Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (21 page)

Having secured one victim, Parliament’s radicals turned to the practical business of ensuring that personal rule could never
be revived. In February that year the Triennial Act had held that Parliament, if not summoned by the King, must automatically
reassemble after three years. Now followed an act against dissolving Parliament without its consent, another to abolish ship
money, and acts to shut down the Court of Star Chamber, which had sliced off Prynne’s ears, along with the Court of High Commission
through which Laud had exercised his control over the Church.

On I December came the climax — a‘Grand Remonstrance on the State of the Kingdom’, which set out no less than 204 complaints
against Charles and his eleven years of personal rule. As the Commons went through their list of
grievances, the debates escalated into a raucous public event to match the dragging-down of Strafford, with delegations riding
in from Essex, Kent and Sussex to shout their protests outside Parliament. Many moderates became alarmed. They rallied to
the royal cause and Pym’s Remonstrance only just scraped through the Commons, by 159 votes to 148.

One hundred and forty-eight worried MPs was a workable base on which Charles I might have moved towards compromise — and there
was every possibility that the Lords would reject the Remonstrance. But God’s Lieutenant did not do compromise, and his hurt
pride would not let him delay Bitterly remorseful and blaming himself for Strafford’s fate, on Monday 3 January 1642 Charles
instructed his Attorney General to commence treason proceedings against his five bitterest critics in the Commons: John Pym,
John Hampden, Denzil Holles, Arthur Hazelrig and William Strode, along with Viscount Mandeville, a leading reformer in the
House of Lords.

Next day Charles marched to the Parliament House in Westminster with a party of guards, intending to lay hands on the culprits
himself— an extraordinarily risky and melodramatic gesture into which he was tempted by Pym and his four companions, who had
set themselves up as bait. Having advertised their presence in the Commons that morning, the five Members then monitored the
King’s progress down Whitehall.

When Charles entered the Commons chamber, he requested the Speaker, William Lenthall, to yield him his seat and to point out
Pym and the others. Falling to his knees, Lenthall replied that it was not for him to either see or speak
but as the House desired. There was no precedent for this situation. No King of England had ever interrupted a session of
the House of Commons. “Tis no matter,’ declared Charles,‘I think my eyes are as good as another’s’, and he cast his eyes along
the benches as the MPs stood bareheaded and in silence. Through the open door they could see the royal guards, some of whom
were cocking their pistols, playfully pretending to mark down their men — until melodrama turned to anticlimax.

’All my birds have flown,’ admitted Charles, disconsolately conceding defeat. Having set their trap, the five had made good
their escape, slipping down to the river, where a boat took them into hiding in the City. As the crestfallen King turned on
his heel to leave the chamber, the suddenly emboldened Members reminded him of their rights and let out catcalls of‘Privilege!
Privilege!’ at his retreating and humiliated back.

The debacle marked a breaking point. Compromise was no longer possible between an obstinate monarch and a defiant Parliament,
and six days later, on io January 1642, Charles slipped out of Whitehall with his family. He stopped briefly at Hampton Court.
Then Henrietta Maria headed for Holland with the crown jewels, hoping to raise money, while Charles rode towards York, intent
on raising the army he would need to fight the Civil War.

L
ADY MARY BANKES WAS A FORMIDABLE
woman, the mother of fourteen children. When the Civil War broke out in August 1642 it fell to her to defend the family home
at Corfe Castle in Dorset. Her husband was a senior judge and a privy councillor, so when the King had gone north to raise
his standard that summer Sir John Bankes followed. He soon found himself, like all the Kings councillors, denounced by Parliament
as a traitor.

Down in Dorset, the local parliamentary commander anticipated little trouble when he arrived at Corfe to take the surrender
of the Bankes’s home. But he had not reckoned on the valiant Lady Mary, who shut the gates against him. When
his men attempted to scale the walls they found themselves showered with rocks and burning embers thrown by the family’s loyal
retainers — cooks and chambermaids included. Even a prize of £20 (£2,240 today) offered to the first man to reach the battlements
attracted no takers. Hearing of royalist troops in the nearby town of Dorchester, the parliamentarians slunk away.

It took an act of treachery to capture Corfe three years later. One February night in 1646, an accomplice in the garrison
opened the gates to fifty parliamentary troops disguised as royalists, and Lady Bankes, a widow since her husband’s death
at Oxford two years previously, was arrested. Parliament confiscated their lands and decided to‘slight’ Corfe Castle: they
stacked the main towers with gunpowder barrels, then exploded them.

The bravery of Lady Mary and the spectacular ruins of her castle that loom over Corfe to this day illustrate the drama of
England’s Civil War and the damage it wreaked. Modern estimates suggest that one in every four or five adult males was caught
up in the fighting: 150 towns suffered serious destruction; 11,000 houses were burned or demolished and 55,000 people made
homeless — these were the years when the German word
plündern,
to plunder, came into the language, brought over by Charles’s loot-happy cavalry commander, his nephew Prince Rupert of the
Rhine. Nearly 4 per cent of England’s population died in the fighting or from war-related disease — a higher proportion, even,
than died in World War I.’Whose blood stains the walls of our towns and defiles our land?’ lamented Bulstrode Whitelock to
the House of Commons in 1643.’Is it not all English?’

The Civil War was not like the Wars of the Roses, when everyday life had largely carried on as normal. The clash between King
and Parliament involved the most fundamental question — how should the country be ruled? And to this was added the profound
differences in religion that bitterly divided families and split friend from friend. Sir William Waller and Sir Ralph Hopton
had been comrades-in-arms in the early 1620s, fighting Catholics on the continent. But now they found themselves on opposing
sides, Sir William supporting Parliament because of his Puritan beliefs, Sir Ralph feeling that he must stay loyal to his
monarch.’That great God which is the searcher of my heart knows with what a sad sense I go upon this service,’ wrote Waller
in distress to his old friend in 1643, and with what a perfect hatred I detest this war without an enemy… [But] we are both
upon the stage and must act those parts that are assigned us in this tragedy.’

Both‘Roundhead’ and‘Cavalier’ were originally terms of abuse. Before the war began, royalists derided the‘round heads’ of
the crop-haired London apprentices who had rioted outside Parliament in late December 1641 calling for the exclusion of bishops
and Catholic peers from the House of Lords. In retaliation the parliamentarians dubbed their opponents
caballeros,
after the Spanish troopers notorious for their brutality against the Dutch Protestants. When Charles I heard this rendered
into English as‘cavalier’ he decided that he liked the associations of nobility and horsemanship, and encouraged his followers
to adopt the word.

In October 1642 came the first great battle of the Civil War, at Edgehill, north of the royal headquarters at Oxford.
Outcome: indecisive. In the year that followed, the balance swung the King’s way. But in July 1644 the two sides met en masse
at Marston Moor, outside York, and Parliament was triumphant.

’God made them as stubble to our swords,’ boasted the plain-spoken commander of the parliamentary cavalry, Oliver Cromwell.
In a famous letter to his fellow-officers from East Anglia, this stocky gentleman farmer who was fast becoming the inspiration
of the parliamentary cause described what he looked for in his soldiers:’I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain what
knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows,’ he wrote,‘than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else.’ When
it came to recruiting, explained the Puritan preacher Richard Baxter,‘none would be such engaged fighting men as the religious’.

Religion was the inspiration of the New Model Army, the 22,000-strong professional fighting force that Cromwell and the parliamentary
commander Sir Thomas Fairfax were now organising to replace the system of regional militias. Its regiments sang hymns, refrained
from drinking, and made a point of listening to sermons. Royalists nicknamed this new army the‘Noddle’ in mockery of its constant
godly head-bobbing in prayer, but sober discipline and holy certainty brought results. On 14 June 1645 at Naseby, just south
of Leicester, the red-tunicked Noddle won the decisive victory of the Civil War, taking some five thousand prisoners, securing
£100,000 in jewels and booty, and — worst of all from Charles’s point of view — capturing the King’s private correspondence.
Soon published in pamphlet form,
The King’s Cabinet Opened
revealed that Charles had been plotting
to hire foreign mercenaries and to repeal the laws against Roman Catholics.

For Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan members of the New Model Army, this was the ultimate betrayal. It was proof that the King
could never be trusted. Righteous voices were raised demanding the ultimate accounting with’Charles Stuart, that man of blood’.

The Battle of Naseby left Charles I at the mercy of an army as convinced of their divine right as he was.

E
ARLY IN JUNE 1647 CORNET GEORGE JOYCE
led five hundred horsemen of the New Model Army to Holmby House in Northamptonshire. In civilian life, Joyce was a tailor.
Now he was a cornet of horse, an officer who carried the flag — and his orders were to capture the King.

The Battle of Naseby had finished the Cavaliers as a fighting force, and having vainly tried to play off his English and Scottish
enemies against each other, Charles had ended up in parliamentary custody at Holmby. But Parliament and the army had fallen
out over what should be done with their tricky royal prisoner, and now the army took the initiative. They would seize Charles
for themselves. At dawn on 3 June,
the King walked through the gates of Holmby to find Cornet Joyce waiting for him, with his fully armed fighting men lined
up at attention.

’I pray you, Mr Joyce…’ asked the King,‘tell me what commission you have?’

’Here is my commission,’ replied the cornet of horse.

’Where?’ asked the King.

’Behind,’ replied Joyce, pointing to his ranks of red-coated troopers.

The dramatic break between army and Parliament had occurred four months earlier, in February 1647, when MPs had voted to disband
the New Model Army and to send its members home. England was exhausted by war, and reflecting the national mood, Parliament’s
leaders set about negotiating a settlement with the King.

But the men who had risked their lives and seen their companions fall in battle were incensed. Parliament was not only dismissing
them with pay owing, it was negotiating with the Antichrist, planning to restore Charles — along with his popish wife and
advisers — to the throne.’We were not a mere mercenary army,’ complained’The Declaration of the Army’ of June that year,‘hired
to serve any arbitrary power of the state, but [were] called forth… to the defence of the people’s just right and liberties.’

Radical ideas had flourished in the war years. Once the army had taken custody of the King it had the power to shape the way
England would be governed, and in October 1647 the Council of the Army met at St Mary’s Church in the village of Putney, south-west
of London, to discuss future action. The agenda was set by the utopian ideas of the
’Levellers’, who were demanding that Parliament be elected by all men, not just on the existing franchise of property-holders
and tradesmen. The Levellers wanted no less than to get rid of the lords and the monarchy.‘The poorest he that is in England
has a life to live as the greatest he,’ declared Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, as he kicked off discussion in what became known
as‘the Putney Debates’.