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"Tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy": was Charles I really that bad?
The reviled king was condemned to death as a “Tyrant, Traitor, Murderer and Public Enemy”. But on the 400th anniversary of his accession, how fair does that judgment seem today?
On 9 July 1637, King Charles I chaired a meeting of his Privy Council at Greenwich Palace. Among the business was the case of two draymen, William Willis and John Collins, who had been involved in a road-traffic collision. They had allowed their cart to crash into that of the Earl of Exeter, a member of the powerful Cecil family. A local jury had cleared Willis and Collins of any wrongdoing, but the king was not happy with that outcome. Charles and his council overturned the verdict, ordering that the two men be “whipped publicly through the town” as a fearsome example to others. After this, the draymen would be sent to prison, and there kept at work until further notice. Charles I was a man who liked order. He organised his political thought around certain maxims, one of them being: “It is better the subject suffer a little than all lie out of order.” Willis and Collins certainly suffered: they were flogged and locked up. After all, one couldn’t have lowly draymen crashing into nobles’ coaches and then being acquitted: it was indecorous and subversive. Charles was a fussy man. His government regulated everything from the lengths of taxi journeys to the wearing of fake jewellery. He once even tried to ban swearing. Bookish, thoughtful and sensitive, Charles was possessed of a heightened sense of his own honour and dignity. By the time he ascended the throne in 1625, he was also politically active, well read and fully capable of forming his own opinions – a bit too much so, perhaps, for a king. When Charles came to power in 1625, it was a highly unusual event. He was the first adult to ascend the Scottish throne since 1390, and only the second adult male to take the English throne since Henry VIII in 1509. Read more | When was the last battle between England and Scotland? He left his thrones in a strange way, too. In 1649, he was put on trial for treason against his own people, and executed publicly. His statue in London’s Royal Exchange was defaced with the Latin words Exit Tyrannus, Regum Ultimus – ‘Exit the Tyrant, the Last of the Kings’. The trial itself had been justified on the grounds that it was legal – indeed required – for the representatives of the people to resist a tyrannical king. To its instigators, this was a moment of emergency: the killing of a king was a necessity, albeit a cruel one. Read more | Why Charles I had to die Charles certainly had a case to answer. After his defeat in 1646 at the end of the first phase of the Civil War, he only negotiated in bad faith – and when the opportunity to start a fresh conflict presented itself in 1648, he took it. His actions sparked renewed violence and bloodshed, and led to radical of his enemies to push for his trial, based on a well-established philosophical position, salus populi suprema lex: the safety of the people is the supreme law. Charles claimed that his trial was illegal, and many have agreed with that assessment – yet it's far from black and white. Listen | Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Charles I’s trial on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time Was Charles truly a tyrant? From a modern perspective – in an age that has given us men such as Hitler and Stalin – surely swotty, art-loving Charles hardly registers. True, he had a cruel streak. After a riot in Lambeth in 1640, he had one young lad tortured – making out the order for that punishment in his own hand – and another hanged, drawn and quartered. Twice in the winter of 1641–42, he gave the order for soldiers to shoot protesters in the streets if they refused to go home. But he was probably no nastier than other leaders among his contemporaries – including even his son, Charles II, under whom great cruelties were committed in Scotland, and during whose reign many hundreds of English Dissenters died in horrific prisons. Charles I was authoritarian. He liked to be obeyed, and sometimes took it personally when he wasn’t. One infamous scandal involved a fairly unlikeable man called William Prynne, who wrote a book perceived to be insulting to the queen. In 1634, Prynne was sentenced to be imprisoned, and to have his ears cut off. Come 1637, when the same man again got into trouble, it transpired that his ears had been only partially sliced the first time around. Furious, Charles personally directed the Privy Council to find out who had been at fault for that half-done job. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/HIP1627908cmyk-3115749.jpg" width="4633" height="3086" alt="Charles and his queen, Henrietta Maria, painted c1630–32." title="Charles and his queen, Henrietta Maria, painted c1630–32. Not unreasonably, the king feared for the safety of his wife, a French Catholic whose father, King Henry IV of France, had been assassinated some years before they married. (Photo by Topfoto)" /> Charles also believed in personal sacrifice for the greater good: he applied this principle to himself, but inevitably it was his people who usually had to bear the brunt. England was then a place riven by discord. The government was short of money – ironic, given the great wealth of the country at large – and, thanks to rising literacy and a thirst for news, growing numbers of people in England were keen to discuss politics and religion. London was expanding, too, bringing more people close to the geographic centres of politics at Whitehall and Westminster. Throughout Charles’s life, he carried with him a grave distrust of his subjects and their desire to involve themselves in politics. During his childhood, one of his tutors had written that the people were a “many-headed monster, which hath neither head for brains, nor brains for government”. It was a sentiment Charles remembered. He never shied from controversy, either, and it was when dealing with controversial topics that his authoritarian side dominated. In religion, Charles favoured a new, ornate and ritualised form of worship. He disliked those who disagreed, especially the so-called ‘Puritans’ who preferred church practice to be much plainer. Charles believed that their form of worship – which emphasised reading, careful listening and participation – was populist and anarchic. His government used the bishops to harass dissident clergymen and writers. Read more | Did Oliver Cromwell really ban Christmas? The Puritan assault on Christmas during the 1640s and 1650s Another of Charle's most persistent problems was money. He knew that the English state was "press beyond her strength" and, in the 1620s, desperately needed to increase military spending. A furious war was raging on the continent, and Charles found himself fighting both Spain and France. Many argued that there was only one legitimate way of raising tax: ask parliament. The English parliament, though, was reluctant to provide the necessary finance without first airing “grievances”. So in 1626, Charles started to contemplate ruling without them. He levied a ‘Forced Loan’ – in effect, a direct tax that didn’t require parliamentary sanction. He argued that this was an emergency and that, in such cases, it fell to the king to levy funds – even if he hadn’t first obtained permission from the people. Worse, in order to ensure that the Forced Loan was collected, Charles imprisoned those who didn’t pay. It was here that a key technique he used to rule came to the fore. Charles allowed the issue to come to the law courts – but made sure that he won. In 1627, five imprisoned knights had sued for habeas corpus – demanding that they be allowed to challenge before a court the justification for what they claimed to be their unlawful detention. Before the case was heard, though, Charles personally interviewed the 12 judges to make sure that they were on his side. Unsurprisingly, they ruled in his favour – that he could imprison people without demonstrating a cause. A showdown followed. Parliament pushed for a ‘Petition of Right’ stating certain key freedoms. Taxation without parliamentary grant was declared illegal, as was imprisonment without cause being shown. Charles reluctantly allowed the petition – but then prorogued parliament and recalled all print copies of the petition, ordering that they “be made waste paper”. It was then reissued but qualified with a series of his objections. In the summer of 1628, Charles’s fears about his people were dramatically confirmed. His unpopular favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, was stabbed to death in Portsmouth. Buckingham’s killing was widely celebrated – indeed, his funeral was held at night to prevent the attendance of jeering crowds. And Charles had other reasons for fearing his subjects. Within months of ascending the throne, he had married the young and vivacious French princess Henrietta Maria. The queen’s father, Henry IV of France, had been assassinated years earlier; in addition, she was a Catholic – and anti-Catholic sentiment was rife. No wonder she and her husband worried for her safety. More discord followed in 1629. When parliament returned that January, MPs started arguing again about tax and religion. Exasperated, Charles decided to send away the quarrelling politicians – but when his order arrived, a small group of MPs restrained the Speaker in his chair and passed a series of inflammatory motions. Charles was furious, and vowed to rule without parliament for as long as he could. Dissident MPs were imprisoned; after their leader, Sir John Eliot, died in the Tower of London, Charles refused to let his wife bury him at home in Cornwall. What followed was a period of ‘Personal Rule’ sometimes seen as a manifestation of Charles’s alleged tyranny. Clearly, he wanted to rule without parliament; he believed that parliaments were “of the nature of cats, that ever grow cursed with age”. But was royal rule so bad? The country was at peace, and some later looked back on these as halcyon days. Charles raised enough money to run a functioning government. It was how he did so that became the problem, and one issue in particular sparked controversy. There is no doubt that the navy needed serious investment. The obligation to pay for ships had traditionally fallen on the coastal counties and towns; now Charles – not unreasonably – extended this inland. By doing so, though, he was effectively creating a new tax – without parliament. Once more, Charles turned to his judges. He would allow Ship Money to be tested in the courts, and he would win. The king’s lawyers argued that this was an emergency situation, so it was the monarch’s duty to raise money for necessary defence. This he could do without parliament because, his attorneys argued, as “the King of England... He is an absolute Monarch”. The judges – men who had been picked by the crown – agreed, though remarkably by only the tightest of margins. Ship Money seems obscure today, but at the time people worried that it gave the king an unlimited right to seize property simply by declaring an ‘emergency’. Whether or not Charles was a tyrant, he was building an absolutist monarchy. As the politician John Culpepper observed: “If the laws give the king power in any danger of the kingdom, whereof he is Judge, to impose what and when he please, we owe all that is left to the goodness of the king, not to the law." <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/GettyImages-520833115cmyk-09e859a.jpg" width="5100" height="3397" alt="A contemporary illustration depicts Thomas Wentworth’s execution on 12 May 1641. He was one of Charles’s “most capable ministers”, but his style of rule generated huge resentment." title="A contemporary illustration depicts Thomas Wentworth’s execution on 12 May 1641. He was one of Charles’s “most capable ministers”, but his style of rule generated huge resentment. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> We cannot, of course, judge Charles only on his rule in England. He was king of Scotland and Ireland, too – and in both he faced huge rebellions. He sent one of his most capable ministers to govern Ireland in 1633. Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Stratford, was busy and bright, but was also possessed of a dangerous ideology. He believed that “reason of state” trumped law. This was similar to Charles’s belief in suppressing private interests for the public good, but it was sharper in focus and backed by a fearsome personal energy. In Ireland, Wentworth successfully played off factions against each other, and built up a military to enforce his will. His aim was to make Charles – in Ireland, at least – “as absolute a monarch as Christendom can set forth”. This generated huge resentment, which in 1641 exploded into a massive uprising against English and Scottish settlers. By that point, Charles’s rule had already started crumbling elsewhere. Desperate to bring his kingdoms into some sort of religious unity, he had tried to impose English church practice in Scotland. This was met with fierce resistance, beginning in July 1637 with a riot in St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh. And when Charles failed to put down the Scottish rebellion, he was forced to turn once more to his English parliament for money. By now, the three kingdoms were cascading into Civil War. Thomas Wentworth – dubbed ‘Black Tom Tyrant’ – was put on trial and beheaded. Charles changed his approach to religion, and cultivated some he had once thought of as puritans, in the hope of winning the political game of chess. “I have somewhat altered from my former thoughts,” he noted slyly, “to satisfy the times.” Read more | 10 key battles of the Civil War He disavowed Ship Money, and agreed to call parliament at least once every three years. By the end of 1641, parliament was trying to remove his power to appoint his own government ministers; in 1642, they tried to strip him of his military authority, too. Much of the blame for the problems that beset his kingdoms has been laid at Charles’s feet – and with good reason. He could be difficult to trust. From 1637, he tried to use his military power to threaten those who opposed his policies. He twice raised an army against Scotland rather than engage in serious negotiations. In November 1640 and in May 1641, he plotted to use the guns and garrison at the Tower of London to overawe London and parliament. In autumn 1641, he facilitated a violent plot in Edinburgh against the Scottish leaders, including his kinsman the Marquess of Hamilton. Late in 1641, he gathered ‘Cavaliers’ at Whitehall Palace, ostensibly to protect his family but also to threaten parliament. Then, in the early days of 1642, he took several hundred of these men to Westminster with the aim of arresting five dissident MPs. That was an error from which Charles never recovered. The astrologer William Lilly thought that “This rash action of the king’s lost him his crown”, as it “left scarce any possibility of reconcilement; he not being willing to trust them, nor they to trust him.” As Charles’s Cavaliers stood outside the Commons, some of them cocked their pistols and threatened to shoot MPs. Charles did not allow this to happen, but parliament feared a massacre. The day after his attempted arrest of MPs, Charles travelled to London's Guildhall and issued reassurances that he wished to rule “like a king, not a tyrant”. Yet many were not so sure. That winter, he fled for the countryside, “so fleeting and so friendless”, as one observer put it. There had been disorderly protests even under the palace windows, and a parliamentarian polemicist at one point managed to throw into the king’s coach a pamphlet that likened Charles to Rehoboam, a tyrannical biblical king. For someone who had always feared the “many-headed monster”, it was terrifying that his subjects could get so close to his person. So was Charles I a tyrant? Historians have deployed the term ‘legal tyranny’, referring to his making controversial policies certain that the judges – who depended on the king for promotion – would support him in the courts. Small wonder that disgruntled subjects turned to parliament as a higher authority. Read more | Has history been unfair to Charles I? By 1642, though, Charles’s enemies had gone much further. They believed that parliament needed to control the government as well as the law: to wield the power to appoint ministers and control the militia. Their partisans had even started arguing that ‘reason of state’ allowed them to act beyond what was ordinarily legal. No longer could parliamentarians claim to be upholding the law; now they had to say they were protecting the people. It was a revolutionary idea – and there was no way that Charles would concede it without a fight. Jonathan Healey is associate professor in social history at Kellogg College, Oxford. His latest book is The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England (Bloomsbury, 2023) This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
How people power fuelled England's century of chaos
King Charles I’s clashes with parliament, the decades of bloody civil war, and the spell of republican government followed by the restoration of the monarchy – these are the major events that dominate the chapters about the 17th century in the history books. But, as Jonathan Healey explores, behind the turmoil lay something deeper: a political awakening of the people
Listen to a version of this article: On an autumn day in 1640, poor Arthur Duck found himself caught between rocks and a wet place. On the north bank of the Thames in London, he faced a hostile and rapidly swelling throng. Hastily boarding a boat, he fled across the heaving river to the safety of Lambeth Palace as his assailants hurled stones at him, chanting and making cacophonous quacking sounds. This assault marked the nadir of a particularly fraught period for the unfortunate Duck – and also reflected rising tensions that defined the 17th century. Born in the Devon countryside, Duck had by 1640 reached the venerable age of 60. A church lawyer, he had held legal posts in several of England’s great bishoprics. Indeed, he’d made an ally of the prickly archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, who found Duck’s expertise useful in a litigious age. By the later months of that year, though, Duck was in the service of another prelate: William Juxon, bishop of London. It was on Juxon’s orders that Duck embarked on a “visitation”: touring the diocese to assess the state of things. Were parishioners behaving themselves? Were the church laws being obeyed? What Duck found was very worrisome. Anger at religious reforms Far from complying with the laws, people were angry about recent religious reforms. Supported by King Charles I, Archbishop Laud had pushed a policy of “beautifying” churches, enforcing strictly hierarchical forms of worship, and exalting the clergy. These Laudian reforms had some support, but plenty of people – especially in the more religiously radical areas near London – saw them as authoritarian, and too close to Catholicism. Passing through villages around London and in the rolling cornfields of rural Essex, Duck was accosted by jeering crowds. Parishioners, youngsters and “amazons” (angry women) jostled his entourage and chanted against him and Bishop Juxon. When some of the rioters that assailed Duck in London were prosecuted in Convocation House next to St Paul’s Cathedral, the trial was interrupted by another huge protest. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/05/FFCB60webready-7bdbd94.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Protesters march on Lambeth Palace in 1640. The Archbishop of Canterbury's efforts to enforce rule by bishops, and his persecution of Puritans, provoked widespread dissent (Photo by GRANGER - Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Protesters march on Lambeth Palace in 1640. The Archbishop of Canterbury's efforts to enforce rule by bishops, and his persecution of Puritans, provoked widespread dissent (Photo by GRANGER - Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)" /> A crowd crammed into the building, shouting and throwing cushions. In the melee, Duck was chased out of a window by Londoners who once again quacked loudly at him, and hooted “as birds at an owl”. A man like Arthur Duck was not accustomed to such treatment. The dominant ideology of the time was one of order: the king and his officers could not be questioned, let alone resisted. The people had no role in the affairs of state. Indeed, the common folk were considered little more than a “many-headed monster”, “giddy” and “fickle”, without “brains for government”. Challenges faced by monarchy and state In the 17th century, though, the fragile government of England collapsed into revolution – not once, but several times. It was a uniquely tumultuous era for monarchy and state. Though it’s tempting to explain this by invoking a clash of personalities – bad kings, ambitious soldiers, incompetent officials and arrogant churchmen – the reality was that there were deeper problems at play. There were the challenges facing a single monarchy ruling the three distinctive kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. There was the fact that the cost of wars and armies was rising faster than a traditionalist state could cope with. And there were the aftershocks of the previous century’s Reformation, when Protestantism threatened (and, in England and Scotland at least, overcame) the hegemony of the Catholic church. On the podcast | Diarmaid MacCulloch responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about the English Reformation But there was something else, too: society was changing. To a much greater degree than in previous centuries, the people were finding a political voice. It was their desire to make this voice heard that drove much of the turbulence buffeting the three kingdoms throughout the 17th century. Even within a chaotic century, the atmosphere in 1640 was particularly electric – and much of that energy was generated by the masses. Everywhere, those in charge complained about a decline in proper deference. The common people were sick, declared one news writer: they “are struck in the head” so that they “rave and utter” against the king and his government. They had plenty to “rave and utter” about. As the cold winter weather began to bite, the price of coal – the main domestic fuel in London – was sky-high. Everyone knew why this was, too. Scottish Presbyterians had rebelled against the king and raised a dissident army, which then occupied Newcastle – the source of most of London’s coal. Failings of Charles I The previous decade had seen Charles I try to rule without parliament. Now all that lay in ruins. Charles’s desire to force his anti-Puritan religious policies on Scotland had stirred serious resistance there. His attempt to stamp out that rebellion by force had ended in fiasco. In the late summer of 1640, a large Scottish army had trailed its pikes across the border into northern England. The only way Charles could pay off that army was to climb down and call parliament again. This parliament, unlike one that had sat briefly in the spring, was here to stay. It came to be known as the “Long Parliament”, to contrast with its “Short” predecessor – and it changed everything. Just two years later, in 1642, members of the Long Parliament raised their own army against Charles. Having fought him once, they raised a new army in 1645, fought him again in 1648 and, in the revolutionary year of 1649, put him on trial and cut off the king’s head. Read more | Has history been unfair to Charles I? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/05/GettyImages-188006827webready-39c27b6.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="William Juxon, bishop of London 1633–49. His attempts to assess parishioners met angry responses (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" title="William Juxon, bishop of London 1633–49. His attempts to assess parishioners met angry responses (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> Bishop William Juxon himself accompanied Charles as he mounted a scaffold out side Whitehall Palace. The cleric watched his master beheaded as another London crowd watched on – this time silent, in shock. For all the horror, though, the regicide was an act undertaken in the people’s name. The king, his enemies charged, had undertaken a “wicked design” to “overthrow the rights and liberties of the people”. Read more | Killers of the king: the men who dared to execute Charles I When the monarchy itself was abolished soon afterwards, it was because the “office of a king”, was “unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people”. Now, argued one republican in 1650, government was “in the people, from the people, and for the people”. Relationship between ruler and ruled Whatever the grubby realities of how the country had reached this point, this was a remarkable thing to say. Both the regicide and the religious and social dissent of this period arose out of the same burning question that underlay the whole Stuart age: what was the relationship between those in power and those they ruled? This was not simply a matter of authoritarianism versus democracy, but something much more tangled and subtle. The sheer complexity of that relationship is illustrated by a famous incident during Charles I’s trial in January 1649. As the king faced his accusers, a masked lady interrupted proceedings, haranguing the court with the accusation that “Not half – not a quarter of the people of England” supported it. It was a palpable hit. Not only had parliament recently been thoroughly purged by the army but, even in its full glory, it was nothing close to a democratic body in the sense that we would understand it today. The vast majority of people could not vote: women were excluded, as were most men in the towns, plus anyone in the countryside who didn’t own land worth £2 a year. In any case, most “elections” were not even contested. Instead, the great and the good of the community got together and picked the right man for the job; he was duly presented to the “electorate”, who happily cheered their approval. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/05/hip1345232smlwebready-b41dabc.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Oliver Cromwell dissolves the Rump Parliament in 1653, in a contemporary engraving. Various attempts to reform England’s decidedly undemocratic electoral system failed in the 17th century (Photo by Heritage-Images / TopFoto)" title="Oliver Cromwell dissolves the Rump Parliament in 1653, in a contemporary engraving. Various attempts to reform England’s decidedly undemocratic electoral system failed in the 17th century (Photo by Heritage-Images / TopFoto)" /> Contested elections did become more common as the century wore on, and the electorate did expand slightly, but change was glacial. Major reform movements – which might have given the vote to “the poorest he”, as one parliamentarian soldier put it – were defeated. Voting, though, is not the only form of politics. Rioting and demonstrations are as old as the hills. The Tudor age had seen several major uprisings for faith and farmland, and disturbances of the old type continued under the Stuarts. Back in 1607, when James VI & I was on the throne, a rising in the Midlands, led by a tinker calling himself “Captain Pouch”, had torn down enclosures in the region. (When the charismatic ringleader was captured, his satchel was emptied – and found to contain nothing more than old cheese.) Peasant uprisings and public debate In the 1620s and 30s, the royal forests of Wiltshire and Dorset were convulsed by peasant disturbances led by men dressed in women’s clothing, symbolising the way the enclosures had turned their lives upside down. There were food riots across the century, too, and none more dramatic than those in Maldon, Essex in 1629, led by “Captain” Ann Carter. Charles I’s government responded by hanging her – even then, an unusual punishment for a poor protester with an empty belly. There was also something new, however, and it became obvious – at least, by the 1620s: public debate. This was a decade of food shortages, inflation, religious controversies and foreign-policy disasters. There was, therefore, plenty for people to discuss – and discuss they did. Fierce arguments raged in alehouses across England. Rumours pulsed through the countryside, following in the wake of travelling traders and pedlars. Public sermons electrified the debate about Stuart foreign policy, and popular demonstrations rocked London. Then there was printed news. When people met, the key question (once the weather had been discussed) would be raised: “What news?” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/05/BAL347921smlwebready-d310fec.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A pamphlet on the siege of Colchester in 1648, when royalist forces were assailed by parliamentary troops during the Civil War. Printed news kept the people informed and engaged (Photo by Bridgeman Images)" title="A pamphlet on the siege of Colchester in 1648, when royalist forces were assailed by parliamentary troops during the Civil War. Printed news kept the people informed and engaged (Photo by Bridgeman Images)" /> The root of all this lay in deep, gradual social change, creating a nation that was more politically engaged and difficult to rule. Most obvious was a growth in literacy. By the second half of the 17th century, the majority of men in the capital could read, as well as plenty of women. Literacy brought access to a world of religious, political and legal writings: everything from histories to plays to sermons could be mined for ideas and things to have opinions about. Another critical development was the expansion of London. A city home to about 50,000 people during the reign of Henry VIII swelled by the 1640s to become a metropolis of some 400,000. That burgeoning population crammed into an urban sprawl largely to the west of the City, with streets and lanes spreading north of the Strand and creeping ever nearer to the royal palaces of Whitehall, St James’s and Westminster. In 1640, 1641 and 1642, those London streets boiled over. Riots in Lambeth in May 1640 provoked savage reprisals from Charles I’s government, with one protester tortured on the rack and another – probably a teenaged lad – hanged, drawn and quartered. Street demonstrations and chanting provided a menacing backdrop to the political breakdown taking place in parliament. On the podcast | Margarette Lincoln reveals how a century that saw plague, fire, revolution and civil war transformed England’s capital Outbreak of the Civil War Then, over Christmas 1641–42, popular anger erupted once again. There was fighting in the streets, and people started dividing into camps. The terms “roundhead” and “cavalier” began to be used, and things became so hot for the king that, fearing for the safety of his family, he left London altogether. Within months, the country was at war with itself – a war that saw a mass mobilisation of the English people fighting to settle questions of religion and the constitution. There was one group that was especially important in the political awakening that propelled the country towards the Civil War. It comprised – as the famous astrologer William Lilly put it – neither the rich nor the very poor, but people “of a middle quality”. Members of society’s middle were also prominent in the New Model Army – the military juggernaut created by parliament in 1645, which promptly smashed the royalists at the battle of Naseby. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/05/hip2756522webready-88dff00.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The battle of Naseby in 1645, depicted in an 18th-century picture. Victory was won by the New Model Army led not by aristocrats but “middling men” including Oliver Cromwell (Photo by Heritage-Images / TopFoto)" title="The battle of Naseby in 1645, depicted in an 18th-century picture. Victory was won by the New Model Army led not by aristocrats but “middling men” including Oliver Cromwell (Photo by Heritage-Images / TopFoto)" /> The New Model Army was explicitly led by men from outside the traditional aristocracy. The titled and the rich were out; middling men were in. Some were country gentry like Thomas Fairfax. More typical, though, were minor gentry such as Oliver Cromwell (who became the most powerful man in the three kingdoms) and officers from outside the gentry altogether – including Thomas Pride, who led the purge of parliament in 1648. Read more | Did Roundheads and Cavaliers really dress so differently? As politics raged, the thinker William Petty published a piece of “advice” for his friend and correspondent Samuel Hartlib. In it, Petty argued for the transformative power of education, which he hoped would leave no one “now holding the plough which might have been made fit to steer the state”. “Rise of the middling sort” The Civil War helped to open the door to men of talent from outside the social elite. Cracks at the political centre allowed those traditionally outside politics to push their way in. Thanks to the rise of the middling sort, the extension of literacy and the growth of London, there was a reservoir of politically engaged people who now saw their moment. Farmers would occupy the highest reaches of the government. One dramatic consequence of the democratisation of education and power was an effervescence of popular religion. Read more | What sparked the Civil War? New ideas sprung up from the bottom: from alehouses and street pulpits, from the press, and from spontaneously gathered congregations in marketplaces and farmyards. In London, a religious radical ascended one pulpit and uttered an hour-long stream of profanities. In Oxford, a freethinking woman walked through the streets in her underwear. In the Wiltshire Cotswolds, a minister with wild, frizzled hair took a male parishioner as his “man-wife”. The Quakers: religious radicalism Most impressive of all was a new group that first appeared in the Midlands, calling themselves “Children of the Light”. Their enemies noticed the way that adherents’ bodies shook with religious enthusiasm, and came to call them “Quakers”. The Quakers, whose influence took hold rapidly in the north, represented perhaps the greatest peasant radical movement in English history. Their beliefs left no formal need for an organised church, and allowed women an equal role to men. And their public performances could be shocking. In 1656, a Quaker Yorkshireman named James Nayler rode into Bristol on an ass, imitating Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem. It was a dramatic enactment of the idea that Christ works through every person, not just through a formal church. Nayler was arrested, tried before parliament, and sentenced to savage physical mutilation for what MPs decided to call “horrid blasphemy”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/05/GettyImages-173363581smlwebready-20c6bfa.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Quaker James Nayler symbolically enters Bristol on an ass in 1656. During this period, the Quakers grew to become one of the most influential radical movements in England (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)" title="Quaker James Nayler symbolically enters Bristol on an ass in 1656. During this period, the Quakers grew to become one of the most influential radical movements in England (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)" /> With the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660, the Quakers and other sects endured, now joined on the outside of the establishment by the old Puritans. Puritanism had thrived under Oliver Cromwell; after the Restoration, though, its followers found themselves pushed beyond the Anglican communion. To do so was a conscious and dangerous choice by the monarchical regime. Read more | The Interregnum: Britain's republican decade In fact, managing a society with so much religious diversity proved too much for the later Stuarts. Charles II just about held things together when the Catholicism of his brother, James, led to calls for the latter to be excluded from the throne. The crisis passed but, when Charles died in 1685, his brother, ruling as James VII & II, faced the same need to balance the different forms of faith that had emerged among the realm’s restive population. His laudable goal was to protect his fellow Catholics, but to do so he pursued an unlikely alliance with Protestant Dissenters, which angered the monarchy’s supporters among the conservative Anglican majority. In 1688–89, James fell victim to an intervention from abroad in the shape of his son-in-law (and nephew) William of Orange. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 A vast amphibious expedition sailed along the Channel, made landfall in Devon, and thrust its way towards London as James’s army and government collapsed. William’s invading army may have hailed from the Netherlands, but the seeds of this revolution were sown among the people of England. Like so many of the crises that preceded it, the Glorious Revolution had roots in the deep popularisation of politics across the 17th century. By the time James II & VII came to rule, English politics had become divided into something completely new: political parties. The Whigs – who advocated greater parliamentary restrictions on the power of the monarchy and who allied with the old Dissenters – faced off against the Tories, who leaned towards absolutism and enjoyed support from conservative Anglicans. In both cases, party loyalty was drawn from deep engagement with the wider political nation. Mass public demonstrations – bonfires, street parties, even riots – were backed by vibrant and virulent printed propaganda aimed at coffee-house readers in London and across the country. Read more | How glorious was the Glorious Revolution? Active monarchy or politicised people? Charles II had been able to face down calls to exclude his brother James from the succession only by allying himself closely with the Tories. But there was a cost: by 1685, when the old king died, the Stuart monarchy had become party political. In a world in which the people had grown to have complex views on politics, the monarchy had been forced to pick a side. And in a period in which the ideological fissures had become so deep, the crown couldn’t help but fall in. If the story of 17th-century England teaches us anything, it’s that you can either have an active monarchy or a politicised people, but not both. It is a lesson that the first king Charles and his son James learned the hard way. After the Glorious Revolution, the monarchy was able to survive by shrinking back from politics, and leaving government to parliament. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes recognised the new reality as early as the 1660s. Perhaps with a tinge of regret, he saw how “the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people”. This was the great revolution that underpins the 17th century – and its consequences are still with us in our modern world of petitioning, protest, new technologies of communication, and political engagement by the people. This article was first published in the February 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Century of chaos: people & power in the 1600s
Jonathan Healey delves into the turbulent 17th century, which witnessed not only regicide and civil war, but also the political awakening of society as a whole
The 17th century was a turbulent time for England, overshadowed by a civil war, a coup and a regicide, not to mention the looming threats of terrorism, plague and witch panics. However, in the coffee shops and on the street corners of growing cities, the common people finally had their voices heard – and those voices were loud. Speaking with Emily Briffett, Jonathan Healey illuminates a revolutionary society that helped forge modern Britain. Jonathan Healey is the author of The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England (Bloomsbury, 2023) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones Related content: Taxing the rich to feed the poor in the 17th century: the world's first welfare state What sparked the Civil War?
Taxing the rich to feed the poor in the 17th century: the world's first welfare state
In Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, parliament took a radical decision: to force the wealthy to support their impoverished neighbours. The result, writes Jonathan Healey, was the world’s first national welfare state, releasing thousands from the grip of starvation
In the summer of 1674, Jane Shaw left her tiny hamlet of Thrang, and headed south. She passed through the green pastures of north Lancashire, skirting the edge of the sandy expanse of Morecambe Bay. Arriving in Lancaster, she trudged up the hill to the castle – a medieval fortress and prison that stood solemn guard over the ancient town. She passed through the tall, forbidding castle gates, and waited her turn. For she had come to attend court, and she had come with a petition. She was, she said, a poor widow, left in debt by her late husband. She had five children; some were too little to look after themselves, others were unable to find work. If she wasn’t given support, she claimed, then she couldn’t maintain her family “in any comfortable manner”. Seven of her neighbours added their names. Amazingly, Shaw’s petition survives. Although she almost certainly didn’t write it, it allows her to tell her story, or at least a version of it: a story of poverty, hardship, and the difficult life of a single mother in an unforgiving world. But she got her dole. A note at the bottom of the petition, added by a clerk of the court, gives the details: she was to receive 12 pence a week. It was probably enough to ensure she survived. Shattered charity The origins of the English Poor Law, the system to which Jane Shaw turned for support, lay well before 1674. Perhaps the first piece of the jigsaw was the development of an idea, from the late Middle Ages, that the state should work to improve society – that it should have a social policy. The Reformation was another factor: the monasteries had provided charity, and the chantries and gilds (abolished under Edward VI) had supported hospitals, schools and almshouses. It’s been estimated that half of these foundations collapsed as a result of the Reformation – an irreversible shattering of the medieval landscape of charity. 10 terrible taxes in history What did Magna Carta mean to the English in 1215? Worse was to come. In the 16th century, the English population started to grow. In 1500 it was around 2.2 million. By 1600 it had topped 4 million. This was a disaster for the poor. They were squeezed in the vice-like grip of rising rents and food prices, and falling wages. The 1590s was one of the most difficult decades to be English and impoverished. Many took to the roads, tramping towards the towns, squatting in dirty suburbs, demonised by the press. When the harvests failed, many starved – or ended their lives at the end of a rope for theft, victims of a brutal criminal code that operated to protect the property-owners. And yet, there were also calls for charity. People listened. Even many fairly humble folk, with little to give, remembered the poor in their wills. For the wealthy, the bequest of land, property, or even the foundation of an almshouse was a way to display virtue. In Winchester, the merchant Peter Symonds left money to create Christ’s Hospital, for the poor, at his death in 1586. His family argued over the will, but the almshouse finally went up in 1607. It even used bricks (visible today) from the nearby Hyde Abbey: a neat allegory for the passing of responsibility from monasteries to private almshouses. Such charities remained important, but gradually the 16th century saw more direction from the state, and more emphasis on compulsory poor rates. Towns were in the vanguard. At Norwich, for example, under the direction of local Puritans, there were attempts to stamp out drunkenness and other vices, combined with a massive drive to relieve the needy poor and provide employment and training for their children. But it was parliament that played the decisive role. At first, it encouraged voluntary charity, but this proved insufficient, so gradually it introduced compulsory taxation, with statutes in 1563 and 1572. It was a drastic solution – wealthy parishioners were to be forced (not encouraged, forced) to support their poorer neighbours. The crucial legislation came in 1598, ordering each parish to appoint “overseers of the poor” who would ensure those who needed work would be employed, and those who couldn’t work would get cash. The system that evolved from the Tudor statutes was both deceptively simple, and startlingly radical. For the first time in recorded history, a state had created a national system of tax-funded poor relief, at least on paper. Stuart Britain: what was life like for ordinary people? "Damn your blood": Swearing in early modern English By 1600, this system was fanning out across the countryside. In Hampshire there is a surviving document that shows poor rates being collected in the tiny parish of Micheldever in 1599. By 1605, a survey of much of north Hampshire shows rates were nearly universal there, and this was probably typical of the rural south (where, as the historian Marjorie McIntosh has shown, some parishes had been collecting rates well before 1598). In the north, things were slower. In Rochdale, for example, rates only started in 1626; in much of what’s now south Cumbria, they were only fully adopted in the 1630s. The wheels, though, nearly came off during the first Civil War (1642–46). Sometimes parish governments stopped meeting, sometimes the overseers were simply all dead. In any case, by 1646 there were complaints that the poor were no longer getting support. What’s worse, England was beginning to slip into famine. While political revolution gripped the nation, in the background, England was hit by a series of terrible harvests. This had happened before: in 1623, harvest failure in the north had led to a huge surge in mortality. But the crisis of the late 1640s had the potential to be much worse, not least because there was now a massive army circling London, sucking away its food. The response was a nationwide effort to kick the system back to life. Where it had faltered, rates were re-instigated and overseers re-appointed. Where it had survived, rates were increased. In the end, it worked. The years 1646–49 saw bad harvests, but there was no famine; the one that struck in 1623 was to be England’s last. Hard luck stories Three paupers who fell on the state’s mercy Three pecks of oatmeal Ralph Standish, a collier from Anderton, asked for relief in 1691, saying that although he was only 27 last May it had “pleased God to visit him with a sad distemper in his knee and leg”. He could no longer walk, and despite spending all his means getting help from doctors, he could no longer earn a living, bringing him into “great poverty and want”. Despite the fact he’d been of “good government and carriage”, all the overseers had given him was three pecks of oatmeal and a shilling in cash. He asked for “some reasonable relief”. A carer’s crisis Thomas Rothwell of Blackley, near Manchester, asked for help in 1654. He was known locally as ‘Tom Cook’, and this reflected one of his three occupations: he was a cook, a gardener and a farmer. But he was getting old. He was now 73 and losing his sight, while his wife was “lunatic and distracted”, and needed constant care. He had spent all his previous earnings trying to avoid calling on the overseers, but now, he said, he had no choice. The abusive neighbour? Agnes Braithwaite of Hawkshead (now Cumbria) waged a long battle with the overseers for a dole in the first decade of the 18th century. She was an old widow, probably in her late 70s, but her neighbours alleged that she was idle, drunken, abusive and litigious, and in any case was fit to work. Several times her dole was reduced, but the overseers were never able to stop it completely, and she died in receipt of a parish pension. Pensions for the poor As the Civil War receded into memory, the Poor Law entered something of a golden age. The law of ‘settlement’ had now been codified, ensuring that every English man, woman and child had a parish to which they had the right to apply for relief. It is from this period that the accounts of overseers of the poor start to survive in large numbers: incredible lists of England’s poor, together with information about their support from the parish purse. Some got pensions, others had their rents paid, or received various doles for occasional expenses, such as medical care, fuel, even house repairs. Using these, historians have shown that many of the poor were either old or in families with lots of children. Others were ill or had long-term disabilities. We also have petitions. Lancashire, in particular, has an astonishing collection of several thousand. In it are sad stories of poverty and hardship that would otherwise be lost – lives of struggle and survival. Like George and Catherine Horner of Claughton, who in 1680 described themselves as having “been very laborious in all their time but are now grown old and decrepit and reduced to much poverty and indigence”. The Claughtons added proudly that they “never (as yet) was in any ways troublesome to the parish wherein they live”. Or Anthony Higgenson of Priest Hutton, who had made a living by catching foxes, badgers “and other devouring creatures”, until old age and sickness intervened in 1656. Or Thomas Somester of Chadderton, a linen weaver, who in 1676 said that his wife had been sick, and that some of their eight children also suffered from “the fever”. Worse, two years ago, when things had been “hard and dear”, they’d had to sell most of their goods, and now they were poor. The Poor Law wasn’t designed to give total support to those who had fallen on hard times. The evidence we have shows clearly that the poor also used various means to scratch a living: they were helped by family and neighbours; they did little bits of work; they sold their household goods, even the clothes off their backs. They gathered sticks, turf, reeds and stones; they collected nuts, berries and shellfish. They might graze a pig or even a cow; or they might fish in rivers, lakes and fens. In extreme circumstances, they might even succumb to the temptations of petty theft. They lived, in the beautifully evocative phrase of the historian Olwen Hufton, in an “economy of makeshifts”. The strong helping the weak Yet the role of the Poor Law was definitely growing. Its costs were rising as more people got relief, and doles got bigger. Whereas the normal pension was about sixpence a week in the 1630s, by the 1690s it was about 12 pence. Parish accounts usually show gradual increases. Slimbridge in Gloucestershire spent under £59 on the Poor Law in 1635, rising to nearly £87 in 1690. At Cerne Abbas in the Dorset downs, costs rose from just over £24 in 1632 to nearly £100 in 1695. All told, expenditure across England probably at least tripled in the second half of the 17th century, and since the population was flat, this meant real improvements in the lives of the poor. Not for nothing did the later 17th century see some of the earliest complaints that, now, too much was being spent. Critics argued that this would encourage idleness, or would discourage ratepayers from giving voluntary charity. On a local level, there might be complaints about individual paupers. Sometimes these related to moral failings on the pauper’s part: Agnes Braithwaite of Hawks-head was said to have become an “idle, abusive, drunken woman” thanks to her dole. More often, they were simply said not to need support, like Mary Ashton of Hest Bank, who was “a woman of an able body and fit to work for her own maintenance”, she having just one child “who is able to work for himself”. Ultimately, though, there was a growing assumption that – if you were destitute enough – you should be relieved by your parish. At some point, indeed, people started to believe they had a right to poor relief. Historians have debated when this belief arose; some prefer the late 18th century. But there are signs it was emerging much earlier. Perhaps the last word can be left to Jane Shaw, or at least to the person who actually wrote her petition. It asks that relief be granted, because “the strong should help the weak, the rich should help the poor”. This was not, of course, a completely new sentiment. What was different was that now this duty could be enforced by the state. Jonathan Healey is associate professor in social history at Oxford University. He is author of The First Century of Welfare: Poverty and Poor Relief in Lancashire (Boydell, 2014) This article was first published in the September 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
Was it religious turmoil? Financial meltdown? Or Charles I's seemingly unique ability to alienate his subjects? Jonathan Healey reveals what really propelled king and parliament into conflict in the 1640s
Was it religious turmoil? Financial meltdown? Or Charles I’s seemingly unique ability to alienate his subjects? Jonathan Healey reveals what really propelled king and parliament into conflict in the 1640s Late on 10 January 1642, King Charles I, his queen and his eldest three children left the palace at Whitehall and slipped quietly into the night, away from London, away from Westminster and away from parliament. Arriving at Hampton Court, they found it unprepared, so they slept – the five of them – all in one bed. Charles wouldn’t see London again for seven years. The next few months were given over to preparations for war. Charles’s wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, was told to pawn the crown jewels and sail to the continent to raise money. In April, Charles tried to seize the arsenal at Hull, but was rebuffed by its governor. In the summer, he issued ‘Commissions of Array’, ordering his people to muster and fight his enemies. Finally, on 22 August, on a rainy day in Nottingham, King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland raised his royal standard to call his people to arms. He had declared war on his own parliament. Charles had, in fact, seen all this coming. The slide to war had started in Scotland. The Stuarts were of Scottish origin. Charles had been born in Dunfermline Palace, in 1600. But before his fourth birthday, he moved to England. The northern kingdom had become profoundly alien to Charles. Scotland and England were still separate states, had separate parliaments, and crucially had separate state churches. The Reformation in Scotland had taken a more radical turn and, to many Protestants, its Kirk was among the most advanced churches in Europe. Managing these two churches required diplomatic panache, not Charles’s fabled stubbornness. He desired uniformity in his realms and so, in 1636, he tried to bring the Kirk in line, imposing on it a new, Englishstyle Prayer Book. The first real trouble came on 23 July 1637: James Hannay, dean of Edinburgh, tried to read from the new prayer book at St Giles’ Cathedral. He was faced with a barrage of flying stools, the first one – according to legend – thrown by the market-trader Jenny Geddes. By 1638, Scotland was in open defiance. In February, a gathering in Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh signed a National Covenant, recently drawn up by Presbyterian divines with the view to resisting “papistical” innovations. Through the year, the Covenant swept the Lowlands, and made some progress too in the more conservative Highlands. In November, a general assembly of the Kirk at Glasgow struck a defiant tone by continuing to sit after Charles’s government had dissolved it. Such was the shock that the king told his chief man in Scotland, the Marquis of Hamilton, that this was tantamount to declaring the country a republic: “So long as this covenant is in force,” he wrote, “I have no more power in Scotland than as a duke of Venice, which I will rather die than suffer.” The following year, rebellion led to war. Charles ordered Hamilton to face the Covenanters down, but they were ready and committed. So much so that even Hamilton’s own mother fought for them, raising a cavalry troop and, allegedly, threatening to shoot her own son. Charles was forced back to the table, and a truce was signed. Charles, though, still believed he could defeat the Covenanters in battle. But to do so he needed money, and there was only one way he could get it. He had to call his English parliament. The Westminster parliament had, by the time Charles came to the throne in 1625, become a crucial fixture in the English political scene: not so much because it was always sitting – it usually wasn’t – but because its statutes were the most constitutionally secure way of getting things done. But it could also be a space for opposition and Charles had bad relations with it from the outset. Early in his reign, he had tried to raise taxes through a ‘Forced Loan’. Refusals to pay led to imprisonments without trial or even charge, and, meanwhile, the costs of a disastrous war against France led Charles to impose martial law and the quartering of troops in the households of ordinary families. Parliament had responded by passing a Petition of Right, setting out what they considered to be fundamental English liberties. Charles, bitterly, accepted it. Absolute rule Things then came to an ugly head in 1629, when Charles tried to dissolve parliament, but a group of MPs held the speaker down in his chair while the house passed a series of bills. From this point on, Charles decided that he would rule without consulting his assembly of representatives. It was a dangerous path. In the early 17th century, many European states were struggling with the rising costs of war, and the corrosive effect of inflation on their tax and estate resources. If monarchies thought themselves unable to work with their representative bodies – the Estates General and Parlements in France, or the Cortes in Spain, for example – then they increasingly tried to work without them, building up a paid bureaucracy of tax collectors backed by military force. This was absolutism, and it was the way the political winds were blowing in many a European state. Was this the future for England and Scotland? Parliament passed a Petition of Right, setting out fundamental English liberties. Charles, bitterly, accepted it Yet, looking back, some saw the 1630s, and Charles’s ‘Personal Rule’ without parliament, as a golden age – days of calm before the maelstrom of the 1640s. Such peace, wrote the royalist Earl of Clarendon rather later, “and universal tranquility for 10 years was never enjoyed by any nation”. But there were signs of the gathering storm nonetheless. One problem was finance. Without parliament, Charles relied on controversial expedients to raise funds: he fined people who had lands in the old medieval forests, or who failed to be knighted despite being wealthy enough. Most controversial of all, he levied a tax called ship money on inland counties – it was traditionally restricted to coastal ones. When a leading Buckinghamshire gentleman refused to pay, Charles won the lawsuit, but only just: five of the 12 presiding judges defied him. The other problem was religion. Charles was not a Catholic, although his French wife was. However, he was drawn to the world of the pugnacious theologian William Laud. Laud was sceptical of the Calvinist belief in double predestination, the idea that God had predetermined who would go to heaven and hell. He allowed the possibility that the way you lived your life on Earth might influence where you were headed afterwards. He believed that it was acceptable, nay, to be encouraged, that people might beautify their churches, as had been the case before the Reformation came with its plaster and whitewash. More to the point, he wanted services to be carried out with more dignity and hierarchy. One of the central battlegrounds was the position of communion tables. For convenience, they were often housed open in the middle of the nave, symbolically at the heart of the congregation, but equally open to profane uses, even to the extent of being used for storage. It was a deceptively complex issue: Laud ordered communion tables to be railed off and placed “altar-wise”, at the east end of the chancel. There they could exist with more dignity, but they were symbolically cut off from the congregation, and either way the whole thing felt rather, well, Catholic. Society was changing too. In the century leading up to the 1630s, England had gone through a series of profound social shifts. The population had grown from a fairly paltry 2.2 million or so in 1500 to a positively teeming 5.5 million by the 1630s. This had put pressure on land, but it also caused a startling rise in the price of food and rent, while wages were stagnant or worse. In the long run, it created grinding poverty among the labouring classes. A growing city London, meanwhile, grew from around 80,000 people in the reign of Henry VIII to some 400,000 by 1640. The first proper maps of the city date from around this time, and they show dense lanes within the old city walls, but also a sprawling mass of new housing in the suburbs of Southwark and the Tower Hamlets, and Westminster, where fashionable new squares vied for space with slum housing. The poor rubbed shoulders with the rich, but there was also a growing literate class of small tradespeople. They picked up books and pamphlets from the hawkers at St Paul’s, they attended plays, and they ‘gadded’ to sermons. The tight knots of parishes in the capital meant that there was a marketplace for ideas: if you didn’t like your local minister, you could easily go and find another. Theologians lectured large crowds. William Gouge, for example, remembered a tough audience of London women when he tried to lecture them on their marital subjection. You were, in fact, probably much more likely in this era to watch a sermon than you were to see a play. Sermon-goers had plenty to think about, too, and not just in London. England in the 1630s was in the midst of a nasty culture war, fought between Puritans and Laud’s supporters. In 1633, Laud was promoted to archbishop of Canterbury, and he was particularly aggressive in enforcing his doctrinal ideas on England’s 9,000 or so parishes. Muscular Christianity Perhaps most controversial of all, he threw his weight behind a new ‘Book of Sports’ (also 1633) which specifically allowed people to play games on Sundays and holy days. Such merry latitude had been royal policy since 1618, but until now it had been left to local communities to decide how far to implement it. Under Charles and Laud, ministers were forced to read the book, going against years of teaching by many Protestants that the Sabbath was wholly sacred, a day for prayer and little else. Some ministers resisted, some even emigrated to America. One London Puritan read the Book to his congregation, followed by the Ten Commandments (“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”). “Dearly beloved,” he said, “You have heard now the commandments of God and man, obey which you please.” Charles was faced with a better-read, more legally and administratively literate society than any of his predecessors Issues like this were prompted by the government, but they were fed into by the social changes of the previous 100 years. Rising literacy and a growing book trade meant that middling people – farmers, traders, craftspeople – had come into contact with religious debates. They were exposed to questions about salvation and the proper organisation of a church. And they governed. England’s ‘middling sort’ were the ones who collected taxes, decided who got poor relief, as well as who got prosecuted. They had to make moral decisions about which of their neighbours had committed the worst sexual transgressions, or kept their alehouse open too late. They had to decide whether it was better to allow football on a Sunday or not. They were readers, administrators, governors, and litigators. Charles was, quite simply, faced with a better read, more legally and administratively literate society than any of his predecessors. They were not, of course, unified against him. Far from it. Many thoughtful people looked at the crisis of the 1640s and decided that challenging the king was illegal, that community cohesion was more important than a strict implementation of the church law, and that the Book of Common Prayer was a more attractive source of doctrine than the Scottish Kirk. But the point was that these were debated in the fields, the churchyards, and the alehouses of England: Pandora’s Box had been opened. The armies of the 1640s had many a man who “knows what he fights for and loves what he knows”, as it was put by an East Anglian farmer, serving as a cavalry officer in 1643. The farmer’s name was Oliver Cromwell. Humiliating treaty The parliament called by Charles in the spring of 1640 didn’t give him the money he wanted. Instead, it tried to debate the Personal Rule. He dismissed it and went to war anyway. It was a disastrous decision. The Scots invaded northern England, rolled over the royalist forces, and occupied Newcastle. Desperate to stop them taking York, and faced with demands from his nobility that he recall parliament, Charles signed a humiliating treaty at Ripon, by which he agreed to pay the Scots army £850 a day until a perpetual peace could be agreed. The writs for elections went out and parliament met on 3 November 1640. At this moment, though, there was little possibility of war in England – not because Charles had too much support, but ironically because he had too little. In 1640, the political nation was largely unified in demanding reform. And reform they got. But as this progressed, many fellow travellers of 1640 dropped away. The radicals tried to abolish bishops, and this lost the support of those who loved church tradition. They attempted to control appointments to the Privy Council, but this shocked constitutional conservatives. When parliament bypassed normal legal process and executed Thomas Wentworth, one of Charles’s leading administrators, simply by passing a statute declaring him guilty, it offended those who respected due process. When the opposition leader John Pym used the London crowd to pressurise parliament, it seemed to conservatives like they were handing power to a rabble, even if it was often literate tradespeople who made up that much of that crowd. The divided nation By late 1641, parliament had become dangerously fractured. It was possible to talk of two sides, and in the street politics of the capital, these had started to be nicknamed Roundheads and Cavaliers. In November, an attempt by the opposition to collate their grievances into a ‘Grand Remonstrance’ had passed the Commons only by 159 votes to 148. There were two sides in the house, and there were also two sides in the country. Ireland was the match that lit the powder. Since early Tudor times, Ireland had been exploited by England. From the late 16th century, England had pursued a policy of plantation whereby Irish lands were given over to settlers. Under James VI and I, the plantations were accelerated, with thousands of Protestant families from England and Scotland brought over and settled in Ulster. Nonetheless, anger at Anglo-Scottish colonisation could be tempered by effective rule. Partly through conciliation and partly through military force, Thomas Wentworth (he called his policy “thorough”) had managed to hold Ireland’s government together. He had even raised an army in Ireland that Charles hoped to use against the Scots Covenanters. By October 1641, though, Wentworth was dead, and his army had been disbanded. The success of the Scots, meanwhile, encouraged aggrieved Irish to believe they too could win better treatment by rising in force. When the rebellion came, it was swift and it was bloody. A plot to seize Dublin Castle failed, but settlers in Ulster were cast off their land, and many were murdered. Lurid reports of atrocities – some true, some fictional – filtered back to England, encouraged by a rabid London press. The effect was like a bolt of lightning. Now an army would have to be raised, although neither side trusted the other to lead it. The winter of 1641–42 brought a climactic power struggle. Charles tried to gain control of London by putting Thomas Lunsford, a hardline royalist ultra, in charge of the Tower. Paper ‘libels’ spread around the City alleging that Lunsford was a baby-eating cannibal. He was so vociferously opposed that the king had to back down and remove his man. Council elections, meanwhile, brought a radical clique to power in the City. The coup de grace happened on 4 January. Charles, realising his grip on his capital was slipping, decided to make a desperate move against parliament. He would strike against five leaders of the opposition in the Commons and one in the Lords. It was like a retrospective of Charles’s leading critics, from Denzil Holles, who had held the speaker in his chair back in 1629, to John Hampden, the Buckinghamshire gentleman who had opposed Ship Money, to Charles’s nemesis in the Commons, John Pym. Setting out from his palace with a gang of armed Cavaliers, Charles marched down Whitehall and into the Commons. It was a terrifying, dramatic scene: an attempted coup by the king against his parliament. But the men had gone. “I see the birds have flown,” Charles said, and they had. Forewarned, they had hastened away down the river, and slipped into the knotted lanes of the city. Charles spent the next few days at Whitehall. The city at his gates threatened to snap at any moment. On 10 January, he and his family stole away into the cold winter night. The slide to war had begun. This article was first published in the August 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine