Constitutional History of England, Henry VII to George II. Volume 2 of 3

by Henry Hallam

Miseries of the war.—It remained only, after the rupture of the treaty at Uxbridge, to try once more the fortune of war. The people, both in the king's and parliament's quarters, but especially the former, heard with dismay that peace could not be attained. Many of the perpetual skirmishes and captures of towns which made every man's life and fortune precarious, have found no place in general history; but may be traced in the journal of Whitelock, or in the Mercuries and other fugitive sheets, great numbers of which are still extant. And it will appear, I believe, from these that scarcely one county in England was exempt, at one time or other of the war, from becoming the scene of this unnatural contest. Compared indeed with the civil wars in France in the preceding century, there had been fewer acts of enormous cruelty, and less atrocious breaches of public faith. But much blood had been wantonly shed, and articles of capitulation had been very indifferently kept. "Either side," says Clarendon, "having somewhat to object to the other, the requisite honesty and justice of observing conditions was mutually, as it were by agreement, for a long time violated."[287] The royalist army, especially the cavalry, commanded by men either wholly unprincipled, or at least regardless of the people, and deeming them ill affected, the princes Rupert and Maurice, Goring and Wilmot, lived without restraint of law or military discipline, and committed every excess even in friendly quarters.[288] An ostentatious dissoluteness became characteristic of the cavalier, as a formal austerity was of the puritan; one spoiling his neighbour in the name of God, the other of the king. The parliament's troops were not quite free from these military vices, but displayed them in a much less scandalous degree, owing to their more religious habits and the influence of their presbyterian chaplains, to the better example of their commanders, and to the comparative, though not absolute, punctuality of their pay.[289] But this pay was raised through unheard-of assessments, especially an excise on liquors, a new name in England, and through the sequestration of the estates of all the king's adherents; resources of which he also had availed himself, partly by the rights of war, partly by the grant of his Oxford parliament.[290]

A war so calamitous seemed likely to endure till it had exhausted the nation. With all the parliament's superiority, they had yet to subdue nearly half the kingdom. The Scots had not advanced southward, content with reducing Newcastle and the rest of the northern counties. These they treated almost as hostile, without distinction of parties, not only exacting contributions, but committing, unless they are much belied, great excesses of indiscipline; their presbyterian gravity not having yet overcome the ancient national propensities.[291] In the midland and western parts the king had just the worse, without having sustained material loss; and another summer might pass away in marches and counter-marches, in skirmishes of cavalry, in tedious sieges of paltry fortifications, some of them mere country houses, which nothing but an amazing deficiency in that branch of military science could have rendered tenable.

Essex and Manchester suspected of lukewarmness.—This protraction of the war had long given rise to no unnatural discontent with its management, and to suspicions, first of Essex, then of Manchester and others in command, as if they were secretly reluctant to complete the triumph of their employers. It is indeed not impossible that both these peers, especially the former, out of their desire to see peace restored on terms compatible with some degree of authority in the Crown, and with the dignity of their own order, did not always press their advantages against the king, as if he had been a public enemy.[292] They might have thought that, having drawn the sword avowedly for the preservation of his person and dignity as much as for the rights and liberties of the people, they were no farther bound by their trust than to render him and his adherents sensible of the impracticability of refusing their terms of accommodation.

Self-denying ordinance.—There could however be no doubt that Fairfax and Cromwell were far superior, both by their own talents for war and the discipline they had introduced into their army, to the earlier parliamentary commanders, and that, as a military arrangement, the self-denying ordinance was judiciously conceived. This, which took from all members of both houses their commands in the army, or civil employments, was, as is well known, the first great victory of the independent party which had grown up lately in parliament under Vane and Cromwell.[293] They carried another measure of no less importance, collateral to the former; the new-modelling, as it was called, of the army; reducing it to twenty-one or twenty-two thousand men; discharging such officers and soldiers as were reckoned unfit, and completing their regiments by more select levies. The ordinance, after being once rejected by the Lords, passed their house with some modifications in April.[294] But many joined them on this occasion for those military reasons which I have mentioned, deeming almost any termination of the war better than its continuance. The king's rejection of their terms at Uxbridge had disgusted some of the more moderate men, such as the Earl of Northumberland and Pierrepont; who, deeming reconciliation impracticable, took from this time a different line of politics from that they had previously followed, and were either not alive to the danger of new-modelling the army, or willing to hope that it might be disbanded before that danger could become imminent. From Fairfax too, the new general, they saw little to fear and much to expect; while Cromwell, as a member of the House of Commons, was positively excluded by the ordinance itself. But, through a successful intrigue of his friends, this great man, already not less formidable to the presbyterian faction than to the royalists, was permitted to continue lieutenant-general.[295] The most popular justification for the self-denying ordinance, and yet perhaps its real condemnation, was soon found at Naseby; for there Fairfax and Cromwell triumphed not only over the king and the monarchy, but over the parliament and the nation.

It does not appear to me that a brave and prudent man, in the condition of Charles the First, had, up to that unfortunate day, any other alternative than a vigorous prosecution of the war, in hope of such decisive success as, though hardly within probable calculation, is not unprecedented in the changeful tide of fortune. I cannot therefore blame him either for refusing unreasonable terms of accommodation, or for not relinquishing altogether the contest. But, after his defeat at Naseby, his affairs were, in a military sense, so irretrievable that in prolonging the war with as much obstinacy as the broken state of his party would allow, he displayed a good deal of that indifference to the sufferings of the kingdom and of his own adherents, which has been sometimes imputed to him. There was, from the hour of that battle, one only safe and honourable course remaining. He justly abhorred to reign, if so it could be named, the slave of parliament, with the sacrifice of his conscience and his friends. But it was by no means necessary to reign at all. The sea was for many months open to him; in France, or still better in Holland, he would have found his misfortunes respected, and an asylum in that decent privacy which becomes an exiled sovereign. Those very hopes which he too fondly cherished, and which lured him to destruction, hopes of regaining power through the disunion of his enemies, might have been entertained with better reason, as with greater safety, in a foreign land. It is not perhaps very probable that he would have been restored; but his restoration in such circumstances seems less desperate than through any treaty that he could conclude in captivity at home.

Whether any such thoughts of abandoning a hopeless contest were ever entertained by the king during this particular period, it is impossible to pronounce; we should infer the contrary from all his actions. It must be said that many of his counsellors seem to have been as pertinacious as himself, having strongly imbibed the same sanguine spirit, and looking for deliverance, according to their several fancies, from the ambition of Cromwell or the discontent of the Scots. But, whatever might have been the king's disposition, he would not have dared to retire from England. That sinister domestic rule, to which he had so long been subject, controlled every action. Careless of her husband's happiness, and already attached probably to one whom she afterwards married, Henrietta longed only for his recovery of a power which would become her own.[296] Hence, while she constantly laid her injunctions on Charles never to concede anything as to the militia or the Irish catholics, she became desirous, when no other means presented itself, that he should sacrifice what was still nearer to his heart, the episcopal church-government. The queen-regent of France, whose sincerity in desiring the king's restoration there can be no ground to deny,[297] was equally persuaded that he could hope for it on no less painful conditions. They reasoned of course very plausibly from the great precedent of flexible consciences, the reconciliation of Henrietta's illustrious father to the catholic church. As he could neither have regained his royal power, nor restored peace to France without this compliance with his subjects' prejudices, so Charles could still less expect, in circumstances by no means so favourable, that he should avoid a concession, in the eyes of almost all men but himself, of incomparably less importance.

The king throws himself into the hands of the Scots.—It was in expectation of this sacrifice, that the French envoy, Montreuil, entered on his ill-starred negotiation for the king's taking shelter with the Scots army. And it must be confessed that several of his best friends were hardly less anxious that he should desert a church he could not protect.[298] They doubted not, reasoning from their own characters, that he would ultimately give way. But that Charles, unchangeably resolved on this head,[299] should have put himself in the power of men fully as bigoted as himself (if he really conceived that the Scots presbyterians would shed their blood to re-establish the prelacy they abhorred), was an additional proof of that delusion which made him fancy that no government could be established without his concurrence; unless indeed we should rather consider it as one of those desperate courses, into which he who can foresee nothing but evil from every calculable line of action will sometimes plunge at a venture, borrowing some ray of hope from the uncertainty of its consequences.[300]

It was an inevitable effect of this step, that the king surrendered his personal liberty, which he never afterwards recovered. Considering his situation, we may at first think the parliament tolerably moderate, in offering nearly the same terms of peace at Newcastle which he had rejected at Uxbridge; the chief difference being, that the power of the militia which had been demanded for commissioners nominated and removable by the two houses during an indefinite period, was now proposed to reside in the two houses for the space of twenty years; which rather more unequivocally indicated their design of making the parliament perpetual.[301] But in fact they had so abridged the royal prerogative by their former propositions, that, preserving the decent semblance of monarchy, scarce anything further could be exacted. The king's circumstances were however so altered that, by persisting in his refusal of those propositions, he excited a natural indignation at his obstinacy in men who felt their own right (the conqueror's right), to dictate terms at pleasure. Yet this might have had a nobler character of firmness, if during all the tedious parleys of the last three years of his life, he had not, by tardy and partial concessions, given up so much of that for which he contended, as rather to appear like a pedlar haggling for the best bargain, than a sovereign unalterably determined by conscience and public spirit. We must, however, forgive much to one placed in such unparalleled difficulties. Charles had to contend, during his unhappy residence at Newcastle, not merely with revolted subjects in the pride of conquest, and with bigoted priests, as blindly confident in one set of doubtful propositions as he was in the opposite, but with those he had trusted the most, and loved the dearest. We have in the Clarendon State Papers a series of letters from Paris, written, some by the queen, others jointly by Colepepper, Jermyn, and Ashburnham, or the two former, urging him to sacrifice episcopacy, as the necessary means of his restoration. We have the king's answers, that display, in an interesting manner, the struggles of his mind under this severe trial.[302] No candid reader, I think, can doubt that a serious sense of obligation was predominant in Charles's persevering fidelity to the English church. For, though he often alleges the incompatibility of presbyterianism with monarchy, and says very justly, "I am most confident that religion will much sooner regain the militia than the militia will religion,"[303] yet these arguments seem rather intended to weigh with those who slighted his scruples, than the paramount motives of his heart. He could hardly avoid perceiving that, as Colepepper told him in his rough style, the question was, whether he would choose to be a king of presbytery or no king. But the utmost length which he could prevail on himself to go was to offer the continuance of the presbyterian discipline, as established by the parliament, for three years, during which a conference of divines might be had, in order to bring about a settlement. Even this he would not propose without consulting two bishops, Juxon and Duppa, whether he could lawfully do so. They returned a very cautious answer, assenting to the proposition as a temporary measure, but plainly endeavouring to keep the king fixed in his adherence to the episcopal church.[304]