Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated), page 837
I was bent on keeping peace with Spain and wished his son to marry a Spanish princess.
This, said the Puritans, would simply bring back the Pope and Popery to England. Once some wicked and hot-headed Catholics made a plot to blow up the King and both Houses of
Parliament with gunpowder (1605). I think you have all heard of Guy Fawkes and the
“Fifth of November,” but perhaps, when we see his absurd figure carried about in the streets,
we are apt to forget that, on that day in the year 1605, he was actually found in a cellar under the Houses of Parliament, watching a lot of barrels of gunpowder to which he was going to set light the next morning when Parliament should have met. The King and the Prince of
Wales, and all the Bishops, Lords and Commons would have met a horrible death, and the friends of Fawkes would then have seized the
Government on behalf of the Catholics. No wonder Protestants hated and feared a religion in whose name such things could be planned.
The Puritans also said that the English Churchwas getting too much like the Catholic Church;
or becoming, as we should say now, too “High
Church.” The bishops were too powerful, the services too splendid, even the teaching was growing Catholic again. So these Puritans began to cry out, first for a limit to the power of the bishops, then for their abolition, and finally for the abolition of the Prayer Book. But,
when it came to that cry, England was by no means united, and at last was divided on the religious question into two camps of nearly equal strength, who were obliged to fight it out in a bloody civil war.
On the second question, the quarrels about money, which we can call the “civil” as opposed to the religious causes of quarrel, there was no real division of opinions. No one of any importance in England wanted the King to be able to take taxes at his pleasure, nor to keep people in prison without bringing them to trial, nor to make war or peace without consulting his Parliament. The Tudors had done many of these things, but, on the whole, with the approval of the whole nation and for its good. The people they kept in prison without trial were usually foreign spies or traitors, who were threatening the very existence of England as a nation. James and Charles, however, sent members of Parliament to prison for speechesmade in Parliament against the “tyranny”
of the bishops, against taxes, against unpatriotic alliances with Spain. They took, at the
English ports, Customs’ duties on goods without consent of Parliament. They did indeed maintain a fine Navy, and they certainly built splendid ships, but they did nothing with them.
Their sailors were itching to cut Spanish and
Popish throats far away in America, and Portuguese throats far away in India; but the fleet was kept hanging about in the Channel, while the flag was insulted by Frenchmen, by Spaniards, and even by our old friends, the Protestant Dutch. So at last men were unwilling to serve in such a Navy; and had to be “impressed,” that is, compelled to serve. And when King Charles, in 1635-6-7, asked for a tax called “Ship-money,” to maintain the Navy,
men began to say “No,” “not without consent of Parliament,” and so on.
It was the same story with the Army, or rather with the old “militia” of “every man armed in his county,” which did duty for an
Army. The Tudors had not been very successful in their efforts to make this force a real one.
Men hated the service and shirked it when they could; they talked nonsense about “England not wanting an Army when she had got such a fine Navy.” You will often hear the same sortof nonsense talked nowadays; don’t believe it!
King James, toward the end of his reign, had a fine opportunity of showing that England could bite by land as well as by sea; for a frightful war broke out in Germany between Catholics and Protestants, which was to last for thirty years; and all good Protestants in England and
Scotland were eager to go and help their brothers in Germany. But James couldn’t make his mind up: he talked big and sent messengers flying about to the Kings of Europe, but act he would not; and so nothing was done except that a great many volunteers went, both from
England and Scotland, and learned soldiering to some purpose, as James’s son, King Charles
I, was to find out one day. Till that day there was no real Army in England, although Charles,
when he came to the throne, tried to establish a general right of “impressing” soldiers, and quarrelled with his Parliaments at once about it. Lastly, James dismissed all his Parliaments in anger, and used rude language in doing so.
When he died in 1625, nearly all the seeds of the future civil war had been sowed.
Charles I, the “Martyr King,” was a very different man from his father; he was shy,
proud, cold, ignorant of the world, obstinate and mistrustful. He did not mean to lie, but he hardly ever told the whole truth; and soneither his enemies nor his friends could trust him. James would have liked to be good friends with his people, and was at bottom what we call “a good fellow,” with a strong sense of fun. Charles never made a joke in his life, and did not care twopence for public opinion, or for being friends with any one except his bishops. His wife, moreover, was a
Catholic and a Frenchwoman and cared nothing for England. Though a firm Protestant,
Charles was much more “High Church” than
James, and wanted to give the bishops more power. He did once interfere (1627) on behalf of the French Protestants who were (rather mildly) ill treated at that time by their Kings,
but he made a complete mess of the task. That was at the beginning of his reign, and, as in his first four years he quarrelled openly with his first three Parliaments, he could hardly get money enough to help him to live and govern
England, and none to defend the honour of
England abroad. Then for eleven years,
1629-40, he called no Parliament at all. This was the longest interval without a Parliament since the reign of Henry III, and to all Englishmen, whose tempers were now boiling over, it seemed intolerable.
During this period Charles took the Customs’
duties at the ports, though Parliament hadnever granted them to him, and they proved to be his main source of income, for, of course,
the long peace since 1605 had greatly increased
English trade, not only with all European countries (especially Turkey, Russia, Portugal and
Spain), but also, in spite of Spanish jealousy,
with Spanish America, the West and East
Indies, and the Colonies which were now beginning to be founded in North America (as I
will tell you later on in Chapter IX). Our44 East
India Company,” which began to build for us our
Indian Empire of to-day, had been founded at the end of Elizabeth’s reign.
Beside the “Customs,” there were lots of other little sources of income, many of them quite against the law, and altogether Charles had a revenue of about a million pounds a year, which certainly enabled him to live as long as he could keep the peace. Perhaps he might never have called a Parliament again if he had not quarrelled about religion with his subjects in
Scotland. His Archbishop of Canterbury was
William Laud, an honourable but narrowminded man, who set himself to weed out the
Puritan party in the Church of England, and to make every one conform to the services of the
Prayer Book. All Puritan England was already growling deeply at this, when it occurred to Laud to try to enforce the same services andceremonies on Presbyterian Scotland. Some steps in this direction had been begun by King
James, but had met with very little success;
there were, however, already some sort of restored bishops in Scotland, though they had no power. Suddenly, in 1637, Charles resolved to force upon Scotland the whole of the Prayer
Book, as a first step toward making the Church quite uniform in the two kingdoms.
Scotland, poor, proud, and intensely patriotic,
had for long felt sore and neglected since its native kings had gone from Edinburgh to London. At this “English” insult it simply rose and slammed the door in the faces of the
King and his Archbishop. A “Covenant” was signed in Edinburgh and all over Scotland,
which bound all men by the most solemn oath to maintain the Presbyterian Church and to root out bishops and all their works; the Covenanters flatly refused all compromise, and
Charles, if he were to remain a king at all in
Scotland, would have to fight. It would be no easy task; for neither Edward I nor Henry
VIII at the head of a united England had been successful against the Scots. And Charles and
Laud were almost the only people in England who did not think the Scots were right to resist!
The Scots got together a much better army than Charles could get, and faced him sturdily;
the first “Bishops’ War,” as the Puritans called it, was a dead failure. “Call your Parliament,
Sir,” was the only advice his councillors could give the King.
Charles gave way, and, in April, 1640, called a Parliament which, as he dismissed it in a few days, had the nickname of “The Short Parliament.” For, instead of giving him cash to crush Scotland with, it began to pour out a torrent of the grievances of the past eleven years, nay, of the past thirty-seven years;
grievances about taxes, customs, ship-money;
about bishops, popery in high places, judges who twisted the law to please the King, and so forth. After one more effort at war with
Scotland in the summer, during which the Scots simply walked into England as far as Durham and sat down there, the King had to own himself beaten, and to call, on November 3, 1640,
a Parliament that was to be anything but short.
History knows it as “The Long Parliament.”
The leaders of this body were no revolutionists or “radicals.” Nearly all were great lawyers or country gentlemen of old families and rich estates: Hampden, Pym, Holies,
Vane, Cromwell, Hyde, Falkland, were the leaders in the Commons; Essex, Warwick,
Bedford, Broke, and Saye in the Lords. The great merchants of the City of London, whichwas already perhaps the greatest place of trade in the world, were on the same side.
No one had the least intention of upsetting the throne of King Charles. But in civil matters all were agreed in wishing to purify the Law Courts and to restore the “ancient constitution,” by which they meant the control of Parliament over the Crown, as it had existed before the Wars of the Roses. The “strong government” of the Tudors, they said, had been necessary at the time; it was no longer necessary. The King of England ought to be a
“limited monarch,” not an “absolute monarch,”
and Charles must be made to realize the fact.
So, in about nine months, the whole fabric of the civil government was thoroughly overhauled. The King’s one honourable and clever minister, the Earl of Strafford, was sent to the
Tower and at length beheaded. Archbishop
Laud was sent to the Tower. The judges who had twisted the law to please the King were removed, and provision was made against their twisting it in the future. Several new law courts, which had grown up in Tudor times,
were taken away: the power of levying any taxes without full consent of Parliament was taken away; and it was decided that henceforward Parliament should meet at least every three years.
All this was done with the most thundering applause of the nation, from Tweed to Tamar,
from Kent to Cumberland; for, as I have said,
all men were agreed as to the “civil” causes of complaint against their King. But it was another story when questions relating to religion were touched. Only one half of England was Puritan or wished to abolish bishops or
Prayer Book. Three fourths of the House of
Lords and nearly half the House of Commons were against making any such change; and this at once began to give the King “a party” in the State. He meant to use that party not only to save the Church, but also, if possible,
to restore his own “strong government” in civil matters. So things stood in the autumn of 1641; and two events then hurried on the civil war, the King’s visit to Scotland, and a rebellion in Ireland.
Our Parliament men easily guessed that the
King’s visit to Scotland was made in order to see whether, if he had to fight his Parliament,
the Scots would help him. For he gave the
Scots everything that they asked, and showered honours on their leaders; in fact, he appealed to their old jealousy of England. Still he got little or no promise of help there.
To understand the other thing, the Irish rebellion, we must go back a long way. No
English sovereign had seriously tried to govern
Ireland before the Tudors. The kings had often made grants of Irish land to Englishmen,
who had then gone over there and had, in a few years, become wilder than the Irish themselves.
There was some shadow of English government in Leinster, with a “Lord Deputy” as Governor,
and a sort of Irish Parliament; but,in the fifteenth century, the English territory had shrunk to a very narrow district round Dublin called
“the Pale.” Outside the Pale, it was all broken heads and stolen cows, as it had been for a thousand years. But Henry VIII had taken the task of government in hand, and had tried to turn the wild Irish chiefs into decent
English landowners, who should really come to
Parliament, help the judges in keeping order,
and cultivate their lands properly. He had dissolved the Irish monasteries as he had dissolved the English, and had given their lands to these chiefs. He put down rebellious earls with a very strong hand, and quite successfully.
He had taken the title of “King” of Ireland.
The “Reformation” had been started in Ireland under Edward VI, but there had been little
Reformation for Mary to suppress, and no
“heretics” were burned there. Certainly, until the middle of the sixteenth century, Ireland had shown little affection for Pope or Catholic
faith. But rebellion in some shape remained the one thing that Irish chiefs loved, and it occurred to some of them, especially to one
Shan O’Neill, early in the reign of Elizabeth,
that a rebellion in the name of religion would be a much more successful affair than without that name: “England is now Protestant;
therefore let Ireland rise for the Pope,” was
Shan’s idea. Philip of Spain saw a splendid chance (for the Pope and himself) of injuring
Elizabeth by sending aid to Irish-Catholic rebellions; and, from 1570 at least, he continued to do so either secretly or openly until his death. The idea “caught on,” as we should say, with the whole Irish nation, and every one went about shouting “Pope aboo,” “Spain aboo,” and “O’Neil (or Desmond, or some other wild earl) aboo.” Thus England, when she tried to keep order, always appeared to be “persecuting” Catholics in Ireland. But
Elizabeth could not face the frightful cost of keeping order there until the last two years of her reign, when she went to work in earnest and with some success. Usually she had preferred to plant “colonies” of Englishmen upon some Irish districts which had been confiscated after a rebellion. So Munster was “planted,”
1583; so Ulster was planted with Scottish landowners, tradesmen and artisans by James I.
These last were mostly Presbyterians, and made vigorous and successful colonists. But, of course, the Irish landowners, who had rebelled and been turned out, always hoped to recover their land. And the rebellion of 1641 was prompted either by this hope, or by the fear of fresh confiscation.
But to the Puritans in the English Parliament it seemed to be simply a rebellion of the
“wicked Papists,” “probably got up by the
King,” they said, “certainly by the Queen,
in order to give excuse for raising an army to use against the English Parliament.” And,
with this fear in their heads, the leaders of
Parliament were now driven to take steps far beyond any they had intended a year before.
First they brought forward laws for the utter abolition of bishops and all their works; and then laws to transfer the command of the army or militia from the Crown to Parliament.
This last was revolution pure and simple.
No king could agree to this, and so Charles began to set about preparations for war. Large numbers of Members of Parliament came to join him from both houses; but those that remained at Westminster were of course all the more determined to fight.
The words “rebellion,” “treason,” “traitor”
are very ugly words; and traitors in those days
CAVALIERS AND ROUNDHEADS 181
were put to a very ugly death. So, many moderate men, who had hated Charles’s unlawful government, and applauded all the work of this Parliament during its first nine months,
now threw in their lot with the Crown. So did many men who cared nothing for bishops;
Charles was their King, and his flag was flying in the field. There were many men, too, who hated the long sermons and the gloomy nature of the Puritans; for the Puritans objected to country sports, may-poles, dancing, and to lots of innocent amusements. These “Cavaliers” called the Parliament men “Roundheads,” “crop-eared rogues,” and so on; they gave the King an excellent force of cavalry,
in which arm the Parliament was at first weak. The King’s foot-soldiers were mostly
Cornishmen or Welshmen, good fellows to fight, too.
