Overworked, fussy, unimaginative and outspoken, sometimes irritable and often rude, William Laud had made many enemies. He was scholarly and devout, withdrawing seven times a day, however pressing his business, to kneel in prayer; yet those who had seen the eyes in his alert, flushed face flash with sudden and alarming anger, who had been shouted down by him in argument, who had suffered at his hands in the Star Chamber or in the Court of High Commission, had good cause to fear and dislike him.
To him Puritans were like wolves ‘to be held by the ears’; and, while introducing measures which effectively reduced the number of those who propounded what he took to be their heretical doctrines, he appointed to vacant sees bishops who were prepared to endorse his own and the King’s views on conformity, the use of the Prayer Book, surplices and organs, the proper position of the communion table as an altar at the east end of the church rather than as a mere slab of wood in the middle, the need to make services more reverent and churches more beautiful. ‘It is called superstition nowadays’, he once indignantly complained, ‘for any man to come with more reverence into a church than a tinker and a dog into an ale-house.’
Very insular in his outlook, he set great store by the Englishness of the established Church which was beginning to be called Anglican, the Church which had kept itself free from the deviations of the medieval popes, which remained the true Church of Christendom, which must be steered in that ‘middle way’, as the King described it, ‘between the pomp of superstitious tyranny and the meanness of fantastick anarchy’.
This view of the meaning and importance of the English Church offended both Catholic and Puritan, yet it could not be said that the jointly held views of the King and Archbishop were imposed upon a wholly antagonistic people: there was much in ‘Laudism’, and not only its nationalistic overtones, which appealed strongly to all classes. While enemies of the established Church ranted against bishops, many parishes presented petitions in support of them and later organized demonstrations in favour of altar rails and organs. Indeed, during these eleven years when the King ruled the country without reference to Parliament, there were numerous people to be found who believed the country in general, as well as the Church in particular, was set upon a fair and encouraging course. New roads were being built and old ones improved, canals dug and swamps drained; a postal service was started; attempts were made to improve local government and to find work for the unemployed. The country was prosperous and remained at peace. Edward Hyde went so far as to suggest that in 1639 ‘England enjoyed the greatest measure of felicity it had ever known. But then,’ Hyde continued, ‘in the midst of this scene of happiness and plenty, a small, scarce discernible cloud arose in the North, which was shortly after attended with such a storm, that even rooted up the greatest and tallest cedars of [the country]; blasted all its beauty and fruitfulness; brought its strength to decay, and its glory to reproach.’
‘Lord, what work was here! What clattering of glasses! What beating down of walls! What tearing up of monuments! What tooting and piping on the destroyed organ pipes!’
Bishop Joseph Hall
The distant rumblings of the storm had first been heard in Scotland, where the King had offended not only the nobility by taking back into royal hands estates which had once belonged to the Crown and had since been alienated, but also the Presbyterian congregations of the Kirk by his evident determination to impose upon them the popish practices of the detested Englishman, William Laud. When a new prayer book designed upon Anglican lines was introduced there was a riot in St Giles’s Cathedral in Edinburgh, and a bishop suspected of concealing a crucifix beneath his vestments was chased through the streets by a mob of three hundred angry women. A representative of the King’s Government in Edinburgh, who ran to the bishop’s assistance and was himself attacked, reported to London that the King must choose between abandoning his prayer book and forcing it down the Presbyterians’ throats with the help of a well-equipped army of forty thousand men. The Marquess of Hamilton, the King’s Commissioner in Scotland, warned the King that his countrymen were ‘possessed by the Devil’, and that if his Majesty used his army in this way he would not only provoke rebellion in England but risk the Crown in his other two kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland as well.
In defiance of this prescient advice, an English army was raised; but, far from being the powerful force recommended, it was a tawdry array of discontented raw recruits, special levies, trained bands and militia, neither inspired by their cause nor encouraged by the prospects of good pay, whereas the army raised by the Scots, fired by patriotism and religious faith and commanded by a wily, though barely literate old professional soldier, Alexander Leslie, was largely composed of clansmen trained to battle and troops experienced in Continental warfare, backed up by hundreds of men and women ready to fight on the barricades with knives and pitchforks in defence of a National Covenant which, signed by all classes, pledged resistance to ‘papistry’.
The English army which the King in person led against the Scottish rebels in March 1639 was numerous enough, being over twenty thousand strong. Yet, apart from the regiments raised in those far northern areas where men were always ready to fight their traditional enemies across the border, the rank and file remained dispirited and their equipment so limited and primitive that many of the trained bands had to make do with bows and arrows until supplied with pikes which proved inadequate. ‘Our army is but weak,’ lamented Edmund Verney, Knight Marshal of the King’s Palace, ‘our purse is weaker; and if we fight with these forces…we shall have our throats cut.’ Sir Jacob Astley, the King’s Sergeant-Major recalled from retirement to command the infantry, felt obliged to concur. ‘Our men are very raw,’ he reported, ‘our arms of all sorts naught, our victuals scarce, and provisions for horses worse.’ The Earl of Essex, another veteran of Continental wars and for a time commander of the cavalry, was no more confident of success; nor was that charming courtier and ‘wooing ambassador’ Lord Kensington, recently created first Earl of Holland, whom the King was unwisely persuaded to put in Essex’s place by Holland’s friend, the Queen; nor were the regimental commanders, many of whom resented the King’s having resorted to an ancient and, for them, most inconvenient tradition by calling upon his tenants-in-chief to attend upon him with an appropriate number of men. ‘We have had a most cold, wet and long time of living in the field,’ wrote Thomas Windebank, one of the many sons of the King’s Secretary of State, Sir Francis Windebank, when the war was over, ‘but kept ourselves warm with the hope of rubbing, fubbing and scrubbing those scurvy, filthy, dirty, nasty, lousy, itchy, scabby, shitten, stinking, slovenly, snottynosed, logger-headed, foolish, insolent, proud, beggarly, impertinent, absurd, grout-headed [daft], villainous, barbarous, beastial, false, lying, roguish, devilish, long-eared, short-haired, damnable, atheistical, puritanical crew of the Scottish Covenant.’
As the Scottish rebel army advanced purposefully towards the border, the English forces began to crumble away; and at Berwick in June the King, who – always reluctant to recognize that his authority was limited by what it was possible to achieve – had declared that he would ‘rather dye than yield to these impertinent and damnable demands’ of the Scots, was now obliged to come to terms and to agree to a meeting of a General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and to the election of a Scottish Parliament to negotiate a peace. The differences between the two sides, however, particularly on the question of bishops, were too marked for settlement. The Scottish Parliament was adjourned and war seemed inevitable once more.
Thomas Wentworth, soon to be created Earl of Strafford, came over from Ireland to give his advice in 1639. The King’s principal Secretary of State at this time was Sir Henry Vane, an assiduous courtier of the Queen, a ‘busy and bustling man’, smooth, cunning, evasive and equivocal. His views, when he could be prevailed upon to express them, contrasted sharply with those of the Earl of Strafford, whom he much disliked and by whom he was much distrusted in turn. It was Strafford’s opinion that prompt, vigorous and if necessary ruthless action was essential. For far too long the government of the country had been drifting