands of lowborn religious fanatics. So, to recap, Royalists and Cavaliers were the same thing and so were Parliamentary and Roundheads.
![A Puritan Roundhead by John Petite]()
A Puritan Roundhead by John Petite
Almost War Time
The drift to war picked up through June when the King appointed a new Lord Admiral of the English Navy. Parliament countered by placing the Earl of Warwick on the same post. They were popular with the sailors and quickly secured their support. Just like that, the King lost control of his navy. Charles then issued something called the Commissions of Array, it allowed the King to raise forces without the approval of Parliament. This was similar to the Militia Ordinance that allowed Parliament to raise an army without consent of the King. These contradictory declarations then circulated through the country and everyone had to choose whether to follow the Militia Ordinance or the Commissions of Array… whether to become a Roundhead or a Cavalier. Both of these were legally uncertain but they were being carried around by men with pikes and guns.
In July, Parliament established a committee of safety, which formally resolved who raised the army it was already raising. The choice to lead this army, by unanimous acclamation, was Robert Devereux the 3rd Earl of Essex. Essex had long been alienated in the royal court. His father had been executed for launching a quick rebellion against an aging Queen Elizabeth in 1601 and then King James had annulled his first marriage in 1613 for the public and humiliating reason of impotence. He spent the 1620s serving as a volunteer in the Dutch armies making him one of the few Englishmen with any military experience, which is one of the reasons why he was selected as major general by Parliament in the first place. The other reason is that he was one of those hardline Lords in the Warwick camp who had demanded Strafford’s head. The parliamentary leadership was assured that they were selecting a man who knew how to fight and was willing to fight. Sadly, they would be disappointed.
As the Militia Ordinance and the Commission of Array is circulating, the English forces in Ireland are still desperate for reinforcements but the King and Parliament had forgotten about them. On August 22nd 1642, King Charles formally raised his banner at Nottingham. This was merely a symbolic act at this point but it was the King’s official declaration that he was at war with the enemies of England and everybody needed to rally to his colors. Except that after he raised the banner, no one showed up. The turnout was pathetic. The Commissions of Array turned out to be a failure. Parliament meanwhile was quickly building an army that numbered almost 15,000 men by early September. Charles had to quickly shift gears and start granting individual commissions allowing Lords to raise troops on their own authority since duty to your local Lord was easier to understand and enforce than some abstract duty to a faraway King. Once he had enough troops, Charles’ plan was to march on London and retake the capital.
War Time
Battle of Powick Bridge
![Old Powick Bridge over the River Teme - geograph.org.uk - 795873]()
Old Powick Bridge over the River Teme - geograph.org.uk - 795873
On September 9th, the Earl of Essex marched out of London with his 15,000 men and went looking for the King. The first real action of the war took place on September 23rd at Powick Bridge where an advanced guard of parliamentary cavalry met an advanced guard of royalist cavalry and in the ensuing skirmish, the parliamentary force was quickly broken and driven off. It was a minor royalist victory but it does present an opportunity to introduce Prince Rupert. He was just 22 years old when the war broke out and was the third son of Charles’ older sister, Elizabeth. He had spent his life in exile, along with the rest of his family after his father, Frederick V, had failed to gain the throne of Bohemia in 1620 and basically starting the 30 Years War. Living in Holland, Rupert embraced the military as a way of life and went on his first campaign with the Dutch Prince of Orange at the age of 14. Five years later, he was captured by the Holy Roman Empire and held as a prisoner for 3 years. He was finally released in 1641, largely due to his diplomatic uncle, King Charles. The grateful Rupert hopped over to England just in time to join the royalist side. He was the most talented cavalry officer of the war (at least until Cromwell shows up).
Battle of Edgehill
![Charles holding a council of war on the eve of the Battle of Edgehill, 1642]()
Charles holding a council of war on the eve of the Battle of Edgehill, 1642
On October 13th, the King finally felt like he had enough men to move on London. As he marched he picked up more reinforcements increasing his men to about 14,000 putting him in equal terms with the parliamentary army. As Charles moved southeast, Essex headed northwest to intercept him but displaying the downright unprofessional soldiering that was the hallmark of the early fighting, neither side sent out advance scouts and so neither side knew where the other was until they were right on top each other. Even then, Charles wound up lining up between Essex and London even though Essex was supposed to be blocking the King’s path. Everyone’s big assumption heading into the Battle of Edgehill is that this was going to be it. The two sides would have one big decisive battle and let the chips fall where they may. It almost worked out that way except that Prince Rupert never came back.
For a brief moment, it did look like Edgehill was going to be decisive. As the two ranks of pike men in the middle advanced on each other, Prince Rupert’s cavalry barreled forward and broke the parliamentary horse. As their beaten enemy fled in disarray, Rupert and his men, flushed with the glory of the whole thing, chased after them, kept chasing after them and never came back. Meanwhile back at Edgehill, the parliamentary infantry was steadily pushing the royalist infantry until evening forced both sides to call off the fight. Had Rupert turned around and come charging into the rear of the parliamentary line, the English Civil War would never have happened.
After the fighting, both sides were battered. The parliamentary army, even after being bolstered by an army being led by John Hampden, was only half of what it had been the day before. The King was no better off. Rupert offered to make a run for London with his triumphant cavalry, who had finally come back after the sun went down, but the King chose the more cautious strategy of keeping what remained of his army together. This meant that the march to London was painfully slow, which meant that Parliament had time to organise a defense. By the time, the Royalist army neared London on November 13, a massive army of 24,000 stood at Turnham Green, ready to stop them. It was less an army and more a hastily raised mob of London apprentices backed up by the trained people. Still, 24,000 is a number that can spook anyone and it did spook Charles. He withdrew his force to Oxford, where he planned to spend the winter.
Break Time
During this break, parliamentary envoys came to Oxford over the winter and the two sides tried to negotiate. It quickly became apparent that the recent fighting had only made everyone dig in even harder. Both sides made ridiculous demands because neither side was ready to concede a thing. This had to be settled on the battlefield.
Come the spring of 1643, the war got going in earnest. It is no longer going to be two armies dancing around each other; it is going to be three separate but interconnected theaters. The Northern theater was defined by a rivalry between the royalist, Earl of Newcastle and the parliamentary, Lord Fairfax and his son, Sir Thomas Fairfax. In the middle, we have the on-again, off-again maneuvering between Charles and Essex. In the west, we have a host of commanders duking it out but for now, the really interesting campaign pits the royalist Sir Ralph Hopton against his old friend Sir William Waller.
![The Battles]()
The North
We’ll start with the North where the Earl of Newcastle had been commissioned to lead the Royalist forces. Newcastle was a magnate (rich and influential person) who had actively supported Charles during the Bishops’ Wars with man and money and had been rewarded with a seat in the Privy Council in 1639. As the Civil War got going, he had managed to raise an army of 8,000 men in a short amount of time. More important than that, he recruited some of the most capable officers to fight on either side of the war including Continental veteran Sir George Goring and Sir Marmaduke Langdale. Newcastle was opposed by Ferdinando Fairfax who had also for the King during the Bishops’ Wars but he switched sides when the Long Parliament convened. Fairfax was supported by his 30-year-old son, Thomas. During the summer of 1642, while Essex and Charles were dancing around each other down South, Newcastle and the Fairfaxes had signed a local neutrality agreement in hopes that the war would be over before they had to fight each other. However, in the spring of 1643, there was no putting off hostilities. Newcastle advanced on York and forced the small parliamentary army of 3,000 – 4,000 to withdraw. From there, the Fairfaxes were forced to move on to the city of Bradford. Knowing they wouldn’t be able to withstand a siege, father and son launched a daring surprise attack on Newcastle’s army of about 10,000 men at Adwalton Moor on June 30. They nearly accomplished their goal but the Royalists regrouped and turned the parliamentary flank, forcing the Fairfaxes to fall back to Hull and surrendering the control of all Yorkshire to the Royalist. In short, it was a terrible opening round for Parliament in the north.
The West
Meanwhile, down in the west, the war started no better for Parliament. There were a number of fights going on there but William Waller and Ralph Hopton led the key armies. Waller was a staunch parliamentarian despite not having any sympathy for radical Puritans. He had fought at Edgehill but had been among the cavalry scattered by Rupert. Hopton, meanwhile, had joined the Royalist cause despite supporting the impeachment of Strafford and being a member of the delegation that had presented the Grand Remonstrance to Charles in December 1641. Waller and Hopton had also served together on the Continent as volunteers in the lifeguard of Elizabeth of Bohemia a.k.a. King Charles’ older sister. They were friends and neighbours but now they found themselves on opposite sides of the Civil War on which they both had mixed feelings. In fact, after they had spent some time fighting each other in early 1643, Hopton sent Waller a letter asking him if there wasn’t some way for them to just settle things and take no further part in the war. Waller replied in a letter, that has become part of the lore of the English Civil Wars. He writes,
“The experience I have of your worth and the happiness I have enjoyed in your friendship are wounding considerations when I look at this present distance between us. Certainly my affection to you is so unchangeable that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship, but I must be true wherein the cause I serve. That great God, which is the searcher of my heart, knows with what a sad sense I go about this service, and with what a perfect hatred I detest this war without an enemy; but I look upon it as an Opus Domini and that is enough to silence all passion in me. The God of peace in his good time will send us peace. In the meantime, we are upon the stage and must act those parts that are assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do so in a way of honour and without personal animosities. Whatever the outcome I will never willingly relinquish the title of Your most affectionated friend.”
Then they went back to trying to kill each other.
After barely winning a fight at Lansdowne hill on July 5, Hopton was badly injured when barrel of powdered keg exploded as his army was preparing to withdraw the next morning. Waller took advantage of his friend’s misfortune and boxed the Royalist army in a few days later. However, a blind and half-paralysed Hopton ordered his cavalry to break for the King in Oxford and beg for reinforcements and they managed to slip away. Amazingly, the King responded quickly and overnight, 1800 horses were riding out of Oxford. Waller’s army numbered 2500 soldiers and about 2000 horses but with the arrival of Royalist reinforcements, he found himself pressed between Hopton’s requested 2000 infantrymen on one side and the 1800 cavalry troopers on the other. He pulled his forces up to a defensive position on July 13. The Royalist cavalry, who had been riding all night, kept riding until they hit Waller’s army. After intense fighting, the parliamentary cavalry were scattered but they accidentally retreated over a concealed cliff ending up, as John Kenyon writes, a shattered tangle of flesh and bone, equine and human, at the bottom of what is still known as ‘Bloody Ditch’.
Meanwhile, Hopton’s royalist infantry, who had been slow to mobilise, because they had not expected help to come so quickly, finally got moving. Waller’s infantry was helpless. A few died where they stood, most surrendered and a bunch more ran off. Waller managed to get away but the parliamentary army in the west was destroyed. So, by mid-summer 1643, Royalists controlled the north and the west and just to compound things, Prince Rupert rode off and seized the City of Bristol on July 26th after convincing the parliamentary garrison commander to surrender without a fight. As the autumn of 1643 approached, Parliament was in it in a bad way.
Not all was lost; Parliament still had money to draw on from the London merchants and fertile recruiting grounds in the eastern counties. When Waller made it back to London in early August, he was greeted as a hero and Parliament immediately granted him an army of 11,000 that he could use to defend London. A few days later, they voted to grant Lord Mandeville, who had become the 2nd Earl of Manchester when his father died the previous November, a commission to raise 20,000 men to form a new Eastern Association Army.
The First Battle of Newbury
With everything going so well for the Royalists, Charles decided to once again, shoot himself in the foot when he made the decision to besiege Gloucester in late July. Had Charles united his forces in the middle and west, it is likely that he could have ended the war before Parliament could regroup. Instead, he decided to besiege a strategically unnecessary city. Before the King came to his senses, Essex took off with an army that numbered about 15,000 to lift the siege. They ran Charles out of Gloucester on September 4. Then, like the year before the two armies just wandered around until they bumped into each other at Newbury, two weeks later. Once again, the King wound up standing between Essex and London. As with Edgehill, everyone hoped that the first Battle of Newbury would be decisive enough to end the war. But, the reason this is called the 'first' battle is to distinguish it from the 'second'.
On the morning of September 20, the two sides lined up on a north-south axis. The north end was bounded by a river, the south end by a flat area called the Wash Common and the middle was a mess of hedgerows and rough terrains, surrounded by a high point called Round Hill, which the Royalist, despite having arrived first, didn’t occupy for some reason. Round Hill was taken by the parliamentary forces. When the battle started, the north degenerated into a bloody stalemate, the middle turned into a vicious fight over Round Hill and the south saw a fierce back and forth between Prince Rupert’s hordes and the parliamentary cavalry. The south end of the fight then turned into a wicked artillery duel that saw the London trained bands, who were supposed to be the weak links of Essex’s army, for some reason decide to hold their ground in the face of alternating artillery bombardments and cavalry attacks. When night fell, Newbury turned out to be just as bloody and just as indecisive as Edgehill had been. Both sides were preparing to get back to it the next day but Charles decided to withdraw after taking stock of his gunpowder stores and realising he had none.
With the Civil War approaching its second winter, the parliamentary cause was reeling. The moderately positive end to the first Battle of Newbury gave them a shred of hope that they can still pull this thing off. They will not be able to do it without help. Next time, it will be time to call the Scots back onto the field of play. It will also be time to meet a man named Oliver Cromwell.
Phew! That was one long blog and that is not the end of it! The second part of this will be up some time in June. This blog covered the first 5 parts in Revolution Podcast’s English Civil War series. Before I end this blog, I want to know whose side are you on… the Royalists or the Parliamentary forces? Also, just a refresher – All this took place because Parliament didn’t vote Charles Tonnage and Poundage for life. Thanks for reading!
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