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With Strafford in his grave and the chief political demands conceded by the king, parliament turned to those ecclesiastical questions which to many of its members were the major issue. The Root-and-Branch Bill had been becalmed in committee, and in June the bill passed by the Commons to exclude bishops from parliament was rejected by the House of Lords. All the summer bickering continued on this matter between a persistent lower House and a reluctant upper. The latter refused to accept a protestant test, which would have excluded catholics from their numbers; the Commons impeached thirteen bishops, decreed the abolition of all Laud’s innovations in ritual, and attacked the prayer-book. Meantime there were ominous demands 1641 from Scotland for the establishment of presbytery in England, and on the Scots the parliament leaders were largely dependent. A House which had been nearly unanimous over the reform of civil abuses and the safeguarding of its privileges, and had shown a great majority against Strafford—which, moreover, in these matters had had popular opinion behind it—now began to show a deep cleavage within itself. It was well enough to get rid of Laud’s extravagances, but the attack was now being pushed against things dear and ancient, the familiar service of the Church. Hyde and Selden and Falkland drew away from their former allies, and a party of constitutional royalism began to form itself in the House, and to win acceptance in the country. Conscious of this loss of support, Pym and his section became bolder and more desperate. They began to contemplate an appeal to force as an inevitable step, and they raised the vital question of the control of the military forces. They had reason to fear an armed coup d’état, and were resolved to forestall it. Before the session ended on September 9th, the Commons had virtually assumed military authority by ordering Lord Holland to secure the key seaport of Hull, and by making provision for guarding the Tower of London.

Meantime on August 10 Charles set out for Scotland. Misled by the Marquis of Hamilton, he believed that in that country, where religious separatism was rampant, but a traditional royalism seemed nevertheless to be universal, he might secure a makeweight against his enemies of the Commons. Dislike was growing between Scots and English, dislike which it was to please heaven to increase on better acquaintance. He hoped especially for the support of Leslie’s army. The first days in Edinburgh disillusioned him.^[113] Leslie’s army was disbanded, and Charles was forced to grant to the Scottish parliament a firmer control over the executive and the THE IRISH REBELLION 1641 judiciary than anything claimed at Westminster. He was compelled to put the Covenanting leaders in high office, and the bogus plot known as the “Incident” was used to strengthen the position of Hamilton and Argyll. Meantime he had written in October a letter to be circulated among the peers, in which he announced his intention of preserving the established doctrine and worship of the Church, and his resolve to die in the maintenance of it. Likewise he took occasion to promote two of the bishops whom the Commons had impeached. Pym, realizing that he was losing ground in the country, as he had already lost ground in the House, and believing that at any moment the king might appeal to force, decided that his position could only be sustained by some dramatic deed. He would appeal to the people at large with a statement of his case and a remonstrance on the disorders of the kingdom.

Suddenly out of Ireland came a thunderbolt. Charles had word of it on October 28 on the links at Leith, and by November 1, the day when Pym’s remonstrance was to be discussed, the news reached parliament and ran like wildfire over London. The peace which Strafford had imposed had ended in blood and fire. The native Irish had risen in Ulster, and the Anglo-Irish gentry of the Pale were about to join them. Women and children had been brutally murdered; fifty thousand—a hundred thousand—a hundred and fifty thousand Englishmen were already dead. The rumours were largely untrue, for it is probable that in the first few months not more than four thousand colonists died by violence and perhaps an equal number from hardships and starvation; but the total was soon to be terribly swollen by retaliatory slaughterings, and the cautious Sir William Petty was of opinion that in ten years from 1641 more than half a million perished. This is not the place to trace the causes of the Irish rebellion. Ultimately they are to be found in centuries of misgovernment and misunderstanding, and notably in the barbarities and confiscations of the Elizabethan settlement. But a potent proximate cause was the removal of Strafford, and the disbandment 1641 of his army. He had given Ireland impartial justice and an equal law, but his regime had not yet rooted itself, and when his strong hand was withdrawn lawlessness leaped forth the more violently because of its suppression. He had treated the catholic faith with fairness and moderation, and to catholics the rule of those who had done him to death meant only persecution. They had not forgotten Pym’s declaration that he would have all papists treated like madmen.

To Englishmen of both parties the rebellion seemed an ebullition of hellish wickedness, which it was their first duty to suppress with a fierce hand. But to the majority in parliament the thing had a still darker look. Most of them were of the class which had speculated in Irish land, who, as Oliver said eight years later “had good inheritances which many of them had purchased with their money.” They saw in the natural rising of the oppressed and disinherited a deep-laid popish plot, and they suspected the connivance of Charles. Had not Sir Phelim O’Neill, the Ulster rebel leader, declared that he held a commission from the king?^[114] Charles had always been tender to Rome, his queen was a bigoted catholic, and the ecclesiastical policy which he favoured meant coquetting with the mammon of unrighteousness. Even Falkland in the summer had said that the aim of the Laudian bishops was “to try how much of a papist might be brought in without popery, and to destroy as much as they could of the Gospel without bringing themselves into danger of being destroyed by the law.” Their dread of Rome was intensified a thousand times, and with it their suspicion of the king. He had already threatened to raise an army to coerce parliament; if he were trusted with new forces to deal with Ireland might not he apply them to the same end?

The logic of such arguments can scarcely be denied, and it determined parliament’s conduct. In the first week of November Pym moved as an additional instruction that, unless the king should accept only such THE GRAND REMONSTRANCE 1641 councillors as parliament approved, parliament should take the matter of establishing security in Ireland into its own hand. Edmund Waller to his credit protested against this subordination of the interests of protestantism and England to a party cause, but the House was proponderatingly on Pym’s side. He had in effect demanded the control of the executive power in Ireland. Oliver went further. This was a matter in which his feelings were deeply moved, and he would have no half measures. On November 6 he carried a motion that the Houses should confer upon the Earl of Essex the command of all the trained bands south of Trent, such command to continue at their pleasure—a claim for executive control in England. Parliament went on to pour oil on the Irish conflagration. In December it resolved that there should be no toleration of popery in Ireland or anywhere else under the Crown, and that funds for the Irish war should be got by further confiscations of Irish land, such land to be a security for the loans to be raised. In this matter Oliver played a leading part. A public subscription was levied in the House and in the city, and he put down his name for £500. He was not a rich man, but his little fortune was quickly realizable, and he could contribute in cash a year’s income.

Meantime Pym, who was not to be beguiled from the larger issues, pressed on the Grand Remonstrance, which was his appeal to the nation. Its two hundred and six clauses reviewed the long list of grievances against the king in language which was often exaggerated and always dull, and set forth the good work done already by parliament. So far it was an ordinary political manifesto, but at the end it laid down a drastic policy on the delicate matter of church reform. “It is far from our purpose or desire,” it ran, “to let loose the golden reins of discipline and government in the Church ... for we hold it requisite that there should be throughout the whole realm a conformity to that order which the laws enjoin according to the Word of God.” But—bishops must be excluded from the House of Lords, the 1641 universities must be purged, “unmeaning ceremonies” must be discarded, and in fact there must be a new Reformation. To achieve this end a synod of divines should be summoned, and in future the king must call to his council only such persons as were pleasing to parliament.^[115]

This declaration showed men where they stood. It was a defiance, a war-cry, intended, with what Clarendon calls its “sharp reflections”, to force a decision. Strangely enough its promoters believed that it would pass with little opposition, since, unlike the Root-and-Branch Bill, it did not abolish episcopacy. So Oliver seems to have thought, for he pooh-poohed Falkland’s proposal that there should be ampler time for debate, on the ground that few would oppose it.^[116] But Pym knew better. He saw no hope of compromise and was resolved to push matters to a crisis—absolute parliament in place of absolute king; and he was aware that the new party of constitutional royalists saw the implications of his policy. The debate began at 9 a.m. on November 22, and was conducted all day with passion. Night fell, candles were brought in, but still the controversy raged, and it was not till two o’clock the following morning that the Remonstrance was finally carried by eleven votes. There rose a great hubbub about the printing of it and the right of members to record their protests, and the hands of angry men stole to their scabbards. “I thought,” wrote Philip Warwick, “we had all sat in the valley of the shadow of death; for we, like Joab’s and Abner’s young men, had catched at each other’s locks and sheathed our swords in each other’s bowels.” Going out of the House, Falkland reminded Oliver of their previous talk. “Was I right about the debate?” Oliver’s answer was, “Another time, I will take your word for it.” He added, in a whisper which showed his own mind and the height to which intransigence had grown: “Had the Remonstrance been rejected I would have sold all I possess next morning and CHARLES AND THE CITY 1641 never seen England more, and I know that there were many other honest men of the same resolution.”^[117]

Two days later Charles returned to London. For the moment there was a curious reaction in his favour even in that stronghold of puritanism, perhaps because on his Scottish visit he had conceded so much to presbyterianism, perhaps, since he was still the protestant king of England, because the populace had to set up some figure-head against the hated Irish. Substantial men were beginning to think that enough had been done to safeguard the rights of parliament, and to be alarmed at the growth of sectarian anarchy. He was received in the city by welcoming crowds and a royalist lord mayor, and may well have believed that he still retained the affections of his people. He had returned from Scotland with one clear conviction: there was no help to be got from beyond the Tweed, and he must look for support to the loyalty of Englishmen; but for this purpose he must act firmly and take order with Pym and his friends, if they would not listen to reason. His aimless drifting had led to the tragedy of Strafford; he was king, with the machine of government at his disposal, and he must be ready to use his power. So, when the Grand Remonstrance was presented to him by a deputation which included Sir Ralph Hopton, he received it with good-humoured indifference, and pointed out some of the many weaknesses in that portentous document.

The royalist reaction was short-lived. An election in the city gave the parliament party a majority in the common council, and Charles’s ill-judged dismissal of the parliament guard revived all the old suspicion. Worse still, he appointed as lieutenant of the Tower one Lunsford, a dissolute bravo who might be trusted to stick at nothing. The fury of the city compelled him presently to cancel this appointment, and put in Lunsford’s place Sir John Byron, who at any rate was a man of honour. But the mischief had been done. Mobs, drawn largely from the slums outside the walls called the “liberties,” beleaguered Westminster, and bishops and 1641-42 peers were roughly handled. Pym approved of this rowdiness: “God forbid,” he said, “the House of Commons should dishearten people to obtain their just desires in such a way.”^[118] Out of these tumults sprang two familiar names, given in contempt by the factions to each other—roundheads for the cropped apprentices, and cavaliers for the king’s men.

For one moment it would appear that Charles dallied with a policy of serious conciliation. Even now war might have been averted if he had succeeded in bringing the parliament leaders into the executive. The principle of ministerial responsibility to parliament was too violent an innovation to be readily conceded, but the thing might slowly have come into being had the leaders of the Commons been included in the government. Oliver St John had been for months solicitor-general, but that was then a post of small importance. Early in 1641 several of the opposition peers—Bedford, Essex, Saye and Kimbolton—had been brought into the privy council, but they were not of the inner circle and had no weight in policy. He had also thought of giving office to Pym, Hampden and Holles, but the scheme fell through. Now it was revived, and on the first day of January Pym was offered the chancellorship of the exchequer. The matter is obscure, but Pym either ignored the king’s summons to an audience or declined the post. Next day it was given to Colepeper, and Falkland received the vacant secretaryship of state, while Hyde, who believed that he would be more useful out of office, sat in the House as a minister without portfolio. That day vanished the last hope of orderly constitutional progress.

In January the situation rapidly worsened. The Commons worked themselves into a state of hysteria, for which there was some warrant. Rumour had long been rife of plots for armed intervention on the king’s side, organized for the most part by trivial people like Suckling and Wilmot and Jermyn, and such army as was in being was believed to be highly malcontent with parliament. Pym’s intelligence service and the THE FIVE MEMBERS 1642 younger Goring’s treachery had provided irrefragible evidence. The queen was known to be intriguing for foreign help, from France, Holland, Denmark, the Pope, even from Scotland, and when the proofs came to the knowledge of the parliament leaders they resolved to impeach her. She knew well what a damning case could be made against her, and she listened to the advice of Digby, who stood himself in the same danger. Strafford had fallen because Pym had been allowed to strike first; now the king must get in the first blow and impeach the Commons leaders of treason. Charles, deeply moved by his wife’s peril, was persuaded, and, on January 3, the attorney-general appeared before the House of Lords with a charge against Lord Kimbolton, and five members of the lower House, Pym, Hampden, Holles, Haselrig and Strode, while the Commons received a demand for their arrest.

Then came folly upon folly. Charles desired to proceed by law and not by violence, and, as the law stood, the accused, notably because of their Scottish intrigues, were as much guilty of treason as Strafford. But his impatience sent him crashing through all constitutional laws and customs. Next afternoon he went down to the House in a coach, with an armed retinue of three or four hundred men behind him. News of his intention had long before been sent to Pym by Will Murray and by one of the queen’s women, Lady Carlisle,^[119] and the five members had discreetly withdrawn. Charles strode into the chamber to find the birds flown, and to receive from Speaker Lenthall the classic answer that “he had neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak, in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me.” Next day he sought for the culprits in the city with no better success.

It was for the king the Rubicon which could not be recrossed. By his action he had exasperated the Commons 1642 to fury, and alienated the Lords. He had lowered his royal dignity, and convinced the ordinary man that neither his honour nor his judgment was to be trusted. He had attempted violence and failed, and had closed every avenue of reconciliation. On January 10 he left Whitehall—not to return to it till he returned to die.

The inevitable result was that the question of army control revived in an acute form. The militia became suddenly a matter of desperate importance. If the king had a purpose of violence, could he be allowed to retain his sword? Pym set his machine to work, the city trained bands were marshalled under Skippon, the river was guarded, the mobs were out, and Hampden’s Buckinghamshire constituents were pouring in with minatory petitions. The Commons decided, and the Lords concurred, that the fortresses and the militia of the kingdom should be placed in hands which parliament approved. It was a violent innovation, since by all law and precedent the control of the military forces, though the Commons paid for them, lay with the Crown, but in the circumstances it had some justification. The Lords passed the Bishops’ Exclusion Bill, which the king accepted; he temporized on the Militia Ordinance, till on February 23 the queen, carrying with her the crown jewels, had safely left the country. Then he accepted it with qualifications which would have defeated its purpose. On March 2 he set out for the north. It was the casting of the die. Oliver’s motion, which had been dismissed as premature on January 14th, was now adopted, and both Houses resolved that the kingdom should be put in a posture of defence. On March 5th they appointed new parliamentary lords-lieutenants and gave them command of the militia.

For six months negotiations dragged on, but the minds of both sides were prepared for war, and the events were like the ranging shots of the guns before a battle. Pym reigned supreme at Westminster, and the few royalists in the Commons had an uneasy life. Falkland could do nothing, for his calm reason was out of place in this carnival of half-truths. Hyde, a watch-dog with every HYDE 1642 hackle erect, replied with effect to Pym’s declamations, but Hyde with his mediocre legal conservatism was, as Bacon said of Salisbury, “fit to keep things from growing worse, but not fit to redeem things to be much better.” He was no man to ride a storm which had left conservatism far behind. Both sides were outside the ancient law, and both sides had a strong prima facie case. The constitution had clearly broken down and must be reconstructed; the question was how. By giving sovereignty to parliament, said Pym, which represented the nation. But that, said Hyde, would only be to replace an old tyranny by a new. What warrant was there for maintaining that the people of England approved of parliament’s recent deeds? Changes there must be, but in any change there must be a rational division of functions, which would ensure not only the liberties of the people but efficient government, and parliament was not a body which could itself administer. The land was in anarchy, and it was trying to save it by barren dogmas. And he might have added, in the words which Sir John Evelyn used three years later in the House of Commons: “If there be any that do dream it necessary to reduce all things to their first principles, and know no way to perfection but by confusion, may their thoughts perish with them.”^[120]

Further, there was the primary question of religion. The bishops were a lesser matter, for the true issue was the very foundations of the Church. The decorous compromise of anglicanism was threatened by violent men who would replace it by presbytery, or would break all bonds of discipline and establish a multitude of sects. Whatever side controlled the Church had the power of moulding the thought of the nation—what would be represented to-day by the control of the schools and of the press. Toleration was still to most men deadly sin, and failure to carry their full policy meant the loss of that which they held most dear. It was true that attachment to a creed was more passionate on one side than on the other; “they who hated the bishops,” said 1642 Falkland, “hated them worse than the devil; they who loved them did not love them so well as their dinner”;^[121] but as controversy advanced men found that what had been a flickering affection was soon fanned into a blaze. “No king, said one party, shall rob us of our religion. No parliamentary majority, said the other party, shall rob us of our religion. It was this and this only, which gave to the great struggle its supreme importance.”^[122]

Yet some compromise might have been reached between Pym and Hampden, Falkland and Hyde, but for one disastrous fact. In arguing on the rights of parliament, royalists thought of the present parliament, and in arguing on the rights of the king their opponents thought of Charles. The Long Parliament had so far not given its opponents much cause to trust or admire it; it had been arbitrary, neurotic, tyrannical, intolerant of criticism. Had there been fresh elections, it is likely that Pym would have found himself in a minority. But Charles had managed to diffuse an atmosphere of lively distrust. His gentleness and charm might attach his friends to him, but his public conduct had been in the highest degree fantastic, disingenuous and uncertain. He had no gift of resolute purpose or single-hearted action; the prominent velvet eyes under the heavy lids were the eyes of an emotional intriguer. They were the eyes, too, of a fanatic, who would find in the last resort some curious knuckle of principle on which he would hear no argument. “He loved not the sight of a soldier, nor of any valiant man,” it had been written of his father, and Charles had no single gift of the man-at-arms except personal bravery. The old monarchy could only survive if its representative had those qualities of plain dealing and sturdy resolution which were dear to Englishmen; and it was the irony of fate that this king should be part woman, part priest, and part the bewildered delicate boy who had never quite grown up. A freakish spirit had been unloosed, as a shrewd observer^[123] noted: “such an unhappy genius ruled these times (for historians have THE FIRST ACT OF WAR 1642 observed a genius of times as well as of climates or men) that no endeavour proved successful, nor did any actions produce the right though probable effects.”

For six months the two sides manœuvred for position. The political trimmings and tackings were meaningless and intended only as propaganda. The king, having got the Prince of Wales into his keeping, was not inclined to be complaisant, and the House of Commons showed the hardening of its temper by committing to prison certain Kentish gentlemen who presented a petition on behalf of episcopacy. The House of Lords sank so low in attendance that it passes out of the picture. Pembroke, who brought a message to the king at Newmarket begging him to return, and suggesting that the Militia Ordinance might be accepted for a time, was told, “By God, not for an hour!” On June 2 the king received from the House the Nineteen Propositions, which represented Pym’s ultimatum, and which claimed on every vital point sovereignty for parliament. It demanded the selection of ministers and judges, the control of the militia and the fortresses, and liberty to reform the Church as it pleased—the direct exercise of functions which no large deliberative body could hope to perform efficiently.^[124] The propositions were refused, and the issue was joined. Lyttelton, the lord keeper, fled to York with the great seal, and Hyde by devious ways through Cotswold and the Peak succeeded in joining his master.

More important were the military events. Hull contained the stores collected for the Scottish campaign, the greatest armoury in the kingdom, and it was also the chief port by which help could be received from the Continent. Sir John Hotham had been sent by parliament to occupy the place, and when on April 23 Charles attempted to enter Hull the gates were shut in his face. It was the first overt act of war. Meantime at York he 1642 was collecting money and plate and drawing his supporters to his side. On June 16 commissions of array were issued and the royalist muster began, and next day Newcastle was occupied for the king. His opponents, meanwhile, were busy applying the militia ordinance in every shire where their influence prevailed, and Warwick, in command in the Downs, carried the fleet to the side of parliament. On July 4 a committee of public safety was appointed.^[125]

On July 12 Essex was nominated commander-in-chief of the parliament forces, and the remnants of the two Houses swore to live and die with him, “for the preservation of the true religion, laws, liberties and peace of the kingdom.” Already there had been blood shed at Manchester, and in early August there was more at Coventry. On August 22 at Nottingham—chosen as being nearer London than York and within hail of the west—the king, accompanied by the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York and the two younger Palatine princes, set up his standard. It was the evening of a wet and windy day, and only a little concourse had gathered. Every detail of the ceremony was emblematic of the man and the confusion of his cause. Charles himself in the rain emended the wording of the proclamation, for he was a precisian in style, and the herald had difficulty with his corrections and read it haltingly, so pedantry and bravado went hand in hand. Presently the gale blew the standard down, and for some days it lay prone on the ground.