showed themselves increasingly prepared to defend the established Church and to support the King. Before the King could take advantage of this change in his fortunes, however, in October 1641 a rebellion broke out in Ireland, the third of his troublesome kingdoms, now released from Strafford’s firm rule; and the tide turned once more.
The rebellion, in which thousands of British settlers were massacred by native Irishmen, became known as the Queen’s Rebellion. For it was she, her enemies protested, who was behind it all, who was in secret correspondence with the Catholic Irish, who now dominated the conscience of the King and would persuade him to make use of the army, which would have to be raised for the suppression of the rebellion in Ireland, to crush opposition at home.
The Commons were determined to ensure that the King did not gain control of this army. Under pressure from Pym, they sent him a message demanding the dismissal of his present advisers and their replacement by Ministers who enjoyed the confidence of Parliament. They also sent him a petition, calling for the bishops to be denied their votes in the House of Lords, as well as their Grand Remonstrance, a critical document which, in two hundred clauses debated for weeks, set out their complaints and listed the grievances they intended to have redressed.
The King, insisting that he had no unworthy advisers – and commenting privately, ‘The Devil take him, whomsoever he be, that had a design to change religion’ – publicly replied that the Church of England had no need of the reforms for which the Commons pressed. Encouraged by reports of deep divisions in the Commons and believing he had the support of the House of Lords, he decided not merely to stand firm but to attack: he ordered firm action to be taken against the mobs parading the London streets and swarming about Westminster Hall shouting, ‘No Popery! No bishops! No popish Lords!’ He dismissed the Puritan Lieutenant of the Tower and replaced him with Captain Thomas Lunsford, a swashbuckling desperado who had, some years before, narrowly escaped being put on trial for murder and was said to roast the flesh of babies. The appointment of Lunsford to so important a post occasioned further tumults. There were renewed demonstrations against bishops in Westminster, where coaches were held up and roughly searched and their occupants questioned by rowdy gangs. John Williams, the Welsh-born Archbishop of York, collared an apprentice who was loudly shouting, ‘No bishops!’ and endeavoured to drag him into the Lords, but ‘the rest of the fellows came jostling in upon the Archbishop in such a rude manner that the Archbishop escaped very hardly with his life’.
Over the next few days there were violent clashes in Westminster Hall where Captain Lunsford and his swaggering Royalist friends, mostly unemployed army officers, marched up and down with drawn swords, threatening to ‘cut the throats of those roundheaded dogs that bawled against bishops’. There was trouble, too, around Westminster Abbey, where stones were hurled from the roof at a crowd of apprentices trying to break into the building to rescue some of their friends being held inside for questioning, and in Whitehall where there was fighting in the nearby streets in which several men were killed and wounded.
Although the King dismissed Lunsford, he continued to provoke his opponents. He appealed for volunteers for an expedition to Ireland; and, when the Commons impeached twelve bishops and were reported to be threatening to impeach the Queen, he ordered the arrest on vague but wide-ranging charges of Lord Mandeville, the Earl of Manchester’s son and the leading Puritan agitator in the House of Lords, and of five of the most vexatious Members of the House of Commons: Pym, Hampden, Denzil Holies and two men who had been most active in the proceedings against Strafford, William Strode, the young Member for Beeralston, and Sir Arthur Haselrig, a Leicestershire baronet, in the opinion of Edward Hyde an ‘absurd, bold man’, who was used as a stalking horse by his cleverer though less forceful colleagues.
To order the arrest of these men was a simple matter; to have them actually taken into custody was not, since the King could not get the order confirmed and the Commons refused to acknowledge its legality. The Queen and a young friend of hers, Lord Digby, son of the Earl of Bristol, urged the King to go down to the Commons with an armed guard and to arrest the men himself. ‘Go, you poltroon,’ the Queen is alleged to have cried out furiously when her husband hesitated to adopt so drastic a course. ‘Go and pull those rogues out by the ears, or never see my face again.’
She had made such threats before: she would go back to France, she had said, or retire to a convent if he would not show his enemies who was master of his kingdoms. Obediently he agreed to go. He kissed her and told her he would be back within the hour.
Sending a message to the Lord Mayor forbidding him to take any action in defence of Parliament, and calling upon the Inns of Court to have all lawyers and students capable of bearing arms ready to take action against his enemies, the King left in his coach on 4 January 1642 for New Palace Yard, accompanied by several courtiers, and followed by a crowd of excited Londoners wondering what was afoot, and by four hundred armed men described by a young lawyer whose sympathies lay with Parliament as ‘desperate soldiers, captains and commanders, papists, ill-affected persons, being men of no rank or quality…panders and rogues’. The King entered the House of Commons and, courteous as always, took off his hat as he walked towards the Speaker’s chair, nodding as he went to various silent Members whose faces he recognized.
‘Mr Speaker,’ he said, ‘By your leave, I must for a time make bold with your chair.’
He sat down, explained his presence, and asked for the five Members to come forward. There was no response. The House remained perfectly quiet.
‘Is Mr Pym here?’
Still there was silence. He turned to the Speaker, and repeated the question. The Speaker fell upon one knee before him and said, ‘Sire, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me.’
‘’Tis no matter. I think my eyes are good as another’s.’
The King looked along the benches; and at length was forced to admit his attempted coup, on which his whole future depended, had failed. ‘Well!’ he said with an air of reproach, ‘since I see all my birds have flown, I do expect that you will send them unto me as soon as they return hither.’
Having gone so far he was determined not to retreat, as convinced that these five men were at the heart of a conspiracy to undermine his authority as they and their supporters were convinced that the King had now shown himself in his true colours as a tyrant. Issuing a proclamation ordering the City to surrender the five Members who had sought sanctuary within its walls, he marched to the Guildhall himself to demand at a meeting of the Common Council that they should be handed over to him. His words were greeted with shouts of ‘Privileges of Parliament! Privileges of Parliament!’ to which he responded, ‘No privileges can protect a traitor from legal trial!’
He returned to Whitehall, his coach surrounded by people shaking their fists at him as they shouted abuse through the windows, and by others no less loudly crying out, ‘God bless the King!’ and cursing ‘that rogue’ Pym. One of these averred that he ‘would go twenty miles to see Mr Pym hanged and would then cut off a piece of Mr Pym’s flesh to wear about him in remembrance of him’.
London was now in uproar. Shops had closed their doors; people had come out into the streets in their thousands; women collected stones to throw at soldiers who might be sent into the City to drag out the five Members variously reported to be in hiding in Coleman Street, Cornhill or Red Lion Court; stools and tables were thrown into the roadway to hinder approaching horsemen; Royalists, who a few days before had been chasing citizens about Westminster with their swords, now prudently chose to stay indoors. Rumours flew from mouth to mouth: the King’s supporters were going to launch an attack on the City and planned to hang Mr Pym outside the Royal Exchange. Barricades were erected, chains pulled across the streets, cannon dragged towards crossroads, cauldrons taken to the top of buildings so that boiling water could be poured down upon the heads of advancing troops. The Inns of Court regiments declared their support of the House of Commons, as the government of the City had already done. Volunteers poured into the City to offer their services in its defence, apprentices from the brickfields at Bethnal Green and Spitalfields, iron workers from Southwark, watermen from Bermondsey and Shoreditch, silk workers from Spitalfields. The houses of Roman Catholics were attacked.
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