BLARNEY
IN
1602 Cormack McCarthy, Lord of Blarney in County Cork, repeatedly delayed the surrender of his castle to the English through an endless series of parleys, promises, queries, and time-wasting speeches. Despite the support of a Spanish landing force, the Irish lords had already been heavily defeated the previous year at nearby Kinsale; and it was only a matter of time before Mountjoy’s English army would reduce the whole of Ireland to obedience.
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But McCarthy’s act of defiance gave people a good laugh; and ‘Blarney’ passed into common parlance as a synonym for ‘the miraculous power of speech’ or ‘the gift of the gab’.
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Indeed, since the defeated Irish became famous for their musical and literary skills, Blarney Castle became a symbol of Irishness and of Irish pride. Popularized by the song, ‘The Groves of Blarney’ (c.1798), it became a place of pilgrimage. The castle’s foundation-stone, which bears the inscription ‘Cormac McCarthy fortis me fieri fecit
AD
1446’, was taken to possess magical powers; and the perilous ritual of ‘kissing the Blarney Stone’ under the overhanging battlements is said to reward the pilgrim with the gift of persuasiveness. The interesting thing, historically, is that the language in which the Irish became so proficient and persuasive was not their own.
In this way Scotland’s religious wars became embroiled with the equally long-running constitutional struggle between King and Parliament in England. Under the Tudors, the partnership between the monarch and the elected representatives of the shires and boroughs did not conceal the fact that England’s Parliament was an instrument of royal policy. ‘We at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in the time of Parliament,’ declared Henry VIII to a parliamentary delegation, ‘wherein we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together into one
body politick.’ There were no doubts who was head: parliamentarians had no immunity, and had reason to fear the royal wrath.
The winning of the political initiative by the House of Commons under James I, however, put an end to Parliament’s subservience. In the long term, parliamentary control of taxation was to prove decisive. In 1629–40, when Charles I decided to rule without Parliament, no one had the means to oppose him. But in April 1640, when the costs of the Scottish war forced the King to recall the English Parliament and to beg for money, the storm broke. Court talk about the divine right of kings was opposed by parliamentary lawyers quoting Magna Carta. According to the popular dictum of the late Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, ‘The law of the realm cannot be changed but by parliament’. A Grand Remonstrance (1641) faced the King with a vast catalogue of recriminations. His chief minister, the Earl of Strafford, was impeached by Parliament and, with the King’s reluctant consent, sacrificed.
Ireland now entered the equation. Strafford had treated the Presbyterians of Ulster with the same harshness that his predecessors had used towards the Irish Catholics. He had started to raise an Irish army for use against the King’s rebellious subjects in England and Scotland; but on quitting Ireland in June 1641 without paying the troops, he left a country in open rebellion. A Scots army arrived in Ireland to support their Protestant co-religionists; and multi-sided warfare proceeded unchecked. Baulked on all sides, Charles I then attempted in good Tudor style to arrest the contumacious members of the English Commons. He failed: ‘I see the birds have flown,’ he stuttered. There was nothing left for him but to flee London and to call his subjects to arms. Defied by the Parliament which he had not wished to summon, he abandoned the tradition of kings accepting the advice of their councils, and raised his standard at Nottingham. It was the summer of 1642. The conflict was to cost him his life. No satisfactory constitutional equilibrium was reached until 1689.
The ‘English Civil War’, therefore, is a misnomer which inadequately describes the nature of a very complex conflict. It did not start in England, and was not confined to England. It embraced three separate civil wars in Scotland, Ireland, and England, and involved interrelated developments within all parts of the Stuart realm. The crisis in England in August 1642 cannot be viewed in isolation. The King’s edgy conduct towards the Parliament at Westminster was undoubtedly conditioned by his unhappy experiences in Edinburgh. The militancy of English parliamentarians was heightened by their knowledge of the King’s despotic policies in Scotland and Ireland, by his proven record of religious impositions, and by the fighting already in progress. Here, above all, was a conflict of political and religious principle. Attempts to explain it in terms of social groups or economic interests, though helpful on some points, have not replaced the older analyses based on a mix of constitutional and religious convictions. Catholics and High Church Anglicans felt the greatest loyalty for the King, whose monarchical prerogatives were under attack. English puritans and Calvinist Scots provided the core support of Parliament, which they saw as a bulwark against absolutism. The gentry was split down the middle.
The English have been taught that their Civil War did not share the religious bigotry and mindless killings of contemporary wars on the Continent. One of the favourite quotations is taken from a letter of the parliamentary major-general, Sir William Waller, which he addressed to the commander of the royalists’ western army, Sir Ralph Hopton, on the eve of the battle at Roundway Down in 1643:
My affections to you are so unchangeable that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person, but I must be true to the cause I serve. The great God, who is a searcher of my heart, knows… with what perfect hatred I look upon this war without an enemy. We are both upon the stage and we must act the parts assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour and without personal animosities.
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If such forbearance had prevailed, the wars could never have been sustained.
For there were several key issues on which neither party was prepared to show a margin of tolerance. The ‘low-taxation philosophy’ of the parliamentarians did not provide the means for the King to govern effectively. Also, the dominant English establishment was only interested in England, and careless of the separate interests of Ireland and Scotland. Above all, in religious matters, both sides were determined to persecute their opponents in the hope of imposing a single religion. The War ‘was not fought for religious liberty, but between rival groups of persecutors’.
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The royalists upheld the Act of Uniformity. The Parliament, in its hour of military triumph, attempted to impose the Presbyterian Covenant. Both found that absolute uniformity could not be enforced.
Nor was the war free of horrors. Well-documented atrocities such as the general massacre at Bolton (June 1644) perpetrated by the troops of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, or the fearful Sack of Drogheda (1649), where Cromwell slaughtered the entire population of an Irish town, were accompanied by the less-publicized practices of killing prisoners and razing villages.
Four years of fighting saw a large number of engagements involving both local and central forces. The royalists, with their headquarters in Christ Church, Oxford, initially held the upper hand in most of the English counties. But the parliamentary forces, aided by the Scots’ League of Covenanters, held an impregnable base in London, and hence the organs of central government. In due course they were able to raise a professional New Model Army, whose creator, the formidable Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), gradually assumed a commanding role in political as well as military affairs. Parliament often controlled the towns and the King the countryside. Neither combatant enjoyed any general advantage, until Parliament slowly reaped the benefits of superior organization, of an invincible general, and of the Scots alliance. After the initial clash at Edge Hill (24 September 1642) north of Oxford, the decisive battles were contested at Marston Moor in Yorkshire (2 July 1644) and at Naseby (14 June 1645). Once the King had surrendered to the Scots at Newark in 1646, all open resistance from the royalists ceased.
As the fighting slowed, the political situation accelerated with revolutionary speed. The parliamentary camp was rapidly radicalized, both in its republicanism and in its association with extreme evangelical sectarians, among them the
Levellers and the Diggers. Unable to pin the King to a firm agreement, Cromwell decided on his execution—which was carried out in front of Whitehall Palace on 31 January 1649, thereby initiating the Commonwealth. Unable to control the Long Parliament, Cromwell purged it. Unable to win over the Irish and the Scots by persuasion, he invaded first Ireland then Scotland. His victory over the Scots at Worcester (1651) left him totally triumphant in the field. Yet he could never engineer a political settlement to match his military triumphs. Unable to carry even the Barebones Parliament of picked supporters, he dissolved it. ‘Necessity’, he told them, ‘hath no law.’ Cromwell was left ruling as Lord Protector through the colonels of eleven military districts. The parliamentary cause, having abandoned parliamentary government, was politically bankrupt.
‘The Great Oliver’ was a man of unparalleled strength of purpose. ‘Mr Lely,’ he told the portraitist, ‘I desire you … to paint the picture truly like me, and to remark all these roughnesses, pimples, and warts; otherwise I will never pay you a farthing.’ But he devised no lasting solutions, and was apt to attribute everything, even the massacre of Drogheda, to the judgement of God. On his death the royalist cause revived. There was no alternative to a return of the
status quo ante bellum
. Both King and Parliament had to be restored. Charles II returned from exile on 29 May 1660, on the terms of an Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. Both King and Parliament had to relearn the rules of watchful cohabitation.
In some ways the British Civil Wars were symptomatic of strains which surrounded the growth of a modern state in numerous European countries. But they did not inspire any Continental emulators, and must be judged a tragedy of essentially regional significance.
Across the North Sea, the Scandinavian countries were moving in the opposite direction—away from unification. Sweden, in particular, had long fretted against Danish dominance. It had possessed its own
Riksdag
or ‘parliament’ of four estates since the 1460s, and its own university at Uppsala since 1479. At Christmas in 1520 a revolt broke out in Darlecarlia against the coronation of yet another Danish king. A bloodbath in the city square of Stockholm, where a hundred supporters of the revolt were executed for treason, only fanned the flames. Led by a young nobleman, Gustav Eriksson Vasa, the rebels expelled the Danish army. In 1523 the Union of Kalmar fell apart. Sweden, under Gustavus Vasa (r. 1523–60), went its own way. Denmark and Norway, under Frederick I (r. 1523–33) and his successors, were early recruits to Lutheranism. The resultant rivalry, not least over the disputed province of Halland, remained intense for more than a century.
Sweden’s
fortunes were tied henceforth to the Vasas, to the search for supremacy in the Baltic, and, with some delay, to the Protestant cause. In 1527, at the Diet of Vasteras, Gustavus created an Erastian Church anticipating that of Henry VIII in England. He abolished the Catholic rite; but by transferring the landed wealth of the Church to his supporters, he created the social base for a powerful monarchy.
His second son, John III (r. 1568–92), married the heiress of the Polish Jagiellons, and his grandson, Sigismund Vasa (r. 1592–1604), was elected King of Poland. Sigismund was seen as the last hope of Sweden’s fading Catholic party, and the civil war which flowed from his accession persuaded the majority of the nobles to identify national independence with Protestantism. In 1593 the Synod of Uppsala adopted the Confession of Augsburg for the state religion. Sigismund was deposed in favour of his uncle, Charles IX of Södermanland (r. 1604–11), parent of the Protestant line. Henceforth, in the constant wars with Poland, Sweden added dynastic and religious motives to the conflict of strategic interests in the Baltic.
The young Gustavus Adolphus (r. 1611–32) assumed that attack was the best form of defence. Possessed of immense talent, a secure political base, a navy, and a native army that was to outclass even the Spaniards, he perfected the art of self-financing military expeditions. In 1613 he recovered Kalmar from Denmark; in 1614–17 he intervened in Muscovy’s Time of Troubles, coming away with Ingria and Karelia; in 1617–29 he attacked Poland-Lithuania, taking Riga (1621) and besieging Danzig (1626–9). He once escaped capture by Polish hussars by a whisker; but he made so much money milking the Vistula tolls that he could play for still greater stakes. In 1630, with French backing, he made his dramatic entry into Germany. His death in battle at Lützen (see below) cut short a career still full of promise.
Queen Christina (r. 1632–54), who grew up under the regency of Chancellor Oxenstierna, saw Sweden rise to its peak with the conquest of Halland (1645) and the Treaty of Westphalia. But she secretly converted to Catholicism, abdicated, and retired to Rome. Her cousin Charles X (r. 1654–60), worried by the ambitions of Moscow and by the cost of an unemployed army, resorted to the old policy of intervention in Poland-Lithuania. His untimely death gave occasion for the comprehensive settlement at the Treaty of Oliva (1660) (see below).
Sweden never gained complete control of the Baltic, the much-heralded
dominium mans Balticae
. But for half a century she played a disproportionate part in European affairs—the terror of the north, the military wonder of the age, the most active of the Protestant powers.
Poland-Lithuania
was another country which experienced its ‘Golden Age’ during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The realm of the last Jagiellons was absolutely the largest state in Europe; and it escaped both the religious wars and the Ottoman invasions which beset many of its contemporaries. Under Zygmunt I (r. 1506–48) and Zygmunt-August (r. 1548–72), husband and son of yet another Sforza queen, it enjoyed strong links with Italy, especially with Venice; and Cracow hosted one of the most vibrant of Renaissance courts.