The English Civil War: A People’s History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III Two Women: Anna Trapnel and Lucy Hay (#ulink_a05657c7-b05b-5f95-b183-578af2e16e9c)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the shop Butter and cheese and other commodities

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

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

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

Item two Bibles and a Testament

Item two silver bowls and two silver drinking cupes

Item in ready money iiii pence

Item his apparel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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