The English Civil War

Conflict and Contexts, 1640-49

John Adamson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781350306905
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica

John Adamson provides a new synthesis of current research on the political crisis that engulfed England in the 1640s. Drawing on new archival findings and challenging current orthodoxies, these essays by leading historians offer a variety of original perspectives, locating English events firmly within a 'three kingdoms' context.

1. Rethinking Royalist Politics, 1642–9

DAVID SCOTT

The Royalists are the Cinderella of mid-seventeenth century history. They are largely overlooked by the exponents of the ‘New British History’, and look like being bypassed once again in the current rush of interest in the Civil-War ‘public sphere’. True, the Royalists remain one of the few groups in the Civil War that most of the public have actually heard of, if only as one half of the double-act of ‘Cavaliers and Roundheads’. But among historians ‘the king’s party’ is unfashionable, and royalist politics – particularly at the top end of the social scale – even more so. There have been several recent studies of royalist literature and propaganda (though few convincingly bridge the gap between political theory and practice);¹ David Underdown and Mark Stoyle have injected new life into the study of popular Royalism;² and the Sealed Knot and other battle re-enactment societies sustain a small but lively market in royalist military history.³ But virtually all we have in the way of recent published work on royalist high politics is a few articles by Ronald Hutton and James Daly in the 1970s and 1980s, occasional, though illuminating, pieces by Ian Roy, and a ten-year-old monograph by David Smith.⁴ One recent miscellany of essays devoted to ‘Royalism’ actually derides the study of court politics during the 1640.⁵ No historian has focused specifically on the king, his supporters, his court, and his camp during the period from the collapse of the Personal Rule to the regicide. Analysis of royalist factions is in a similarly primitive state. As yet, no attempt has been made to trace the connections between the ‘ultras’, ‘moderates’, ‘swordsmen’ or any of the other royalist factions that have been identified in the early 1640s with David Underdown’s ‘Louvre party’ and ‘Old Royalists’ of the 1650s.⁶ Our picture of the three Stuart kingdoms during the 1640s cannot but be flawed while one whole section of the tableau remains virtually blank.

Why this neglect of the Royalists? Is it because, as Hutton and others have suggested, so much royalist documentation was burned by its owners at the end of the war as to make it very difficult to say anything definitive about the structure of the king’s party?⁷ There is certainly something in this. Clearly we lack the mass of material on the workings of the central and local government under the king that we possess for the Parliamentarians. On the other hand, we have more private correspondence for the royalist grandees (that is, the most influential men around the king and queen),⁸ particularly after 1644 when they scattered to the four winds, than for their parliamentarian counterparts, who were mostly living cheek by jowl in London and rarely needed to communicate by paper. But perhaps the main reason for the dearth of research on the Royalists is simply the fact that they lost – and not just the first Civil War but the second as well. The Royalists were two-time losers, and their defeats gave force to the arguments of S. R. Gardiner and other Whig historians that England’s advance to constitutional maturity under Victoria was a legacy of the parliamentarian victory. From this teleological perspective, the Royalists were not just on the wrong side of the war, they were on the wrong side of History. Until recently, most studies of the 1640s were premised on the need to explain the English Revolution, in which the Royalists’ role was merely that of obstacles in the path of the juggernaut. To explain why the Parliamentarians won was at one and the same time to explain why the Royalists lost.

This teleological approach to the 1640s may have lost much of its force, but it lingers on in the tendency to regard the Royalists as (in the words of 1066 and All That) ‘Wrong but Wromantic’.⁹ The effect is to lend a distinctly Whiggish feel to the way we look at Royalism. There is a preoccupation with personality, as if the Royalists failed partly through want of ‘character’;¹⁰ and a corresponding neglect of royalist wartime institutions – from the royal court to the Parliament that the king summoned to meet at Oxford in 1644.¹¹ Intrigue and factionalism at court are often attributed to short-sighted and selfish motives, rather than a desire for power in order to shape and implement policy. Above all, there is the continuing predilection when discussing Royalism for historians to employ curiously nineteenth-century terms like ‘Constitutional Royalism’.

I FALSE TAXONOMIES: THE MIRAGE OF ‘CONSTITUTIONAL ROYALISM’

In the writing on Civil War loyalties since the 1640s, ‘Constitutional Royalism’ is actually a recent invention. The great Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay coined the phrase ‘constitutional royalist’, but he applied it sparingly, and it did not catch on with his successors. Brian Wormald in his 1951 case-study of Sir Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, referred to the ‘so-called Constitutional Royalists’.¹² However, as this construction suggests, he found the term unsatisfactory, and particularly so with reference to Hyde himself. The historian who identified Constitutional Royalism as a distinct political theory, and constructed a royalist faction around it, is David L. Smith. In Smith’s account, the Constitutional Royalists were those leading figures within the king’s party whose support for a negotiated settlement amounted to a ‘knee-jerk reflex’; its leading figures were the Duke of Richmond, the Marquess of Hertford, the Earls of Southampton, Lindsey, and Dorset, Viscount Falkland, Sir John Culpeper, Sir Edward Hyde, and a few others.¹³ Smith sums up their credo as a belief ‘that royal powers should be guided and limited by the rule of law . . . a respect for Parliament’s place in the constitution . . . a defence of the existing Church of England and Protestant religion “by law established” . . . [and] a wish to preserve . . . royal discretionary powers’.¹⁴

Perhaps the most obvious problem with this formulation is its vagueness – not to say its potential for internal contradiction, as the king’s discretionary powers could (and had) been exercised in ways that many considered at variance with the rule of law. To conceive of the ‘ancient constitution’,¹⁵ and by extension royalist constitutionalism, in such broad terms is to render it virtually useless as a reference point for factional alignments within the king’s party; for one would be hard-pushed to find Royalists who did not believe in the ‘rule of law’ or respect ‘Parliament’s place in the constitution’. This is what George Lord Digby, often portrayed as the most unconstitutionalist of the royalist grandees, had to say on such matters:

The truth is . . . the Kings of England are never in their glory, in their splendor, in their Majestique Soveraignty, but in Parliaments. Where is the power of imposing Taxes? Where is the power of restoring from incapacites [sic]? Where is the legislative Authority? Marry in the King. . . . But how? in the King circled in, fortified and evirtuated [sic] by his Parliament. The King out of Parliament hath a limited, a circumscribed Jurisdiction. But wayted on by his Parliament, no Monarch of the East is so absolute in dispelling Grievances.¹⁶

We face a conundrum. If even Digby – the most politique of the royalist grandees – recognized the fundamentals of the ancient constitution, it is hard to see how a ‘constitutionalist’ outlook has any use as a factional label. And yet to employ a tighter definition of the ancient constitution may be equally self-defeating. As Glen Burgess has recently argued, early Stuart England had no constitution in the sense of a blueprint, or set of first principles, for governing. The ‘constitution’ was ‘the complete set of laws, prerogatives and rights, and the polity they defined. The constitution had no existence, no formulation, apart from its specifics.’¹⁷ Consequently, no two Royalists (or Parliamentarians for that matter) ordered and interpreted this mass of specifics in exactly the same way.¹⁸ The ancient constitution was therefore at once too broad, and too narrow, a platform for factional organization.

This lack of consensus on constitutional details even afflicted the three men generally regarded as the ‘leading theorists’ of Constitutional Royalism – Viscount Falkland, Sir John Culpeper, and Sir Edward Hyde.¹⁹ Their disagreement over the king’s answer to the Nineteen Propositions (Parliament’s eve-of-war ultimatum of 1642), and whether Charles was one of or superior to the three estates of the realm, is well known.²⁰ But they also disagreed on another supposed tenet of Constitutional Royalism – the maintenance of ‘the Church by law established’ as an integral part of the government of England.²¹ Hyde, in his own words, ‘did really believe the church of England the most exactly formed and framed for the encouragement and advancement of learning and piety, and for the preservation of peace, of any church in the world’.²² He reverenced the Church of England not only as a necessary part of the political establishment, and an instrument of good government, but also because ‘its politics encouraged the virtues, the good order, learning, and decency, that God intended for man’.²³

But contrast his position with that of his friend Viscount Falkland. Falkland had ‘a better opinion of the church of England, and the religion of it, than of any other church and religion. . . . But he had in his own judgement such a latitude in opinion, that he did not believe any part of the order of government of it to be so essentially necessary to religion, but that it might be parted with, and altered, for a notable public benefit or convenience.’²⁴ In other words, he thought that episcopacy – government of the church by bishops – should be retained, but not at the expense of achieving a lasting peace. Sir John Culpeper (appointed Master of the Rolls at Oxford early in 1643) took an even more pragmatic line, being ‘very indifferent’ in matters of religion, ‘but more inclined to what was established, to avoid the accidents which commonly attended a change’.²⁵ Culpeper, a ‘true politique’, favoured episcopacy on grounds of political expediency, and once it had become inexpedient to do so (as it had by 1646) he was willing to endorse Presbyterianism for much the same reason.²⁶ Culpeper had spent some of his youth in military service abroad, and ‘like a tall sword-man’ he was quick to take and give offence.²⁷ True to his irascible nature, he put his faith in force or the threat of force, not in laws and constitutions;²⁸ and it is perhaps not surprising therefore that one of the most serious rivalries at Oxford was between him and the pompous, lawyerly Hyde.²⁹ During 1643, Culpeper made several attempts to block Hyde’s preferment at court and, with John Ashburnham (Treasurer of the King’s Army and a Groom of the Bedchamber), to encroach on his office as Chancellor of the Exchequer.³⁰ The resulting ‘jealousy or coldness’ between the two men poisoned their relationship for years.³¹ Moreover, what is often cited as evidence of Culpeper’s irenic disposition – his call for peace negotiations at the opening of the Oxford Parliament in January 1644³² – looks on closer inspection more like that time-honoured courtier tactic of using Parliament as a platform from which to attack his rivals. Thus he made purging the court and camp of Catholics and those, such as Digby, who had been declared traitors by Westminster the crux of his ‘peace initiative’.³³ As he probably predicted, his demand for the removal of highly-placed Catholics was taken up by the lower House, although ultimately to little effect.

And if Culpeper’s ‘constitutionalist’ credentials are suspect, then those of the Duke of Richmond are non-existent. A cousin of the king and the highest-ranking figure at court after princes Rupert and Maurice, Richmond ‘was of a great and haughty spirit, and so punctual in point of honour that he never swerved a tittle’.³⁴ He was apparently hostile to the Long Parliament’s attack on the Personal Rule – with which ‘Constitutionalists’ were supposed to have been broadly in sympathy.³⁵ More to the point, he and another alleged ‘Constitutionalist’, the Earl of Lindsey, were devoted supporters of the figure widely regarded as the most hard-line royalist opponent of peace talks during the early years of the war, Prince Rupert, which is hard to reconcile with enthusiasm for a negotiated settlement.³⁶

The argument for the existence of a coherent constitutionalist party is questionable in other ways. For example, there seems to have been no necessary connection between reverence for the ancient constitution and the advocacy of peace negotiations with the Parliamentarians, based on a genuine desire for compromise. As the case of Hyde demonstrates only too clearly, adherence to the ancient constitution and the common law as the touchstones of political action – rather than helping to bridge the distance between Royalists and Parliamentarians – could actually militate against the king offering the kind of generous concessions that would have been necessary if an irresistibl...