Many historians have seen the growth of royal power after 1500 as the dawn of the modern state, as if the process was natural and even desirable.  But the new royal power was very precarious.  If things went against the king for too
long, if he lost his wars or went too deeply into debt, its former allies in the nobility and the financial community would turn against him; those whose privileges he had trampled on would reassert them; and religious malcontents would agitate for a change in policy.  So we do not see the kings and princes of the 16th century moving from success to success; there
were many serious revolts and religious wars, from the Peasants' War in Germany to the revolt of the Netherlands.

The same story continued into the 17th century.    Usually monarchs recovered, and most continental countries were saddled with an absolutist government by 1650 or so.  But sometimes centralization was resisted.  The most interesting example of at
least partially successful resistance comes from England in this period.

The Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the Republican regime under Cromwell, and the eventual restoration of the Stuart dynasty all impinge directly on our own political heritage, and how we visualize it.   The history of 17th century England is interesting and important enough that we will spend four lectures on it.

Our first one will look at the lead up to the Civil War.

The year 1603 will serve as a convenient beginning for our story.  In that year Queen Elizabeth I died, and at the last moment named as her successor her Scottish cousin, James VI.  James, a man approaching middle age, was, in the words of a recent historian, "lumpish and lazy, foul-mouthed and not overly clean." [Lacy Baldwin Smith, p. 181]  He was also a well-educated but pedantic man who earned the soubriquet "The Wisest Fool in Christendom," and used his learning chiefly to promote his own royal status, his religious ideas, and witch-hunting.  But the English political class was glad to get him anyway.  A dynastic union with Scotland (both countries would have the same king, but no other common institutions) would guarantee that their northern neighbor would not ally itself with a continental enemy; also Scotland was so small and poor that England need
not fear foreign domination.  And James was safely Protestant.  Since the 1560s, Scotland had had a Calvinist church organized on Presbyterian lines.

James himself was overjoyed to have the English throne. English monarchs were far richer and more powerful than Scottish ones. Once James left Edinburgh for London, he hardly ever went back.

Yet  the Crown of England was financially strapped.  Elizabeth's war with Spain (which had not yet ended) and the reconquest of Ireland had left a debt of 473,000 pounds, compared to an annual income of less than a million pounds.   Unlike his continental contemporaries, James had no power to tax his English subjects without the consent of the greater nobles
(the peers in the House of Lords) and the lesser nobles (the untitled gentry in the House of Commons).  Nor did he have a hierarchy of royal officials in the local communities enthusiastic to promote the centralist cause.  The same gentry that sat in Parliament also served as local justices of the peace, sheriffs and so forth.  They could not be used to force money out of their neighbors.

James best tactic would have been to buy off his nobility with a lucrative war, which also would have been an excuse to raise taxes.  But England had no standing army and James had no capital to build one.  And there was no suitable enemy.  The English gentry of this period were always willing to fight Spain, but James saw that Spain outclassed his realms in every possible way: so he made peace and maintained an unpopular Spanish alliance while looking for other methods of raising money.

He did not have much luck.  Worse, he got the backs of his English gentry up by trying loosen Parliament's control over the royal pursestrings.  On his own authority he raised the customs rates.  This incident and a royal attempt to manipulate parliamentary elections roused the suspicions of the landowning class.    James himself took parliamentary criticism very badly.  The mutual distrust made it impossible for James and his richest subjects to work together.  A constant low level of irritation was the result.

Nonetheless, England stumbled through the rest of James's reign with no major crises.  When James's son Charles I succeeded in early 1625, however, the political atmosphere quickly soured.  At the end of James's life, he had gained a burst of public approval by agreeing to declare war on Spain.  This was a popular policy because it lent English support for the Protestant side in the Thirty Years' War, and English hatred of foreign popery was as high as ever.  James was lucky to die when he did.  Everybody wanted to fight, but no one wanted to pay the necessary taxes.   King Charles and his favorite minister, the Duke of
Buckingham, acquired the odium of raising and wasting a lot of revenue in an unsuccessful war.

A couple of big mistakes severely injured royal prestige.  King Charles had recently married a French princess, Henrietta Maria, and in 1625 he invested her large dowry in an amphibious expedition against the Spanish port of Cadiz.  Instead of profit, he got disaster.  Charles nearly went bankrupt, and had to call a parliament to ask for funds.

The members of the Commons demanded a change in the royal council before they granted any money. They wanted Buckingham impeached and executed for corruption.   Charles, to save his minister, dissolved parliament, before any taxes were agreed to.

Charles raised the money he needed by collecting customs on his own authority and forcing important men to lend him money.  Seventy who were brave enough to refuse were imprisoned.  When five of them challenged the king's right to imprison them arbitrarily, since it violated habeas corpus, they were told by royal judges that the king's special command was reason enough to send them to prison.

This hardline royal policy was undermined in 1627 by another of Buckingham's foreign policy disasters.  While war with Spain continued, he got England involved in a war against France, too.  In 1628, another Parliament had to be called to pay the bills.  This parliament required the king to assent to a Petition of Right, which guaranteed that he would never force loans, raise revenue illegally or imprison men arbitrarily again.

But when the Commons tried to get Buckingham dismissed, Parliament was dissolved again.  Soon thereafter, Buckingham was assassinated by a man who disapproved of his religious policies.  Charles blamed his opponents in the Commons for inspiring this act.  When the next year's parliament assembled, Charles got no cooperation once more.  Charles dissolved Parliament with the evident resolution of never calling another.  He found a new set of advisors to replace Buckingham and decided to govern without recourse to the political nation.  He, like the French and Spanish governments of same period, was going to unify and reform the nation through the exercise of the royal prerogative.

For eleven years, from 1629 to 1640, Charles's government followed an unpopular but not disastrous policy.  The king's new chief minister, the Earl of Strafford, worked systematically to build royal power and independence.  He found new sources
of income that made it possible to do without parliamentary subsidies.

The most costly (or lucrative) new tax was ship money.  This was traditionally an emergency tax on coastal districts meant for maintaining the fleet.  In 1634 Charles declared a state of naval emergency; two years later he extended it to inland districts.  After that he levied it on an annual basis.  This non-parliamentary extraordinary tax eventually sparked wide resistance.

Arbitrary taxation and the waste of much of the money by corruption at court made the king's personal rule unpopular; but this would probably never have brought on a civil war by itself.  It took another element to make an explosive mixture:  and that was religion.

In the later years of Elizabeth and during the reign of James, something of a Calvinist religious consensus had grown up in England.    Even archbishops felt that ceremonies and episcopacy itself were popish remnants that would eventually be phased out.

Charles, from early in his reign, had different ideas.  Both he and Buckingham were attracted to Arminianism, a doctrine out of
Holland that rejected predestination.  Charles, Buckingham, and William Laud, later archbishop of Canterbury, felt that Arminianism allowed a return to a more sacramental church, one in which ritual beauty and episcopal dignity would have their place.  During Charles's reign bishops willing to move in this direction were slowly installed, while Calvinist preachers were harassed.

This return to sacramentalism was opposed by the vast majority of Charles's subjects.  To them abandonment of predestination, the reinstitution of altars and vestments, and the emphasis on the divine right of bishops to rule the church, all typical of Laud's policy, were a big step towards popery, which most English people associated with sedition (as in Guy Fawkes's attempt to blow up Parliament in James's reign) and foreign aggression (as in the Armada).

Indeed many people were convinced that Charles's court was full of secret Catholics.  This was not an irrational belief.  The Queen, being French, was a Catholic; prominent English people attended mass in her chapel or the private chapels of ambassadors from Catholic countries.

Finally, Charles's foreign policy was now as pro-Spanish as his father's had been, despite the fact that Spain was still
fighting Protestant princes in the continuing Thirty Years' War.  The more determined Puritans fled to Massachusetts, and waited for God's wrath to fall on England.  Most others simply simmered angrily.

It was Arminianism that brought on the great crisis of Charles's reign.  The crisis did not break in England, but in Scotland.  The ministers there ignored the bishops and ruled the church through assemblies of presbyters, a form of government both James and Charles had always found far too democratic.

The attempt to reintroduce the prayer book of Edward VI's time (after all these years it looked more Catholic than Protestant) was unpopular in much of England; it caused a riot in the cathedral when it was imposed on the people of Edinburgh in 1637.  In the next year, 1638, large numbers of Scots signed a national covenant to resist the king's policy, and the General Assembly of the church abolished episcopacy and banned the new prayer book.  Though there was no direct attack on the king's position, it was a revolutionary rejection of his authority over the church.

Charles mustered an English army and sent it north to whip the Scots into line.  But the campaign merely showed his weakness.  There was no money, since resistance to Ship Money was growing, and no support in the south for imposing popery on Protestant neighbors.  The army signed a truce with their opponents without firing a shot.  To recover the situation, Charles recalled parliament in hopes of getting funds needed for a serious war.

The two parliaments of 1640 did nothing to bail Charles out.  All the resentment of eleven years of arbitrary rule, of drift towards popery, of the harassment of good protestant preachers boiled over.  The first parliament of the year was so rowdy that it was dissolved almost immediately.  It was called the Short Parliament.  But then the Scots, provoked by Charles, invaded England and forced him to pay daily blackmail (850 pounds) not to march on London.  To get the money, another parliament
was called, which became known as the Long Parliament.  It sat for thirteen years, made war on the king, and eventually executed him.

War was not in the minds of the MPs and Lords who made up the Long Parliament when they first met.   But the Parliamentarians were determined on a complete purge of church and state. In the traditional way, Parliament attacked the king's policies and his ministers.  Archbishop Laud was condemned to death for treason, as was the Earl of Strafford, who had offered to raise an army in Ireland to crush the king's opponents.  Mob violence in the streets of London convinced the king to sign the death warrants.

Beyond this, however, he was less willing to go.  Charles approved a bill that would force him to call a parliament every three years, and allow one to assemble independently if he did not; he also allowed church courts to be abolished.  But he became stubborn when the Commons began to agitate against episcopacy.  Laud's Arminian bishops had turned many people against
the whole idea of bishops, and many MPs wanted to institute a Presbyterian system.  The Scots supported them.  Charles's resistance to this radical reform (he was supported by many of the lay peers in the House of Lords) inflamed the old suspicions that he was a crypto-Catholic, and there were even threats by the Commons to try his Catholic queen for treason.

Perhaps some kind of arrangement might have been worked out, if there had not been another foreign policy emergency in the fall of 1641.  A Catholic revolt broke out in Ireland, and there were rumors that 30,000 Protestants had been massacred.  An army would have to be raised to put this rebellion down.  But who was to control it?  Traditionally military leadership was the core of the king's prerogative.  But, remembering Strafford's threat to use Irish troops against parliament, and Charles's
favor toward Catholics and semi-Catholics, could Parliament trust him to raise a new army?  The majority of MPs and lay peers did not feel they could.

Charles showed that they were right:  in January of 1642, Charles, defending the rights of his bishops, broke into the House of Commons and tried to arrest five leading members.  His failure to find those MPs made him look foolish as well as tyrannical and he fled from London.

Parliament proceeded to more radical measures:  they excluded the bishops from the House of Lords; Charles signed that bill.  Then they passed a Militia Ordinance  that transferred control of the army and navy to Lords Lieutenant appointed by Parliament.  Charles refused to sign that one.

War was just a breath away.  There was really no room for compromise, just surrender by one side or the other.  Parliament called upon Charles to give over effective control of the government to them; he refused, and on August 22, 1642, raised his standard at Nottingham and called on all loyal men to support his cause.  The great Civil War was on.

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.