Royalists at War in Scotland and Ireland, 1638–1650

Barry Robertson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409457473
• eBook ISBN: 9781317061052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Analysing the make-up and workings of the Royalist party in Scotland and Ireland during the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century, Royalists at War is the first major study to explore who Royalists were in these two countries and why they gave their support to the Stuart kings. It compares and contrasts the actions, motivations and situations of key Scottish and Irish Royalists, paying particular attention to concepts such as honour, allegiance and loyalty, as well as practical considerations such as military capability, levels of debt, religious tensions, and political geography. It also shows how and why allegiances changed over time and how this impacted on the royal war effort. Alongside this is an investigation into why the Royalist cause failed in Scotland and Ireland and the implications this had for crown strategy within a wider British context. It also examines the extent to which Royalism in Scotland and Ireland differed from their English counterpart, which in turn allows an assessment to be made as to what constituted core elements of British and Irish Royalism.

Chapter 1

Scottish and Irish Royalism in Context

The Problem of Royalism

Any student new to the history of the British and Irish Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century will invariably find themselves presented with a vast array of studies concentrating on a variety of topics relating to political, social and military aspects of the period. Some of these aspects, it has to be said, remain much more widely studied than others. Traditionally, royalism has very much fallen into the less widely studied category. Whereas a vast number of works have been written over the years examining the covenanting movement in Scotland, the Catholic Confederation in Ireland, or the Parliamentarians in England, royalism has rarely attracted the same kind of attention. Scholars of English royalism have offered up a number of reasons for this. One major telling factor appears to have been the fact that the men and women who supported the king left relatively little in the way of diaries, journals and administrative records whereas much remains from the pens of their parliamentary counterparts. Royalist pamphlets were somewhat thicker on the ground, but again, this output was far outstripped by pro-Parliament printed propaganda. As such it has simply been the case that historians of the Civil Wars in England have tended to gravitate to where the bulk of the surviving evidence lies.¹ Added to this was the dominance in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century of a historiography of the Civil Wars that concentrated almost exclusively on the groups deemed to have been part of a progressive movement towards beneficial social change. Thus Parliament and Puritans were thought worthy of study while royalism was seen as an archaic, conservative movement that inhibited the forward thrust of historical progress. Alongside this was traced the rise of the gentry or ‘middling sort’ at the expense of a declining nobility, the former being primarily associated with the forces of progression, and the latter with that of a stagnant status quo.²

In part also, there may simply have been a tendency on the part of historians in England, Scotland and Ireland to examine the movements that come closest to being ‘national’ in viewpoint and whose leading figures sought to assert this in dynamic fashion whether they were Parliamentarians, Covenanters or Confederates. All three movements sought to advance individual versions of what might be termed ‘governmental nationalism’ as well as ‘confessional nationalism’ and to assert this within a wider three-kingdoms context. By its very nature royalism could never seek to compete on those terms. Primarily, royalism was a creed which drew the support of those who valued loyalty to the king and his policies over and above individual ‘national’ agendas within England, Scotland and Ireland. This ultimately left its adherents facing life as a minority in each country, particularly so in Scotland and Ireland. Historians of royalism in the three kingdoms have duly been left in the same position.

A number of scholars are now actively beginning to challenge this imbalance within an English context. The likes of David L. Smith, Jason McElligott, David Scott and many others have now begun to add to the older work of Paul Hardacre, David Underdown, Ian Roy, P.R. Newman and Ronald Hutton, thus developing a richer and ever more sophisticated picture of royalism in England. This is all important work, and for historians of Scotland and Ireland it remains highly instructive. For, while English royalism is now being ever more widely studied, the same cannot yet be said of the movement in the other two Stuart kingdoms. A handful of useful articles have emerged on aspects of the Scottish and Irish royalist experience, as well as important biographical studies of some of the key royalist figures, but much work remains to be done. Crucially, no overall, fully comprehensive studies of Scottish or Irish royalism have yet been attempted. This may seem particularly surprising given the paramount importance of Scotland and Ireland to royalist planning in an overall three-kingdoms context throughout the Civil Wars. Over much of the period Charles I and Charles II looked to pursue strategies, both military and diplomatic, that utilised forces and supporters in all three of the Stuart kingdoms. Indeed, from 1648 until the early 1650s, there was little doubt that Scotland and Ireland were the twin lynchpins of the Stuart war effort. Quite simply, in order for a full understanding to be gained of royalism in the three kingdoms during these years, and in particular of the reasons for royalist defeat, it is imperative that a comprehensive study be made of the movement in both Scotland and Ireland forthwith. This book aims to meet this challenge.

The current chapter serves as a broad introduction to the topic. It opens with an overview of the work done to date on English royalism, examining how historians have approached the subject over the years and paying attention to the various models that have been constructed in order to ascertain who the Royalists were and what their goals and objectives were. It is particularly important that an appreciation be gained of how these scholars have detected differing patterns of allegiance within the movement and the manner in which they have delineated factional divisions associated with this. Consideration will then be given to the work that has been done on Scottish and Irish royalism and how this sits within the wider historiography of the Civil Wars in those two kingdoms. Some thought will also be given to how English models for understanding royalism can inform and enlighten any study of the king’s supporters elsewhere. Two key points relating to the scope of the book will then be flagged up. Firstly, the reasons for, and benefits of, studying Scottish and Irish royalism within a single volume will be highlighted. Secondly, the argument will be made for limiting the range of the study largely to the confines of the respective nobilities of the two countries. In recent years a number of scholars of English royalism have sought to point the way towards the study of support for the Stuart kings at a popular level. While not decrying the usefulness of this approach within an English context, this book will nevertheless maintain that there is much less scope for the same to be done in Scotland and Ireland. From the outset Scottish and Irish nobles took up the running as the main driving force behind royalism in those two kingdoms.

Royalism in England

The act of constructing a bibliography of English royalism soon reveals the extent to which the subject was overlooked in the past and how there has been an upsurge in dedicated work in recent years. Up to the late 1970s the shortage of articles and monographs was particularly apparent. Scholars such as B.H.G. Wormald, P.H. Hardacre, David Underdown, Ian Roy, and J.W. Daly had produced a handful of important publications but this had barely scratched the surface of the movement.³ A fresh body of work did emerge in the late 1970s and 1980s from the pens of P.R. Newman, Joyce Lee Malcolm, and Ronald Hutton, mainly on aspects relating to royalist armies and strategy, but it could not hope to cover the movement as a whole.⁴ The 1990s saw the publication of important monographs and articles by David L. Smith and James Loxley (on constitutional royalism and royalist poetry respectively) as well as the continuation of the oeuvres of P.R Newman and Ian Roy⁵, but it was not until the following decade that the real surge of diverse new work occurred, much of it self-consciously aware of the manner in which royalism had been neglected in the past. This work has ranged from examinations of royalist literature, polemic, identity and print culture by Robert Wilcher, Jerome de Groot, Anthony Milton, Jason Peacey, and Jason McElligott, to analyses of the royalist spy networks and exile communities by Geoffrey Smith and Marika Keblusek.⁶ Capping this has been the appearance of a range of essays on royalism in two dedicated collections edited by Jason McElligott and David L. Smith, as well as important articles by David Scott (on royalist politics) and Anthony Milton (on Anglicanism and royalism) in John Adamson’s collection, The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640–49.⁷ All-in-all, the study of English royalism is now in a far more buoyant state than it has been in past decades.

Current debate among the new generation of scholars is very much focused on the need to move the study of the topic away from the kind of over-strict factional compartmentalisation of English Royalists that was so evident in works such as Ronald Hutton’s 1981 article, ‘The Structure of the Royalist Party, 1642–1646’, and David L. Smith’s 1994 monograph, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement. In the former Hutton sought to establish that two main factions of royalist supporters emerged during the Civil War: an extreme, or ‘ultra-royalist’ party on the one hand, and a moderate grouping on the other. He saw the ‘ultra-Royalists’ as genuine, first-generation supporters of the king who had only recently returned from exile on the continent and who advocated an aggressive war strategy designed to bring outright victory against Parliament. Prominent in this faction were Queen Henrietta Maria and courtiers such as George, lord Digby, Henry Jermyn and John Ashburnham. The moderate party included men such as Edward Hyde, Sir John Culpepper and Lucius Carey, viscount Falkland, all of whom had been one-time critics of crown policy but who by 1642 had come to accept that the king had done much to satisfy their concerns regarding the Constitution and the Church and that it was Parliament that was now beginning to present a radical danger. Nevertheless they advocated negotiation as the best way forward with a view to securing a settlement that eschewed the extremities that were being pushed for by the other parties.⁸

Smith’s analysis broadly followed Hutton’s. In his book he argued for the existence throughout the 1640s of a fixed group of moderate royalist counsellors who were united in advocating the need for a negotiated settlement to end the Civil War based upon the idea of a balanced constitution wherein royal discretionary powers should be preserved and in turn the king should be limited by the rule of law and should look to defend the Church of England and Protestant religion ‘by the law established’. Smith duly arrived at a list of ten leading ‘constitutional Royalists’ (headed by Hyde, Falkland and Culpepper) based on the criteria that they were prominent among the king’s advisers during the period 1641–42 when the latter engaged in making conciliatory approaches to the English Parliament, and that they later became heavily involved in (and strongly advocated) the peace negotiation process which took place sporadically between 1642 and 1648. They were also characterised by the fact that they had been opposed to crown policy prior to the Long Parliament of 1640 but had been satisfied that by mid-1641 Charles had gone a long way to address and satisfy their concerns. They regarded any further reform as a threat to the rule of law and the Church and from that point took the king’s part against Parliament.⁹

A number of criticisms have been levelled at the absolutist-constitutionalist dichotomy as it has been advocated by Hutton and Smith. Writing in 1984, J.W. Daly pointed out that Hutton had overlooked the extent to which feuds cut across the divisions within the movement, as well as the fact that at times there was little practical difference in the policies being advocated by members of the supposed opposing royalist factions.¹⁰ In his own earlier work Daly had been at pains to underline the moderate nature of the royalist movement as a whole during the 1640s. In his view spokesmen and publicists such as Hyde represented a mainstream of royalist opinion that sought to prove to the country that the king could be trusted to rule as a limited monarch and that he would stand by the settlement he had agreed to in 1641. Dissenters from this central position were deemed to have been the voices of a distinct and inconsequential minority.¹¹ Aspects of Smith’s study were criticised by Paul Seaward in a review article published in 1997. He noted that Smith had not considered several individuals who by the criteria used could conceivably have been included alongside the ten chosen ‘constitutional Royalists’. Like Daly, Seaward also questioned the extent to which there were any real differences between these men and other supporters of the king. In Seaward’s view, Smith’s formulation for ‘constitutional royalism’ largely emanates from what is known of the political thinking of Hyde; he can see little evidence to support the view that this precisely reflected the opinions of all moderate Royalists.¹²

Smith himself seems to have reached the conclusion that there are problems associated with retaining ‘constitutional royalism’ as a meaningful term of reference. In an introduction co-written with Jason McElligott for their 2007 collection of essays on royalism, it is asserted that the formulation is too broad and general; indeed, it would seem that very few Royalists (if any) actually opposed the idea of seeking to protect the ‘rule of law’ or the concept of a mixed constitution. As such, ‘constitutional royalism’ under the criteria devised by Smith can be seen as little more than an umbrella term that encompassed virtually the whole movement.¹³ David Scott seconds this motion in his 2009 essay entitled ‘Rethinking Royalist Politics, 1642–9’, and refers specifically to ‘the mirage of “constitutional royalism”’. He adds that it is also very hard to discern a solid ‘absolutist’ faction whose members consistently advocated nothing else but military victory, a victory which would allow Charles to rule without the limitations forced on him by Parliament. Scott also points out that a lack of consensus was evident among Hyde, Culpepper and Falkland (the leading ‘constitutional Royalists’) over the specifics of what the constitution actually was. Furthermore, they held differing views on key matters relating to the Church. He then g...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Dates
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Scottish and Irish Royalism in Context
• 2 Confronting the Covenant, 1638–1639
• 3 Royalist Defeat, 1639–1641
• 4 Ireland and the Royalist Cause, 1638–1642
• 5 Irish Royalism, 1643–1647
• 6 Scottish Royalism, 1642–1647
• 7 Scottish and Irish Royalism in Eclipse, 1647–1650
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index