Cavaliers and Roundheads: The English Civil Wars

Today we have a slightly different kind of show -- literary analysis takes a bit of a back seat to historical context.  We'll look at the turbulent period between 1625 and 1660, when England went to war with itself over the roles of the monarchy and of Parliament.  We'll look at primary historical documents as well as a little poetry to get a sense of the state of the nation as it begins its rise to a world power.

Transcript

Hello, hello, everybody!  I hope you’re doing marvellously well.  Thank you for joining me here on The Classic English Literature Podcast.  Last time out – here on the main stream anyway – we looked at a group of writers often called the Cavalier Poets because their poems were light and sensual and because they were supporters of King Charles I, whose view of divine kingship defied the restrictions of Parliament.  In that episode, I gave a quick and dirty on the civil war that resulted from those tensions, but only enough to contextualize the poetry composed from the 1620s through the 1640s.  On this episode, I’d like to go a little deeper into the history of the English Civil Wars and the English Commonwealth, looking at some primary documents in those events.

Before we shoulder our pikes and march off, let me remind you to like, follow, and subscribe to the Classic English Literature Podcast on your favorite podcatcher.  You can also send me a text right from the episode page, so feel free to get in touch with any comments or questions you have.  You can also hook up with me on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube if you’re into the antisocial media.

And now, off to the wars!

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I find it always helpful to begin at the beginning, so allow me to point out that Charles Stuart ascended the throne in 1625, upon the death of his father, James I and VI.  Unlike his father, however, the new king lacked both a powerful intellect and any charisma.  That he had a speech impediment probably inflected public perception.  On the other hand, he had a connoisseur’s eye, and started the magnificent royal collection of art, sponsored Inigo Jones’ architectural innovations, and put on multitudinous court masques (little plays with elaborate costumes and scenery) for his queen, Henrietta Maria, to act in.  Many of these, by the by, were written by Ben Jonson.

While we may wish to raise three huzzahs for Charles’ cultural sophistication, putting on expensive theater productions to indulge a spoiled queen hardly endears a monarch to the people whose taxes fund these aristocratic soirees.  Especially since the theme of many of these masques was the divine majesty of the king.  

On the theme of divine right, Charles elevated the ambitious William Laud to Bishop of London and finally Archbishop of Canterbury.  Laud was a vocal apologist for divine right monarchy, arguing that since the king is God’s Anointed, his will could never be questioned.  To make the matter most clear, Laud invited himself to educate Parliament on its vestigial status.  I am certain they listened charitably.  Parliament also gave the king’s favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, the hairy eyeball, certain that his undue influence with Charles was to their detriment.

And, truth be told, Parliament was still in a bit of a snit over tussling with James and so were hardly disposed to indulge his thick and wilful son.  They decided against giving him customs duties for life – traditionally a good part of a monarch’s income – instead allowing them for only one year.  Furthermore, he would have to give Buckingham the boot and consent to be advised by Parliament rather than aristocratic insiders.

“Pish, posh!” I imagine Charles saying.  Rather than negotiate, the insulted king took his ball and went home – that is, he dissolved Parliament.  Spoiler alert: he would find that he quite liked dissolving Parliament and would do so whenever he felt a bit brassed off.

Another spoiler alert: Charles would often find himself in a bind after such dissolutions and would be forced to recall the hated Commons.  One can imagine such meetings were frostier than a frozen PopTart.  At this second parliament, the king tried to gag his more vociferous critics, including imprisoning Cornish baronet Sir John Eliot.  That didn’t smooth relations at all, so the king said, “Pish, posh” and dissolved the house again.  But then he realized he needed the Commons’ approval to raise money for war against France’s Louis XIII, his previous endeavor – a forced loan from all those liable for tax – having resulted in hundreds of aristocrats and gentry going to prison rather than give up the readies.  So, in 1628, Parliament was once again summoned by the king.  But the MPs were in a stern and remonstrative mood.  Sir Edward Coke, the aforementioned Sir John Eliot, and rural landowner John Pym denounced the king’s petulance with the Petition of Right, making the rights and liberties of the English subject clear, and threatened to impeach Buckingham if the king refused to sign the petition.  He did not, and he got the funding he required for the French wars.  But alas, the king’s favorite could not savor his liberty for long, as he was assassinated in Portsmouth by a Puritan terrorist.

Well, that’s one of the king’s hated advisors down.  Time to go after Bishop Laud.  Once again, Sir John Eliot got up on his hind legs and produced a bill that condemned Arminianism (an anti-Puritan belief that asserted free will and disavowed Calvinist predestination) and of course Roman Catholicism.  Under Laud, the Anglican Church began restoring many of the old rites of Henry VIII’s time, which were basically Catholic by another name – at least in ritual.  Furthermore, the Church of England became, in essence, a propaganda arm of the monarchy, and Divine Right became a motif of sermons throughout the country.  The whisper went abroad that the king would suspend anti-Catholic penal laws.  Puritanical suspicions were, of course, further raised by the fact that the preening Queen Henrietta Maria was herself Catholic and attended Mass in a private chapel in Whitehall.

“Pish, posh!” the king fairly shouted and sent directly to the House of Commons to give them a right good ticking off.  But, the MPs literally slammed the door in the messenger’s face!  Imagine!  Well, Charles would not stand for that, you can be sure.  He sent troops to arrest the turbulent MPs but by the time they arrived, Eliot’s bill had passed.  Eliot himself was allowed to be a guest of the king’s hospitality for three years in the Tower of London, where he died of tuberculosis.

Oh, and, unsurprisingly, Parliament was once again dissolved.

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From this point, 1629, to 1640, King Charles I ruled England as nearly an absolute monarch.  For 11 years, he governed personally, without a Parliament.  Advised primarily by the Queen, Archbishop Laud, and Sir Thomas Wentworth, a man deeply disturbed by the highhandedness of the Commons.  Following Wentworth’s advice, Charles relied instead upon what were called prerogative courts – that is, English common law did not apply there – as well as the infamous Star Chamber and one called the Court of High Commission.  Laud used this latter to battle Puritan clergy, fully intending to wipe it off the map.  The punishments issued to recalcitrant ministers were brutal: William Prynne, a rather po-faced cleric who hated the theatre, was branded with hot irons and had his ears cut off for writing a rather gossamer-veiled attack on Henrietta Maria and her court masques.

I must say that, while I am no fan of Puritanical Protestantism, Charles and minions were making it rather easy for them to charge the monarchy and church with tyranny.  In 1634, Charles reintroduced ship money, a tax on coastal towns used during wartime to strengthen the navy.  Presently, England was not at war, though the Dutch were behaving ominously.  People were understandably upset and, famously, John Hampden, a landowner from Buckinghamshire, refused to pay the levy, and his 1638 trial brought tensions between the king and the people to a boiling point.

But what turned that simmer into a rolling boil had more to do with religion than government.  Despite the evident resistance by the Scottish Kirk, Laud insisted upon imposing the Book of Common Prayer to bring it more in line with the English Church.  Riots erupted in Edinburgh and perhaps elsewhere.  In 1638, Scotland assented to a National Covenant, resolving to cling to a gospel-based reformed church and to defy Popery.

Predictably, Charles decided that the Scots needed a good thrashing, so we get the First and Second Bishops’ Wars.  The first was a bit of a non-event, because Charles had no money to raise an effective army.  Remember, Parliament hadn’t been around for a while.  So, yep, that’s right, he recalls Parliament, and loses the second war.  Parliament dissolved.

Parliament summoned!  The Scots now occupied great swaths of Northumberland and Durham, and savvy MPs realized that they now had the whip hand over the capricious Charles.  They arrested Archbishop Laud for treason, for attempting to return England to Rome.  Thomas Wentworth was executed for trying to overthrow Parliament.  With Larry and Curly out of the way, the MPs could focus on Moe.  The declared the forced loans and ship money illegal, and destroyed the prerogative courts, including the Star Chamber and the High Commission.  

There’s an old expression, attributed to Daniel O’Connell, the Irish land reformer, in 1856: “England’s weakness is Ireland’s opportunity.”  Though spoken two centuries after Caroline England’s crisis, O’Connell’s declaration fits the crisis.  With Charles pretty much emasculated, the Catholic Irish seized an opportunity and, in 1641, rose up, driving English colonists off the land.  Anti-Catholic bigotry magnified the carnage in the telling, however, and Parliament prepared for an invasion by an Irish Catholic army.  A document called the “Petition of Gentlewomen and Tradesmen’s Wives” solicits Parliamentary policies to ease the deprivations caused by declining trade, but most especially expresses the terror of the English about a resurgence of Popery.  It references women’s fears of the “savage usage and unheard-of rapes exercised upon our sex in Ireland, and have we not just cause to fear they will prove the forerunners to our ruin?”  Rallying his colleagues, John Pym put out the Grand Remonstrance, a damning concatenation of the king’s crimes and his “malignant design to subvert the fundamental laws and principles of government.”  

Charles responded in his characteristically politic way. Breaking all protocol, he himself, in January 1642, went to arrest Pym, Hampden, and three other anti-monarchist ringleaders at the House of Commons.  Unfortunately, those MPs caught wind of the king’s mood and flew the coop.  This left Charles standing rather awkwardly in the Commons Chamber, wishing to be anywhere else.  By July of that year, Parliament – Commons and Lords – declared the king to have initiated a war and declared all royalists traitors.  A month later, before the walls of Nottingham Castle, where he had fled, Charles unfurled the royal banner, and the English Civil Wars officially began.

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Not being a particular aficionado of military history, I’m going to move over the actual fighting of the war rather rapidly.  We’ve actually got the battles of two civil wars to ignore.  The First Civil War, from 1642 to 46, was a fairly straightforward conflict between the royalists and the radicals, but from 46 to 49, the Parliamentary party’s mission changed from simply reigning in the monarchy to becoming a revolutionary movement.  The goals of that movement – whether the deposition of Charles or the abolition of the monarchy altogether – being rather fuzzy at this point.  Charles had made some common cause with Irish Catholic rebels and they assisted on his side.  Alas, they were no match for the military tactics and mounted troops of the Roundheads under a sternly devout Puritan MP named Oliver Cromwell, who whipped the Cavalier forces at Marston Moor like a bowl of cream.  A further whipping was handed out at Naseby in 1645, due to the introduction of Cromwell’s famous New Model Army, a disciplined and zealous fighting force.  There followed the disasters of Selkirk and Truro and finally Charles’ surrender to a Covenanter Scots army at Newark.  Civil War, Part 1 was over.

Part 2 was rather shorter lived, beginning with some uprisings in Essex, Kent, and Wales in the summer of 48, but Cromwell’s forces promptly crushed them.  Years of war and chaos had done much to dampen popular support for the Roundheads and a pro-royalist mood began to move through the country.  To ensure Parliament’s ultimate revolutionary victory, the leadership of the New Model Army at Windsor Castle declared it would "call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for that blood he had shed, and mischief he had done.”  The Puritan poobahs nicked that phrase from a passage in 2 Samuel from the Bible in which a prophet condemns David as a usurper of the House of Saul.  I find that a curiously ambiguous allusion in this context: I get the “Charles has usurped the role of Parliament and the People” bit, but it feels odd that the “man of blood” in Samuel is Israel’s greatest king and ancestor of Jesus.  Best not to think too much about it.

What this declaration does, however, is quite earth-shattering.  It is basically a charge of treason against a rightful monarch – an idea that, at the time, seemed absurd.  How can a king commit treason against himself?  The innovative argument is that a nation is not embodied in the king, but is embodied in the people, and they are those whom Charles has betrayed.   In December of 1648, those MPs who still owed some support to Charles were removed from Parliament by military troops.  Only the Rump Parliament, those who supported Cromwell and the army, were left to govern.  January of 1649 saw the first ever trial of an English – or European, for that matter – monarch for crimes against the people and the state.  Found guilty (of course), Charles Stuart’s death sentence was signed by only 59 of the 135 Parliamentarians – which, when you consider it, is a minority of the Rump minority.  On the 30 of January, 1649, Charles I became the first European monarch to be executed by a court of law.  You have heard, no doubt, the little anecdote that Charles wore two shirts that day, to prevent a shiver from the cold being misinterpreted by the crowd as a shudder of fear.  But the crowd was in no mood for rejoicing and, in fact, seem to have been repulsed by the enormity of the scene.  We have a diary from a witness to the beheading and in one entry we read: “There was such a groan by the thousands as I never heard before and desire that I may never hear again.”  And when the executioner held up the severed and gory head, no shout of triumph, only muffled weeping.  The poet Andrew Marvell, whom we shall meet again soon, writes of the king’s final dignity in a poem called “An Horatian Ode on Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”:

He nothing common did or mean

Upon that memorable scene,

But with his keener eye

The axe’s edge did try;

Nor call’d the gods with vulgar spite

To vindicate his helpless right,

But bowed his comely head

Down as upon a bed.

We shall hear more of that poem’s title personage, Oliver Cromwell, and his dastardly exploits in Ireland presently.  But at the time of the execution, a pamphlet circulated by one John Gauden eloquently put forth the case for the Royalist cause in the guise of the king;s thoughts.  This account, called Eikon Basilike, or The Royal Portrait, was actually sold on the day of Charles' death.  I have disturbing images of hawkers wandering the crowd: “Popcorn, peanuts, pro-grams!  Get your programs here!”  Gauden was originally intended to revise the King’s meditation for publication, but actually became the primary author, though this was unknown to the public until 1690.  So, as far as the public wracked by the crisis of civil war and the deposition of the monarchy were concerned, the Eikon was the king’s own testimony intended to whip up sympathy.

Gauden takes a distinctly anti-populist stance. thundering “nor does anything portend more God’s displeasure against a nation than when He suffers the confluence and clamors of the vulgar to pass all boundaries of laws and reverence to authority.”  His case clearly rests on the assumption of Divine Right and appeals to the moral rectitude of the reader: “What good man had rather not want anything he most desired for the public good, than obtain it by by such unlawful and irreligious means?”  It’s a nice rhetorical trick, implicitly condemning any disagreement by the reader as iniquity.  Only good people will agree with this, and you’re a good person, aren’t you?

Gauden chastises the work of demagogues who, with “some reputation for parts and piety” set the great unwashed on to insolence.  “Parts” here, in the 17th century, meant talent or gift.  So somebody with parts was competent or excellent at a given task.  This rabble glories in the shame and outrage of their betters.  The fault, of course, lays at Parliament’s feet:

Had this Parliament, as it was in its first Election and Constitution, sat full and free, the Members of both Houses being left to their freedom of Voting, as in all reason, honour, and Religion, they should have been; I doubt not but things would have been so carried, as would have given no lesse content to all good men, then they wished or expected.

Well, them’s fightin’ words!  But who will pick up this polemical gauntlet?  Who will stand toe to toe with John Gauden at high noon?  John Milton says, “I’ll be yer huckleberry.”

Milton, even moreso than the aforementioned Andrew Marvell, will feature in episodes coming soon.  He will become arguably the greatest English poet behind Shakespeare.  But now, in the late 1640s, he’s mostly an apologist for the Parliamentarian cause.  In response to Eikon Basilike, Milton publishes Eikonoklastes (which means “image breaker”), a meticulous, but highly sarcastic, point by point refutation of Gauden’s work (apparently Milton never really believed that the King was the actual author).  Nonetheless, Milton keeps his jabs completely above the belt, attacking the arguments and not the arguer.  For instance, he disposes of the argument of government by Divine Right, saying the king’s resolution was always

to set up an arbitrary government of his own, and that all Britain was to be tied and chained to the conscience, judgment, and reason of one man; as if those gifts had been only his peculiar and prerogative, entailed upon him with his fortune to be a king? 

Note the almost innocuous use of the word “fortune” as the basis of the king’s prerogative.  He is king by chance, not by Providence.  Therefore, such kingship is not immutable.    Law is not the king’s privilege or caprice.  Government derives its power from 

public reason, the enacted reason of a Parliament; which he denying to enact, denies to govern us by that which ought to be our law; interposing his own private reason, which to us is no law. 

Neat bit of deduction there.  Much of Eikonoklastes is structured around a quotation from Eikon Basilike, which Milton mockingly proceeds proceeds to deconstruct and refute.  So, here’s Milton’s rebuttal to those clever rhetorical traps of Gauden’s we peeped at earlier.  Gauden says, “What good man had rather not want anything he most desired for the public good, than obtain it by such unlawful and irreligious means?”  Milton scoffs:

 as much as to say, Had not rather sit still and let his Country be Tyrannized, then that the people, finding no other remedy, should stand up like Men, and demand their Rights and Liberties. This is the artificialest piece of fineness to persuade men into slavery that the wit of Court could have invented. But heare how much better the Moral of this Lesson would befit the Teacher. What good man had not rather want a boundless and arbitrary power, and those Fine Flowers of the Crown, call'd Prerogatives, then for them to use force and perpetual vexation to his faithful Subjects, nay to wade for them through blood and civil war? 

The subsequent passage takes on Gauden’s charge of demagoguery, which Milton dismisses as a “goblin word,” going on to say, “the King by his leave cannot coin English as he could money to be current (and tis believed this wording was above his known style and Orthographie, and accuses the whole composure to be conscious of some other Author).”  Milton does not see in Eikon Basilike evidence of the King’s style, and hints that a ghost writer is behind the pamphlet.

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It’s worth noting that once the Rump of the Rump Parliament put Charles’s head in a basket, they found themselves in a pickle.  Who governs now?  And how?  What were we really after?  The immediate resolution was to declare England a republic or, as they called it, a Commonwealth.  Monarchy was abolished, as was the House of Lords, and England became proto-Marxian workers’ paradise in which hearty, jolly peasants happily worked away for the common good and no one oppressed anyone and everyone loved everyone and life was just a maypole dance.

Not even a little.

They established a Council of State, with the High Judge who sentenced Charles, John Bradshaw, as president.  John Milton, incidentally, became basically the foreign secretary.  The actual title was Latin Secretary, but as diplomacy was conducted in Latin, I think the analogy holds.

It seems to me a truism that, for almost anybody, death is a great rehabilitator of reputation.  Ever notice how, as soon as someone dies – particularly a famous person, a celebrity or politician, and even one whose approval ratings in life were mixed – there follows a great outpouring of regret and loss and, “What a swell guy!”?  No one is a jackass once they’re dead. 

Apparently, neither was Charles Stuart.  His martyrdom revived a good deal of Royalist feeling.  On the other extreme, the radical Levellers disliked the new scheme and began agitating within the army.  Presbyterian forces in Scotland proclaimed the Prince of Wales Charles II and in Ireland, Protestant royalists made common cause with Catholic nobility to rise against Commonwealth impositions.  The violence of this uprising was greatly exaggerated in the English press.  And here’s where our old friend Oliver Cromwell stomps back on the scene with his great muddy boots.  Ireland has still not fully recovered from his rampage across the island and its aftermath.  He laid siege to the towns of Drogheda and Wexford, sites of royalist garrisons, and his brutality in these campaigns has become the stuff of legendary nightmare.  Entire garrisons were executed even after surrender.  In Drogheda, those taking shelter in St. Peter’s Church were locked therein and the building set alight, burning all inside alive.  In his letters from Ireland, Cromwell himself, in a smug, self-satisfied way, it must be said, records the agonized cries of the doomed: “One of them was heard to say in the midst of the flames: ‘God damn me, God confound me, I burn, I burn!’”  He set 140 other people to starve: “hunger must compel them . . . until their stomachs were come down.”  Cromwell extended some mercy, however.  With at least one captured force, “their officers were knocked on the head” – a delightfully euphemistic phrase for crushing a man’s skull with a hammer – and killed only one in ten of the soldiers, the balance being sold into slavery on the sugar plantations.  Cromwell considered this “a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches.”  So much for loving thy neighbor and turning the other cheek.  Following these atrocities, Cromwell redistributed conquered Irish land among his soldiers, displacing the Irish to the barren moorlands west of the Shannon River if they refused to renounce their Catholicism; they could go “to hell or Connaught.”

One of the most famous lyrics to come out of this war in Ireland is an Irish language song called “John O’Dwyer of the Glen,” about a guerilla leader resisting the Cromwellian onslaught.  The text we have comes from an 1831 anthology of Irish songs collected by James Hardiman with a translation by Thomas Furlong.  Hardiman files “O’Dwyer” under the heading “Jacobite Relics,” and so placing it within the tradition of songs supporting the Stuart cause from James I in 1603 to Bonnie Prince Charlie in the 18th century.  Here it is:

Blithe the bright dawn found me,

Rest with strength had crown’d me,

Sweet the birds sang around me

Sport was their toil.

The horn its clang was keeping,

Forth the fox was creeping,

Round each dame stood weeping,

O’er the prowler’s spoil.

Hark! the foe is calling,

Fast the woods are falling,

Scenes and sights appalling

Mark the wasted soil.

War and confiscation

Curse the fallen nation;

Gloom and desolation

Shade the lost land o’er,

Chill the winds are blowing,

Death aloft is going,

Peace or hope seems growing

For our race no more.

Hark! the foe is calling,

Fast the woods are falling,

Scenes and sights appalling

Throng the blood-stained shore

Nobles once high-hearted,

From their homes have parted,

Scattered, scared, and started

By a base-born band.

Spots that once were cheering,

Girls beloved, endearing,

Friends from whom I’m steering,

Take this parting tear.

There is a classic Irish feel to this lyric: quatrains with 3 rhyming trimeter lines and a final dimeter line.  That three rhyme structure always feels like amplification to me, intensification, as if whatever the singer is feeling or seeing crescendos as they experience it.  And then that foreshortened fourth line – almost stoic, to my ears.  A recognition of the ineluctability of the previous three lines and a resolve to accept or resist as the case may be.  

In this poem, the natural imagery connotes an innocent Ireland, an almost idyllic pastoralism.  But the fox creeps in (Cromwell, yeah, or any other foreign intruder) attacking the singing birds as the old woman weeps for the destruction.  There follow images of desolation and flight, perhaps echoing the famous Flight of the Earls in 1603, when defeated Irish chiefs fled to Europe.  Incidentally, these chiefs were nicknamed “the wild geese” and so the fox’s spoliation of the old woman’s birds – well, I like to think of the birds as geese.

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The Council of State maintained a wobbly rule for a few years, with many scenting the whiff of a new tyranny much like the old they believed they had defeated.  England got itself entangled in the Dutch Wars over mismanaged trade rivalries.  By 1653, Cromwell and his goons had had enough and stormed into Westminster, declaring, “It is not fit you should sit here any longer!”  The MPs were brusquely escorted out and when Cromwell spied the Golden Mace – symbol of the Speaker of the House’s authority – he ordered grimly: “Take away this bauble.”

I’m sure you’re sense of irony is tingling, friend listener.  A king was deposed and executed for tyranny, to be replaced by a fraction of a fraction of the people’s putative representatives, to be replaced in turn by a military dictatorship.  Hardly an auspicious beginning for the vaunted liberties of the English nation.  Cromwell now held supreme power, which he believed he derived from God!  Oho!  Really, could one be less self-aware?  He became Lord Protector of the Realm and immediately took to dismissing Parliaments whenever he felt they were getting too uppity.  Ringing any bells?  Occasional uprisings against the Cromwellian Puritan regime gave the big O cover for imposing martial law.  Then there was a war with Spain, a failed assassination attempt, and when Cromwell died in 1658, you know what happened?  His son, Richard, succeeded to the protectorate!  What?  How is this any different from a monarchy, except that Cromwell was decidedly less fabulous in his style?

Richard lacked the ambition and talent of his father and could not rein in a newly vivified Parliament.  Politics once again descended into factionalism and squabbling.  Richard resigned and retired to the country.  Watching his country circling the toilet bowl, General George Monck, a former army commander in chief, had been in contact with the Prince of Wales in Holland.  On condition of a general pardon, a reconvened full Parliament (actually called the Convention at this time) accepted Monck’s advice and invited the prince to return as Charles II.  On his 30th birthday, Charles accepted that invitation and the monarchy was restored.

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OK, so now we’ve got a decent background on the political and social upheaval in England during the mid 17th century.  We’ve already seen mutual influence between this history and the poetry of the Cavaliers.  I’ve said over the course of this survey that we’ll meet writers like Andrew Marvell and John Milton again.  And, of course, these epochal events put England on the road to constitutional monarchy and eventually to a world empire, which too will be conditioned by and reflected in the literature of that empire.  All that is to come.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode of The Classic English Literature Podcast.  If you did, please tell a couple people you know about it.  Let’s get a big, big audience!  Please like, subscribe, and follow here on your podcatcher and on social media.  Send me a text with any comments, questions, or suggestions.  If you’d like to make a financial contribution to keep the poddie going, please click the “Support the Show” button.

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