Royalism and the Three Stuart Kingdoms: Ideas in Action in the Wars of the 1640s 3031420985, 9783031420986

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Royalism and the Three Stuart Kingdoms Ideas in Action in the Wars of the 1640s

Robert Armstrong

Royalism and the Three Stuart Kingdoms

Robert Armstrong

Royalism and the Three Stuart Kingdoms Ideas in Action in the Wars of the 1640s

Robert Armstrong Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

ISBN 978-3-031-42098-6    ISBN 978-3-031-42099-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42099-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Harvey Loake This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For Dorothy, Alan and Tom

Preface

Royalism won. Not in the short term, when the death by decapitation of Charles I on 30 January 1649 spun countless subjects of his three kingdoms into disorientation, despondency or despair. Having commanded armies against his king, Sir Thomas Fairfax expressed an impossible yearning: Oh Lett that Day from time be blotted quite And lett beleefe of’t in next Age be waved.1 As the fighting stopped successively in each of the three realms, so they found themselves subject to an English Republic, the ‘Commonwealth and Free State’ ‘constituted’ at Westminster in the May following the king’s demise.2 But Charles’s defeated, hunted, then exiled son was, little over a decade later, a King of England with the legal and practical control over military power that his father had struggled for since 1642, and holding supreme governance of a church of bishops and prayer book, that mode of faith so closely identified with the elder Charles, and which, for the moment, was accorded a legally exclusive hold on the nation’s religious life. Indeed royalism’s triumph was yet greater, for the 1660s 1  Peter Davidson, Poetry and revolution: an anthology of British and Irish verse 1625–1660 (Oxford, 1998), p. 356. Spelling has been modernized in quotations throughout, with the exception of poems and titles. 2  S.  R. Gardiner ed., Constitutional documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford, 1906), p. 388: ‘An Act declaring England to be a Commonwealth’.

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witnessed, with variations to be sure, a similar form of monarchical rule in place in both Scotland and Ireland, banishing the temporary triumphs of regimes sprung from the commitment to a National Covenant in Scotland from 1638 or generated by the Confederate Catholic movement in Ireland from 1642. Of course, history’s dust never truly settles. All three kingdoms would be plunged into another round of convulsions and, for some more than others, of bloody conflict, before the century’s end. England’s wars of the 1640s, ‘The Civil War’ in many retellings, were readily, and to some extent permanently, incorporated into a national narrative not of triumph and defeat but of contest for the national soul, whether between royalists and parliamentarians, Tories and Whigs, Conservatives and Liberals (or Labour), or for that matter Anglicans and Dissenters, a binary vision of shape-shifting contestants given classic form in the ‘Wrong but Wromantic’ Cavaliers facing down ‘Right but Repulsive’ Roundheads.3 In decorating the Victorian Palace of Westminster, home to a politics of measured partisanship, it was thought good to commission eight frescoes illustrating ‘the virtues and heroism of some of the actors in the great Civil War, four of them on the Royalist side, and four on that of the Parliament’.4 But for all the ‘British’ iconography at times used elsewhere, these would be resolutely English images. For all that Ireland’s history, too, has been imagined in binary terms, nationalism in its various modes confronting variants of loyalism, or later Unionism, even the latter, for all its attachment to the Crown, has looked more to a ‘revolution’ heritage drawn from the days of William III, or indeed of Scottish Covenanting, rather than to Royalism of the mid-seventeenth-century variety. The Crown, and latterly the Union, won and held much loyalty in Scotland too, but Royalism, for all the appeal in some quarters of the memory of the gallant, doomed, marquis of Montrose, at times as a precursor to the more doggedly doomed Jacobite cause, did not so much generate a polarity in national life or imagination as a disturbance in a narrative too readily centred only on kirk, covenant and constitution. Memory does not altogether play false in casting Royalism as a principally English phenomenon, but such an evaluation depends on when, as  W. C. Sellar & R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and all that (London, 1930).  Quoted in David Robertson’s article on ‘Cope, Charles West’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter Oxford DNB). 3 4

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well as how, Royalism is considered. Making 1642–1646 the crux not only gives England a priority in the King’s calculations, for all his readiness then or later to look to Ireland or Scotland for aid against his rebel parliament at Westminster, but gives Royalism an English form, above all in its alignment with a church settlement of prayer book and bishops, and an English substance, in the sheer weight of support there accorded to the King, whether of sword, pen or purse. Move the dial forward, and the heft of the Kings’ war effort lay in the other kingdoms, from 1647 to 1653. If their Irish and Scottish supporters can be considered ‘Royalist’, rather than, or perhaps as well as being, for the most part, disenchanted Covenanters or Confederates, then clearly Royalism meant something other than the creed of Sir Edward Hyde, or even Prince Rupert. The present study aims at a reconsideration of Royalism in three-kingdom terms, in the hope that such an undertaking may bring into sharper focus some of the features shared across, as well as distinctive to, the nations. More especially it seeks to consider how Royalism might mesh with the national or confessional ambitions articulated, with such attractive effect, by its rivals. The aim is to find a middle way between Royalism conceived in abstract or, we might say, in doctrinal terms, as a set of political principles or premises, and Royalism as enacted, perhaps almost instinctively, undertaken as a commitment, a choice for the King over those he had declared his enemies, a choice also as to the most appropriate, and morally right, route to take for the good of church and kingdom. My son Tom warned me that this book could become my Key to all mythologies.5 He was right, and the caution has had, I trust, a salutary effect. In the following chapters, the view which three-kingdom multifocal lenses can accord is restricted to the ‘High Royalist’ years between 1642, when conflict engulfed England last among the three kingdoms, and 1646, when Charles I moved into the captivity from which he would never re-emerge, and then only to some features of that landscape. The first of them scans the horizon and suggests that what comes into view is not an undifferentiated ‘British’ royalism. Rather, success in winning and sustaining support for the king’s cause came when it could be most closely aligned to values and aspirations which resonated at a national level, not 5  With apologies to my publisher, I can only urge any reader unfamiliar to this allusion to set this book aside and hasten away to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, even as the risk of being forever after haunted by the ghost of Edward Casaubon.

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least in matters religious. Where royalism stood apart from the patrioticconfessional causes which came to power in each of the kingdoms was that for royalism, such alignment was not exclusive, grounded as it was in an allegiance between monarch and subject preceding, yet foundational, to more particular bonds shaped by national histories, laws or institutions, whether civil or ecclesiastical. In chapter two, the gaze falls on the resolutely Scottish royalism concocted partly in Oxford and enacted in the Montrose campaigns, which, in the very fervency of its national attachments, made space for English royalism also to appear unashamedly in patriotic guise. The third chapter turns to the twists of peace-making in Ireland and in England, spying out parallels in Royalist positions, but also the overriding impulse to dissolve, absorb or ingest its rivals, by whatever means necessary or possible, from concession to subversion. And the volume concludes with a sampling of Royalist political texts, for the most part the productions of the active Oxford press examined to test whether Royalist thought might best be thought of in terms of an aspiration to craft a grammar of obedience, more as a setting of boundaries or a regulation in right thinking, and thereby right action, than a determination of political doctrine. The debts owed to those who have made this book possible are many, and gladly owned. Mr. Casaubon might have delighted to rehearse all the ‘possible arguments to be brought against [his] entirely new view of the Philistine god Dagon and other fish-deities’,6 but a great gain to the reader of a Pivot publication is to be spared such elaboration (if also, in the present case, any claim to such novelty). The gain to the author has been to work with the unfailingly generous, patient and supportive staff at Palgrave, especially Sam Stocker, Emily Russell and Sheetal Sharma. Library and archive staff proved even more than usually helpful during the demanding days of pandemic lockdown, and I owe particular thanks to Jan Smith at Aberdeen University Library for supplying a copy of an important source close to the finish line. Friends and colleagues have offered much encouragement, sometimes unbeknownst, but not the less welcome. Amongst the fellowship of early modernists, I have learned much from Graeme Murdock, Patrick Little and Micheál Ó Siochrú. Tadhg Ó hAnnachráin and Ciaran Brady have listened with especial patience and responded with signal insight in conversations about Royalism 6

 See note above!

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which have wound through our friendships for many years. In acts of exceptional generosity, Jane Ohlmeyer and David Scott shared with me, respectively, a pre-publication copy of her edition of Clarendon’s Irish history, and his extensive collection of notes on all things Royalist. It has been a singular privilege to have learnt and taught within the Department of History at Trinity College Dublin for so much of my life, and I am grateful to my colleagues and to successive cohorts of students who have made the experience one perennially rich. As always, the wisest counsel and the staunchest support, as well as the greatest patience, have come from those closest, and I offer my deepest thanks to my family, and especially to Dorothy, to Alan and to Tom. Dublin, Ireland

Robert Armstrong

Contents

1 A Royalist Cause?  1 2 Royalism Reborn: Scotland 31 3 Royalist Peacemaking: Ireland and England 61 4 Thinking Royalist 85 5 Conclusion111 Index121

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CHAPTER 1

A Royalist Cause?

I Oxford was the English Royalism’s war capital for four years from 1642, the site of the royal court, headquarters for the war effort and home to a residual civil bureaucracy, with its printing presses, if overshadowed by London’s mighty engines, bustling out proclamations and poetry collections, discourses civil and religious, in support of the king’s cause. By January 1644, members of the English parliament were gathered there, challenging the claims of the rival assembly at Westminster. And all the while, the city buzzed with Irish and Scots (and Welsh, for whom Welsh-­ language prayer book services were being conducted at St Giles1), and never more than in the months between the summer of 1643 and the spring of 1644, when political, religious and military developments across the three kingdoms were dominated by two, not unconnected, processes. An emergent alliance beckoned between the Westminster parliamentarians and the covenanting regime in Edinburgh, heir to the first of the revolts against the authority of the king, but hitherto maintaining an uneasy neutrality towards the English war on the basis of a settlement reached with Charles I in 1641. The alliance was sealed in a Solemn League and Covenant, and promised armed intervention in the English War. It 1  Ian Roy, ‘The city of Oxford 1640–1660’ in R. C. Richardson ed., Town and countryside in the English revolution (Manchester, 1992), p. 150.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Armstrong, Royalism and the Three Stuart Kingdoms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42099-3_1

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coincided with the September 1643 ‘cessation’ of arms in Ireland between the forces of the King and of the confederate Catholics, emergent from the bloodstained turmoil of insurrection in Ireland in the winter of 1641–2 to attain institutional and military dominance over most of Ireland. The ceasefire presaged more far-reaching peace talks, perhaps even a realignment in aid of the king, and more immediately permitted the re-­deployment of royal forces to England, principally from the largest Royalist garrison anywhere, Dublin. Civil war royalism has been—unsurprisingly and not inappropriately— investigated principally in English terms.2 During the years 1642–1646, when the war was at its height in England, this was the kingdom3 where royalism was most readily identifiable, and most potent, though by 1647, and even more so after 1649, those in arms under the banner of the Stuart monarch were more likely to be based in Scotland or Ireland. The more royalism is extended chronologically or geographically, the more historians have struggled to define it, the more they have needed to attend to the dilemmas of contemporaries struggling to find means by which ‘loyalty to the king’ might be ‘bound together’ with ‘national interest’—or confessional commitment—rather than being co-opted by it.4 Perhaps the most successful attempt at definition, in ‘descriptive’ not ‘prescriptive’ terms, is that of McElligott and Smith: a Royalist as ‘someone who, by thought or deed, identified himself or herself as a royalist and was accepted as such by other individuals who defined themselves as royalists’; for all their diversity of opinions, ‘united by a concern to see the Stuarts return to power on their own terms or, failing that, the best possible terms available’. The corollary that ‘not every expression of antipathy to parliament or sympathy for the plight of the king is evidence of royalism’, is certainly a fair one,5 though the argument presented here will be that, while neither Scots 2  The principal exception is Barry Robertson, Royalists at war in Scotland and Ireland 1638–1650 (Farnham, 2014). 3  The Kingdom of England of course included Wales within its bounds, as discussed further below. 4  Nicole Greenspan, ‘Charles II, exile and the problem of allegiance’, Historical Journal 54 (2011), 73–103 (quoted at 82 with reference to the Marquess of Clanricard). 5  Jason McElligott and David L. Smith, ‘Introduction: rethinking royalists and royalism’ in McElligott & Smith eds., Royalists and royalism during the English civil wars (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 12–13: they reckon the Scots Engager army of 1648 ‘not … royalist’, any more than the confederates who allied with Ormond from 1649.

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Covenanters nor Irish confederates were Royalists, they were capable of becoming such, and without surrendering all of the national, or even confessional, aspirations caught up by those movements. Indeed too ready a focus on England, and on the years of England’s ‘First’ Civil War, can have two consequences, neither wholly fortunate: a tendency to detect there an epitome of principled royalism, against which all other variants, in time or place, may be judged as having fallen away into unscrupulous or desperate pragmatism; and an inclination to see royalism as part of an English binary, perhaps even a perpetual one, caught in a dualistic struggle with parliamentarism. Both have grounds. With monarchy restored after 1660, a historiographical impulse to identify long-standing antagonists, as much ‘puritan’ (or ‘presbyterian’) as parliamentarian, took hold in England.6 As royalism fitted with powerful social and cultural tendencies in English life, persistent across generations,7 so a contest of pasts would be played out against a present of resurgent partisan strife, of Whig and Tory, or an ongoing challenge to a restored Church of England of uncompliant and unrepentant dissenters. Though efforts were made, upholding an unblemished royalist past as precursor of present loyalties was not so easy in Ireland or in Scotland. During the war years, royalists had been as ready as their rivals to fashion a polarizing discourse,8 depicting their enemies as the epitome of political iniquity, religious deviance and social disorder.9 It served important functions, resolving doubts, quelling confusion or energizing hesitant support, but these were ways of speaking and writing to be put to use, not chains to bind thought. For royalists, exalted or humble, allegiance was always a choice, if sometimes constrained or even coerced, and not necessarily one made once and for all. In order to survive, all of the wartime causes needed to adapt to ever-changing conditions, to 6  Matthew Neufeld, The Civil Wars after 1660: public remembering in late Stuart England (Woodbridge, 2013). 7  Alan Cromartie, ‘The persistence of royalism’, in Michael J. Braddick ed., Oxford handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford, 2015), pp. 397–413. 8  Jerome de Groot, Royalist identities (Basingstoke, 2004) sets out to explore royalist writing in terms of ‘the construction of a set of binary role and behavioural models designed to perpetuate a certain paradigm of social stability’ (p. xv). 9  For a master of such devices, and texts offering ‘a rare glimpse of non-élite royalism’, see Bernard Capp, The world of John Taylor the water-poet, 1578–1653 (Oxford, 1994), chapter seven (and quoted at p. 192).

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remobilize flagging support or reach untapped constituencies, even at the risk of appearing to surrender what had once won them support. Individuals, for their part, might try to cultivate, or even just present their actions as demonstrating, a ‘stable moral quality’ like loyalty, but circumstances, or conscience, could push them towards what others saw as defection.10 For the three great patriotic ‘causes’ which emerged in the 1640s—first Scottish covenanting, then the Irish Catholic confederates, then English parliamentarism—winning over the uncommitted, or winning back the lost, meant reception into the bosom of a community defined in national and confessional terms, perhaps requiring some form of legal restoration, possibly involving a reaffirmation of confessional commitment, almost certainly demanding an oath-bound pledge to a movement with defined, if debatable goals. For all their differences, the national-confessional ‘causes’ each combined three ambitions: a commitment to constitutional renovation11; an aspiration towards confessional consolidation, ensuring a more appropriate alignment between a ‘national’ faith and the realities of political and social power, and, for many, revivifying that faith to serve as a fuller moral and spiritual resource for a national community; and safeguarding that community against identifiable threats, internal and external, to its political and religious values, threats which could place ‘malignants’ ‘outside the kingdom’s moral community’ and render them a force to be ‘defeated absolutely’.12 For Irish confederates, a ‘malignant’ party was entrenched within the Dublin administration, but stretched to embrace accomplices in England, acting together to block access to the king, from whom protection of faith, ‘estates and liberties’ was to be sought, in effect as an Irish Catholic equivalent to the legislative settlements endorsed by the king in 10  Rachel Weil, ‘Thinking about allegiance in the English Civil War’, History Workshop Journal 61 (2006), 183–91 (quoted at 188); Michael Braddick, ‘Mobilisation, anxiety and creativity in England during the 1640s’ in John Morrow and Jonathan Scott eds., Liberty, authority, formality: political ideas and culture 1600–1900 (Exeter, 2008), pp.  175–93; Andrew Hopper, Turncoats and renegadoes: changing sides during the English civil wars (Oxford, 2012). 11  When many, and not just royalists, would have considered this to have been accomplished in England, and even more in Scotland, by 1641, no such renovation had been achieved in Ireland: the implications of this will be discussed in chapter three. 12  Thomas Leng, ‘The meanings of “malignancy”: the language of enmity and the construction of the parliamentarian cause in the English Revolution’, Journal of British Studies 53 (2014), 835–58 (quoted at 843, 848).

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both Scotland and England in the course of 1641.13 For the Anglo-­ Scottish covenanting alliance, neutrality was ‘detestable to God’, those tempted by ‘indifferency’ should speed their adherence to the Solemn League and Covenant against the ‘common Enemy’, lest they be themselves considered ‘public enemies to … Religion and Country … to be censured and punished as professed Adversaries and Malignants’. At least their return to the fold of the Covenant was possible, if not without penalty; as for ‘papists’ in arms, they were to be punished as traitors and ‘intolerable Enemies’ along with Irish serving in England, or kindlers of war, ‘restless and active Instruments’ who had ‘infused Malignancy in others’.14 Royalism was not such a ‘cause’. It did not so much offer an alternative political or religious platform, as an alternative route to the accomplishment of some, or all, of these goals, not only in a manner compatible with securing the interests of the king, but by recognizing royal power and authority as essential in bringing them to pass, maintaining them, and guarding against their fall at the hands of unscrupulous politicians, unrelenting clergy or an ignorant and ill-disciplined populace. Charles I was equally king of three kingdoms, though some kingdoms were more equal than others. In a dark moment, when he acknowledged a turn towards ‘the business of Ireland’, a deal with the confederates, ‘but only in case there be no other way to save the crown of England (for which at all times it must be sacrificed)’, he spoke no more than the truth of his own enduring priorities.15 The English Royalism which emerged in 1641–1642 was produced by political choices, often in response to developments in the other kingdom, resulting in a vital reinforcement to the king’s existing support from reformist MPs and peers, and their provincial contacts, and his allowing their voices to speak in his name, of his commitment to the rule of law and a legally established church. English royalists would lament the loss of innocence involved in dealings with Irish or Scots, not least the discord it created within their own ranks, though few were made privy to

13  J. T. Gilbert ed., History of the Irish confederation and civil war in Ireland, 1641–1653 (7 vols., Dublin, 1882–1891), ii, 73–74 (Orders of the General Assembly, October 1642), 129–32 (‘Humble petitions of the Catholicks of Ireland’, Dec. 1642), 233–234 (‘Remonstrance of grievances in the behalf of the Catholics of Ireland’, March 1643). 14  The declaration of the kingdomes of Scotland and England… (Edinburgh, 1644). 15  Charles to Henrietta Maria, 8 January 1646  in John Bruce ed., Charles I in 1646 (London, 1856), p. 5.

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such dealings, or for long.16 The king who bestowed his blessing on their aspirations might do so towards other subjects in other realms, but English royalism gained solidity from more than a king’s calculation to favour his most powerful kingdom. For all that recent scholarship has warned against over-easy alignments of royalism and episcopalianism, even in England,17 a compatibility of religious commitment towards a church with prayer book and bishops—and royal supremacy—not only reflected Charles’s own conscientious attachments but thereby gave promise that this was a religious order he would bend his will to sustain, where Catholics or Presbyterians could only turn to hope. Some of the finest assessments of English royalism have emphasized the importance of apparently straightforward, even ‘instinctive’ notions, in winning and retaining allegiance, of moral impulses tied to honour or loyalty, even a kind of ‘virtue ethics’ expressive of the best impulses of a whole way of living, not just an isolated political choice.18 Such insights are of great value, though they must be handled with care, lest they presuppose an ‘unthinking’ royalism, or one standing in contrast, or even opposition, to the sophisticated defences of the royalist cause produced during the 1640s and beyond. Like its rivals, royalist success required that its claims be articulated in multiple registers, from subtle or sustained argument to sloganizing. Hard thinking was not monopolized by royalism in England,19 though the presence of a vibrant press facilitated complex, extended and enduring expressions of royalist thought. But royalism did lean into modes of argument which made allegiance self-evident, a living out of obligations held by all subjects of legal, settled and Christian kingdoms, obligations so deep that they underlay those arising from the claims of nation or even confession. Royalists insisted that national law and true religion gave form and content to the obligations monarch and subject

16  David Scott, ‘Rethinking royalist politics, 1642–1649’ in John Adamson ed., The English Civil War (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 36–60. 17  Anthony Milton, England’s second reformation: the battle for the Church of England 1625–1662 (Cambridge, 2021). 18  Barbara Donagan, ‘Varieties of royalism’, and Ian Roy, ‘Royalist reputations: the Cavalier ideal and the reality’, both in McElligott & Smith eds., Royalists and royalism during the English civil wars, pp. 66–88, 89–111. 19  See the raft of position papers generated in Dublin and found among the Carte MSS, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

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owed each other, and both clarified and elaborated the benefits such a connexion bestowed.20 If used to good effect, a cluster of royal resources, from the granting of pardons or the bestowal of rewards, offices or commands (not least military), to the indulgence of religiously tender consciences, might prove more effective than the promotion of a distinctive political or religious platform, in dissolving the ‘causes’ arrayed in defiance of the king and absorbing their adherents back into a wholesome political order. Close attendance to the working of English royalist politics has revealed that even as choice an example of a ‘moderate’ as Edward Hyde regarded formal peace negotiations with parliamentarians as but one route towards accommodation, indeed a less direct or reliable one that efforts to detach leading figures and regain them for the king, while supposed hardliners could also turn towards talks if this seemed effective towards re-­establishing royal authority.21 As the ‘practice of politics’ by Charles and his Queen, Henrietta Maria, has been seen as rejecting the premise that ‘principled, resolute politics and the politics of prudence and flexibility were in opposition’, that what ‘they attempted to practice was both principled and prudent’,22 so the grand project of restoring of Scots and of Irish as well as English to loyal service was a principle relentless in its demand, but to which all the resources of prudence, flexibility, even pragmatism might be bent. And of faith. As commitment meant moral choice, it could best be understood in Christian terms of repentance and reconciliation, making contact with the royal prerogative of mercy, a kind of grace, bringing the sinning but pardoned subject back into royal protection. The contents of this book are intended to substantiate the claims advanced this far. The focus will be on those very years when royalism was at its most successful within England, when royal efforts to regain Irish or Scottish loyalty needed to maintain space for English royalism not only to survive but flourish. Chapter two considers the rebirth of Scottish royalism from 1643, and chapter three contrasts the peacemaking processes in Ireland and England. The final chapter assesses arguments advanced by authors of the more sustained and effective statements of the royalist case. In one such work of 1643, John Bramhall urged his readers to ‘Consider  These issues are considered in some detail in chapter four.  Scott, ‘Rethinking’, pp. 41–51. 22  William J. Bulman, ‘The practice of politics: the English Civil War and the “resolution” of Henrietta Maria and Charles I’, Past & present 206 (2010), 43–79, at 52. 20 21

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the present Estate of Christendom, what King hath not Subjects of sundry Communions and Professions in point of Religion’.23 In an England where the first ‘pretence of … division’ between king and parliament was ‘the true Protestant religion, which both protested to maintain’,24 royalists would need to consider, maybe confront, the ‘papist’ presence in their ranks. Much more problematic was the prospect that the king may be moving towards peace, even reconciliation with Irish Catholic ‘rebels’, and in doing so compromising the position of one putatively loyal community, the Protestants of Ireland. Their figuration in Royalist discourse is one path through the thicket identified by Bramhall.

II As ever-fuller and ever more colourful reports of a rising in Ireland reached Westminster in the winter of 1641–1642, future Royalist and future Parliamentarian MPs alike expressed their determination to aid their ‘brethren’ there, ‘by blood and by religion’. By 1642, in excess of 10,000 English troops had been despatched to Ireland, alongside a comparably sized army negotiated from the Scottish regime, and even more soldiers were raised and armed from within Ireland, predominantly from its Protestant population. The king consented to the establishment of a commission for the ‘government and defence’ of Ireland, comprised largely of his parliamentary critics, and, reluctantly, allowed Westminster to foist upon him a controversial scheme to repay loans to sustain war in Ireland through land confiscated from Irish rebels. Unsurprisingly, the outbreak of war in England diverted energies away from the Irish conflict, and the king and the two Houses were soon bogged down in a war of recrimination over the failures to sustain the loyal population of Ireland.25 In late 1642, Leonard Lichfield, printer to the University of Oxford, put in print a petition from four officers despatched from Ireland in quest of aid, which conceded that their appeal to parliament had proved gainless given ‘present distempers’, but was packaged so as to discredit Westminster while playing up the king’s efforts for ‘timely Relief’.26 The following October 23  John Bramhall, The serpent salve, or the remedie for the biting of an aspe… ([York,] 1643), p. 24. 24  Francis Quarles, The loyall convert (Oxford, 1643), p. 2. 25  Robert Armstrong, Protestant war: the British of Ireland and the wars of the three kingdoms (Manchester, 2005), chapter two. 26  The petition of the committees for Ireland to His Majestie… (1642), pp. 3, 5, 6.

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he issued a defence of the Irish ‘cessation’, ‘printed by his Majesties Command at Oxford’. English readers were informed that ‘the same Men (and only they) who have brought all these Miseries and Calamities upon them here, have been the Promoters (if not the Contrivers) of the miseries of their Brethren in Ireland, by preventing those Remedies, and diverting that Assistance, which being seasonably applied, might have eased that poor People of many of those Calamities they have since endured’. The king was ‘bound in duty and Conscience, since it was not in Our power otherwise to preserve that Kingdom from utter ruin, at least to admit any expedient, which with God’s blessing might be a means to preserve that People’. Testimony was elicited, and published, from ‘principal Persons, as well of Our Council, as the Officers of Our Army’ in Ireland to the effect that a cessation was ‘necessary for His Majesties Honour, and service … [and] for the preservation of this Kingdom of Ireland’.27 It was bolstered by Lichfield’s publication, in November 1643, of the Dublin government’s response to Westminster’s condemnation of the cessation, setting out at great length the shortfalls in the military assistance rendered to the protestant camp in Ireland by Parliament.28 That royal duty to preserve and protect had taken sharper form in the spring of 1642, during the very weeks when he appeared to be ceding so much control of the Irish war to his English critics. This was his offer to ‘venture Our Royal Person’ for the ‘Redemption’ of ‘Our poor Protestant Subjects’ by an expedition to Ireland, ‘not declining any hazard of his person, in performing that Duty which he oweth to the defence of God’s true religion and his distressed Subjects’.29 Soon quashed, it was an initiative freighted with significance as tensions escalated over control of armed force in England. What Charles was articulating was a concrete instance of a wider, fundamental principle of kingship. He may have been manoeuvred onto ground chosen by his critics, where the ‘fundamental duty’ of ensuring public safety was alleged to be one which the two Houses would 27  The grounds and motives inducing his Majesty to agree to a cessation of armes for one whole yeare, with the Roman Catholiques of Ireland … (Oxford, 1643), pp. 1–2, 4–5, 21–2. 28  A copy of a letter from the speakers of both houses of parliament in England … to the Lords Justices and Councell of … Ireland, together with the answer… (1643). 29  ‘His Majesties Declaration’, 9 March 1642, and ‘His Majesties message … concerning his resolution to go into Ireland’, 8 April 1642, both in An exact collection of all remonstrances, declarations, votes, orders, ordinances, proclamations, petitions, messages, answers, … betweene the Kings most Excellent Majesty and his high court of Parliament… (London, 1643), pp. 105–110, 133–134.

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discharge should the king default, but it was solid ground indeed from which to ‘counter-attack’, on the basis of a trust devolved upon the king by God and the law, not ‘imposed … by his own subjects’.30 To concede on the militia would mean the king ‘cannot protect any Man: And what discharge would it be for Us, either before God or Man, (when Our good Subjects, whom God and the Law hath committed to Our charge, shall be worried and spoiled,) to say That We trusted others to protect them; that is, to do that duty for Us, which is essentially and inseparably Our own’.31 The obligation to protect was non-negotiable. It was ‘unworthy of the trust reposed in Us by the Law, and of Our Descent from so many great and famous Ancestors, if We could be brought to abandon that power which only can enable Us to perform what We are sworn to, in protecting Our people and the Laws, and to assume others into it as to divest Our Self of it’.32 As the king protected, his subjects served, and not to protect the king only, but themselves, the laws they lived by, the kingdom they inhabited. This too was non-negotiable, lying deeper than law, deeper even than religious profession. Oliver Cromwell might work his way to the assertion that ‘the state, in choosing men to serve them, takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve them, that satisfies’.33 In 1642, Charles I had informed his commander in the north of England, the earl of Newcastle, that ‘I must not look what opinion men are who at the time are willing and able to serve me. Therefore I do not only permit, but command you to make use of all my loving subjects’ services, without examining their consciences (more than their loyalty to me)’.34 Newcastle would give classic expression to the case for the employment of Catholics in early 1643: as there was an obligation upon Catholics in common with other subjects to defend the nation against invasion, so ‘the great confusion which is now in this Kingdom is of as fearful a consequence as any foreign invasion possibly can be: & therefore the Recusants are so far from 30  Quentin Skinner, ‘Classical liberty, Renaissance translation and the English civil war’, in Skinner, Visions of politics, volume 2: Renaissance virtues (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 332–333. Skinner folds this argument into the contest over the King’s ‘Negative Voice’, his right to accord or decline assent to parliamentary legislation. 31  ‘His Majesties answer to a printed book …’ of 26 May in An exact collection, p. 290. 32  His Maiesties Answer to the XIX Propositions… (Oxford, 1642), p. 7. 33  Austin Woolrych, Britain in revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002), p. 299. 34  Charles to Newcastle, 23 September 1642 in Charles Petrie ed., The letters, speeches and proclamations of King Charles I (London, 1935), p. 128.

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being disobliged, as they stand deeply obliged for giving their assistance in this time of extremity, if they shall be required …’.35 Griffith Williams, a Welsh-born cleric who had barely taken up residence in Kilkenny as bishop of the surrounding diocese of Ossory before fleeing a city soon to become the confederate capital, posed two telling questions: ‘(1) Whether every Papist that is subject to his Majesty is not bound to assist and defend his King in all his dangers? (2) Whether the King should not protect his Subjects that are Papists in all their dangers, so far as by the Law he ought to do it; and accept of their service when himself is environed with dangers?’36 Williams was not above reading rebellion in comparative terms, and not to English advantage, their defection ‘a rebellion far greater and more odious than either Popish, Irish, or any Sect or Nation of the world hath hitherto produced’. English rebels ‘hath justified all the Romanists, and shewed themselves worse Christians, less Subjects, and viler Traitors than all the Papists are’,37 sinners against the light. It was not a view Protestants in Ireland were necessarily inclined to share. The royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus asked its readers to ‘take special notice, what opinion the Protestants in Ireland have of the Rebels in England; for there is no greater evidence in the world that His Majesty now fights in defence of the Protestant Religion, then That those English Gentlemen who went into Ireland, and hazarded their lives for the Protestant Religion’, the army despatched in 1642, now freed up by the cessation, ‘should now come over to assist His Majesty in the same cause against Rebellious Brownists and Anabaptists’.38 But in practice, the returning rank and file proved all too prone to defect to parliament’s side.39 For some Protestants in Ireland, the cessation was not a means to preservation, but to a lingering defeat, their best hope renewed war, even if that might be an attachment to a wider covenanter alliance, embracing three kingdoms. Agents were despatched to Oxford, ready to contest the claims of confederate delegates angling for a settlement with the king. They felt rebuffed. Rather than 35  A declaration made by the earle of New-Castle … as also a just vindication of himself from the unjust aspersion laid upon him, for entertaining some popish recusants in his forces (York, 1642/1643), p. 5. 36  Griffith Williams, The discovery of mysteries: or, the plots and practices of a prevalent faction in the present parliament (Oxford, 1643), p. 70. 37  Williams, Discovery of mysteries, pp. 2, 102. 38  Mercurius Aulicus 48, 23–29 July 1643, p. 686. 39  Hopper, Turncoats and renegadoes, pp. 89–91.

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have their unrelenting terms assessed in terms of law, justice and their own security, they were being pressed to consider ‘What prudentially was fit for his Majesty to do, seeing the Protestants were not in a condition to defend themselves, and that the King would not admit the Protestants to join with … any … that had taken the Covenant’.40 It was intentionally to counter moves ‘against making or consenting to any Peace with the Rebels’ that A letter from a Protestant in Ireland … upon occasion of the treaty in that kingdom was concocted, ‘pretended’ as being sent from Dublin ‘but made at Oxon and printed at London’ in November 1643.41 Readers were reminded, again, that ‘His Majesty is too much acquainted with the Royall duty of a King, to think he can depute His Office of protecting to other hands, and be excused, if by their ill managery a Nation (committed to his care) be lost’. The author took the voice of the Protestant Ireland to declare that the king ‘can no more give us away, and exclude us from His Protection, which if He excludes Himself from managing this War, or redeeming us from this War by Peace, He doth absolutely do, then we can put off our subjection, & say He shall be Our King no longer’.42 The inveterate pamphleteer James Howell, seeking to defend the king’s dealings with the Irish as he languished in the Tower, framed it as ‘a Rule, That a King can no more desert the protection of his own People, then they their subjection to him’.43 The Letter pushed its argument further, onto more treacherous ground. Might the royal duty of protection extend not only to loyal and dutiful subjects but to rebels, too? At least Irish rebels should be heard, like their English counterparts: ‘Must the King of England receive all Petitions, and the King of Ireland refuse all?’ Could it be true that if the Irish and Catholic rebels ‘repented now of that Design & having felt the smart of that Folly & Madness, desired to return to their Allegiance there can be 40  A ‘true narration’ of the Protestant agency was published in London in 1644 (as mandated by the Commons on 27 August) alongside a copy of the confederates’ ‘remonstrance of grievances’ to the King and a massive (eighty-page) response: The false remonstrance of the inhumane and bloody rebells of Ireland … together with an answer thereunto … also a true narration of the all the passages concerning the petition of the Protestants of Ireland … (London, 1644) (quoted at p. 130). 41  A letter from a Protestant in Ireland to a member of the House of Commons in England upon occasion of the treaty in that Kingdome (1643), pp. 1–2. The comments on publication are those of the collector George Thomason. 42  Letter from a Protestant, pp. 6, 7. 43  [James Howell,] Mercurius Hibernicus: or, a discourse of the late insurrection in Ireland … (Bristol, 1644), p. 6.

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no door open to Mercy and Oblivion?’ And if it was true, and the King had committed himself to rooting out not only Catholicism but Catholics from his realm, ‘would he not rob himself of an invaluable Treasure & strength in the loss of so many Subjects. … Is this your Proposition? No Rebellion must be extinguished but with the blood & extirpation of the Rebels’. This would hardly be a ‘prudent … politique position’, but even more so it would be fundamentally irreligious: it would rather befit ‘Turks and Infidels which have no reverence of the precious image of their Maker, but with the same temper behold the slaughter of a man and of a Horse’.44 Williams, too, professed himself repelled by the bloodthirstiness of parliamentarian opinion, their ‘unmerciful cruelty’. Such attitudes, he reckoned, drew strength from the application of scriptural passages such as Israel’s rooting out of the Canaanites or the call upon King Saul to slay Agag and his people, and were fitting companions to an unmerciful puritan soteriology, with its over-confident demarcation of the saved from the damned, and a resulting loss of rights to the reprobate or malignant. ‘I believe the first inventers of that Design to root out all the Papists in Ireland, and to get that Act to purchase all the Lands of the Rebels, had tasted too much of this bitter root of such destructive Doctrines.’45 Several hares were loose. This was more than a royalist readiness to paint their opponents as overpowered by their own zeal, or the sometimes angry, and sometimes mischievous paralleling of rebellions, as seen in the ‘wicked parable’ recounted in one royal declaration, which confronted readers with an Irish, rather than an English, parliament fallen prey to a majority who had ‘voted their religion and liberty to be in danger of extirpation’ and acted with pretended legality.46 Rather this was to face square­on a much more profound challenge than that posed by the employment of loyal Catholics, that of the reconciliation to service of outright rebels. The power to pardon could be considered one of the ‘marks of sovereignty’ in early seventeenth-century England,47 indeed, in some legal readings be reckoned a prerogative ‘so essential to the nature of monarchy 44  Letter from a Protestant, pp. 2, 3, 4, 5, 7. Cf. Howell, Mercurius Hibernicus, p. 8: ‘God forbid but the King of Ireland should receive his Subjects petitions, as well as the King of Scotland’. 45  Williams, The discovery of mysteries, pp. 52–53, 55. 46  Exact collection, 288–289; Conrad Russell, The causes of the English civil war (Oxford, 1990), p. 141. 47  D.  Alan Orr, Treason and the state: law, politics and ideology in the English civil war (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 35–39.

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that the king could not be deprived of them even by Act of Parliament (which means, of course, by his own consent)’.48 It would feature on many Royalists’ lists of the prerogatives of an English king.49 ‘God, that hath put power into the hand of Majesty, hath likewise planted Mercy in the heart of Sovereignty.’50 From the outbreak of the rising in Ireland, there had been a tendency, shared by some of those in power in Dublin and some men seeking power at Westminster, to circumscribe tightly the capacity of their king to bestow pardon on rebels.51 The Protestant agents at Oxford in 1644 could hardly deny the king’s right or power to pardon, and only insisted that earlier genuine offers had been spurned and that present pardon was undeserved.52 The king was well aware of the potential power, and potential strife, that the prerogative of mercy could unleash. Faced with one of the most anguished moments of his political life, the demand that he acquiesce in the death of his loyal servant, the earl of Strafford, in the spring of 1641, he had issued a pardon to a condemned English Catholic priest, which was recognized, and in some quarters condemned, as a precursor to such an act on Strafford’s behalf, one which might underdo all the accomplishments of condemnatory legal action.53 The king had made much of his offer of a ‘General Pardon’ as England lurched towards civil war, and of Westminster’s disdain for his offer.54 His ‘much advertized mercifulness’ has been recognized, alongside its tendency to shrivel somewhat under the blast of war.55 Certainly Charles’s wartime proclamations in England are punctuated with declarations of pardon. Across the winter of 1642–1643, he scattered them the length and breadth of the country, individual counties receiving their stereotyped assurances that ‘We are graciously pleased to attribute the Crimes and 48  Glenn Burgess, Absolute monarchy and the Stuart constitution New Haven, 1996), pp. 198–199, discussing Sir Edward Coke. 49  [Edward Hyde,] Transcendent and multiplied rebellion and treason discovered by the lawes of the land ([Oxford,] 1645), p. 15; [Sir John Spelman,] The case of our affaires, in law, religion, and other circumstances briefly examined, and presented to the conscience (Oxford, 1643), p. 3. 50  Quarles, Loyall convert, p. 7. 51  Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 1625–1642 (London, 1966), pp.  205–209, 229–233. 52  False remonstrance, pp. 17, 19, 21–22, 69–71. 53  John Adamson, The noble revolt: the overthrow of Charles I (London, 2007), pp. 162–163, 166. 54  Exact collection, pp. 110, 127–128. 55  Roy, ‘Royalist reputations’, pp. 92, 100.

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Offences of Our said Subjects of that County, to the Power and Faction of their Seducers’, blaming ‘the Malice, Industry, and Importunity of several’ (in fact, usually a mere handful of) ‘ill-affected and seditious Persons’.56 Pardons continued to be offered, to officers and soldiers who turned their coats, to members of the Lords and Commons who debunked from Westminster to Oxford,57 and by April 1645 to more or less all and sundry who turned in their rebel allegiance.58 A ‘general pardon without, or with exceptions, as shall be thought fit’ was offered as a component of an English peace settlement.59 There were limits to be sure.60 But royal pardon offered more than balm for the miscreant. The grace of forgiveness elevated the triple monarch and made relative the merits and demerits of his scattered subjects. The king could not be prevented from having mercy upon whom he would have mercy, not by law, and not by any warped morality. He could refigure not only the political, but the moral order, of his realms. Carefully mixed and applied pardon, protection and service could act as solvent of the patriotic causes arrayed against the king, or adhesive to reattach errant subjects.

III Royalism was all about regaining the prodigal son, but also about ensuring his elder brother did not fall too far into resentment. Wales poses particular questions for a ‘three kingdom’ discussion of royalism, whether in terms of the apparently near-universal choice for the king in 1642, the challenge of retaining support as the pressures of wartime were brought to bear there with particular force, and more broadly, in its relative neglect in histories written ‘in terms of kingdoms rather than peoples’.61 Set alongside other early modern kingdoms, much has been made of England’s 56  James F. Larkin ed., Stuart royal proclamations, volume 2: Royal proclamations of King Charles I, 1625–1646 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 806–849, 860–862, 880–882; the quotation is from that directed towards Essex (p.  845). For earlier offers of pardon see pp.  785–786, 790–794, 803–805. 57  Though see chapter two for the Oxford parliamentarians’ readiness to designate traitors. 58  Larkin ed., Stuart royal proclamations, ii, 889–890, 917–918, 1063. 59  King to the Westminster Lords and Commons, 4 July 1644, in Petrie ed., Letters, pp. 145–146. 60  For helpful comments see Hopper, Turncoats and renegadoes, pp. 45, 59–60, 83–84. 61  Mark Stoyle, West Britons: Cornish identities and the early modern British state (Exeter, 2002), p. 51.

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comparative uniformity in its laws and institutions, characterized by local participation as well as government initiative. If this could allow for a ready identification of English ‘kingdom’ and ‘nation’, it was a ‘kingdom’ which also included within its bounds a Welsh ‘nation’, distinct in its language and history, if at one in its engagement with the structures of government, civil and religious, in which their clergy were incorporated, their gentry ‘enmeshed’. If the Council in Wales and the Marches or the Court of Great Sessions operated only, or predominantly, in Wales, ‘there were no autonomous institutions to provide for any putative Welsh voice’.62 With perhaps 90% of its population communicating only in Welsh, ‘bilingual brokers’, often if not always gentry or clergy, have been accorded a vital role in mediating the political and religious debates which increasingly characterized the English portion of the shared polity, not least in print, and especially present in developed urban centres, lacking in Wales. Rather than bearers of the kind of puritan-patriot narrative spreading through parts of England, these clergymen and gentlemen were more likely to prove resistant to its claims, embedded within a ‘matrix’ of values shared with, rather than imposed upon, the wider population, elevating an ancient Welsh past and a present Welsh loyalty to monarchy and church.63 The gentry of north-east Wales could exemplify such attachments ‘east and west’,64 conflating not conflicting their attachments to Welsh tradition, the politics of England and, perhaps above all, of Protestant religion. Indeed, pre-war connexions of puritan-inclined gentry and clergy which aided parliamentarian mobilization in some parts of England faced similar Royalist connexions, supportive of the more ceremonialist innovations of the 1630s, and linking gentry families in different parts of Wales with the clerical products of Jesus College, Oxford.65

62  Lloyd Bowen, ‘Structuring particularist publics: logistics, language and early modern Wales’, Journal of British Studies 56 (2017), 754–772 (at 762). The case for Cornwall as a further exception is made in Stoyle, West Britons. 63  Lloyd Bowen, ‘Information, language and political culture in early modern Wales’, Past & Present 228 (2015), 125–158; Bowen, ‘News networks in early modern Wales’, History 102 (2017), 24–44; Bowen, ‘Structuring particularist publics’. 64  Sarah Ward Clavier, Royalism, religion and revolution: Wales 1640–1688 (Woodbridge, 2021) (quoted p. 3). 65  Philip Jenkins, ‘The Anglican church and the unity of Britain: the Welsh experience 1560–1714’ in S.G. Ellis & Sarah Barber eds, Conquest and union: fashioning a British state 1485–1725 (London, 1995), pp. 129–130.

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In Wales alone could it be said that a broadly supported ‘national religion’ proved a ready means to attach a nation to the King’s party, rather than detach much, of even most, of it from full allegiance. By ‘national religion’ might be meant that whole cluster of structures, liturgies and laws recognized or validated by civil authority, indeed entwined with its temporal political order, fittingly summed up in Sir Edward Hyde’s descriptor ‘Religion of State’.66 Or an identification of a people with a particular form of Christianity, a bundle of traditions, customs and practices which might connect to remembered moments in time or be mapped unto the national landscape. ‘Popular’ religion might partake of both. And in Wales they were aligned. More than that, the Welsh faith was at once that of the Church of England—sharing in its governance by bishops and ordered by its canons, doctrinal formulae and the liturgy of its prayer book—and understood as that of an ancient Welsh, indeed ‘British’ past, mediated by language, above all Welsh translations of both Bible and Book of Common Prayer, and sacred landscape. That this was so was the result of sustained effort by reformers to align Protestantism with a Welsh inheritance, and the gradualist, adaptive manner in which Welsh Protestantism took hold,67 until Catholicism, if still contesting its place as the faith of the people, had less potency than ‘anti-popery’, and where puritanism remained on the margins, geographically and linguistically.68 Such an alignment could be widely found in England, but so could conditions where the current form of national religion was reckoned to have slipped its moorings in law, with ‘innovations’ increasing in number and prevalence under Charles I, or where the national repudiation of ‘popery’ needed to extend to the trappings remaining within the practices of the church, local or national. The north Wales petition of March 1642 in support of episcopacy chimed with the language of some conformist English petitions, but the appeal to sustain an order of bishops ‘which came into this Island with the first plantation of Religion here … with the first 66  Though one need not subscribe to his arguments to find the terminology useful: B.  H. G.  Wormald, Clarendon: politics, historiography and religion 1640–1660 (new ed., Cambridge, 1989), pp. 303–306. 67  Katherine K. Olson, ‘“Slow and cold in the true service of God”: popular beliefs and practices, conformity and Reformation in Wales, c.1530–1600’ in Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin & Robert Armstrong ed., Christianities in the early modern Celtic world (Basingstoke, 2014), pp. 92–107. 68  Lloyd Bowen, ‘Wales and religious reform in the Long Parliament, 1640–1642’ Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion 12 (2005), 36–59.

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dawning of the day very near or in the time of the Apostles themselves’ harked to a past before the coming of the English to Britain. Here the dangers of ‘Innovation’ were set against the ‘public service of God’ found in the ‘public liturgy’, one not only practised but defended ‘since the blessed time of Reformation’,69 of course present to the Welsh population in their own tongue. Royalism might speak to, and in, Wales in English, literally, in petitions and declarations, but metaphorically too, its appeal to ‘known laws’ being to English common laws, the institutions it invoked paralleling those operational in English counties or amongst English armies. In August 1642, as he gathered support in York, petitions reached the king pledging service and requesting protection, in terms which oozed legality from every pore. One, purporting to represent the ‘Knights, Gentry, Justices of the Peace, Ministers and Freeholders, of the Principality of Wales’, blended calls on the king to extend his ‘Protection’ against any ‘Rule, Order, or Ordinance’ which Westminster might try to impose without his assent, with pledges to ‘hazard … Lives and Fortunes, for the maintenance and defence’ of his ‘sacred Person, Honour, Estate, and Lawful Prerogative’, was printed in tandem with a comparable petition from Lincolnshire.70 In Denbighshire, the ‘petition for protection against the orders and ordinances of Parliament’ was directly linked to royalist mobilization, using institutions familiar in England, too. It was the trained bands of Denbighshire which the king reviewed at Wrexham in October 1642, and the county JPs to whom he directed his orders, along with the newly nominated commissioners of array. Welsh regiments and volunteers were summoned to Chester, even as they were informed they would be regimented as a guard for the Prince of Wales.71 Translation could and did occur. In Flintshire, the commissioners of array ordered that ‘every minister in every parish church’ issue a call to mobilize troops ‘in the vulgar language’, a ‘vernacular dissemination’ likely to have been replicated 69  The humble petition of the gentry, clergy and other inhabitants … of … the six shires of Northwales (London, 1641/1642). 70  Two petitions presented to the Kings most excellent majestie at Yorke… (London, 1642), pp. 3–5. Its printing again as A petition of the gentry, ministers and freeholders of the county of Flint… with his majesties most gracious answer… (London, 1642) is perhaps indicative of coordinated effects across Welsh counties: Lloyd Bowen, The politics of the principality: Wales, c.1603–1642 (Cardiff, 2007), p. 250n. 71  Robert Williams ed., ‘An account of the civil war in North Wales … from the MS … of William Maurice’, Archaeologia Cambrensis 1 (1846), 33–34.

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elsewhere, perhaps extending to the whole raft of proclamations and declarations distributed to leading royalists for propagation.72 Royalism was credible in Wales in 1642. It offered a way of thinking about politics that could carry conviction, that could mesh with received, even ingrained notions. But it was also plausible, its very prevalence among mediating élites and popular endorsement rendering it deserving of confidence as a reasonable, even reliable, pathway to attaining the goals it proposed, of upholding peace, justice, order and true religion. Both the readiness of the parliamentarian press to recycle unflattering Welsh stereotypes and infuse them with religious and political characteristics, depicting a people as addicted to its ‘litanies’ as its king, and the readiness of Mercurius Aulicus to present loyalty as almost inherent in the Welsh, could reinforce Welsh royalist attachments.73 But some caution is needed, too, especially if no plausibility gap was to open up, in Wales as elsewhere when Royalists held sway. Warnings against assuming too dominant or enthusiastic a Welsh military participation even in 164274 can be set alongside careful local studies which have charted reluctant recruitment, tax resistance and disaffection, at least in counties like Radnorshire or Monmouthshire where parliamentary incursions grew over time,75 and indeed where the quartering of royalist outsiders, like the northern English cavalry in 1644, could prove almost as oppressive.76 That Wales and adjacent parts of England were at once more securely royalist than most other English territories made them bear a proportionately high share of the costs of the wider war effort, and the site of the full gamut of royalist experiments in governance, from efforts to uphold at least the outward forms of legality and tradition more thoroughly than parliamentarians, to a concentration of control in the hands of regionally powerful ‘warlords’

 Bowen, ‘Information, language’, 152–153.  Lloyd Bowen, ‘Representations of Wales and the Welsh during the civil wars and interregnum’, Historical Research 77 (2004), 358–376. 74  M. D. G. Wanklyn & Peter Young, ‘A king in search of soldiers: Charles I in 1642: a rejoinder’, Historical Journal 24 (1981), 149–151. 75  Keith Parker, Radnorshire from civil war to restoration: a study of the county and its environs 1640–1660 in a regional setting (Little Logaston, 2000); Jeremy Knight, Civil War & restoration in Monmouthshire (Little Logaston, 2005). 76  Martyn Bennett, ‘Dampnified villagers: taxation in Wales during the first civil war’, Welsh history review 19 (1998), 29–43. 72 73

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or tendencies towards anarchic extraction not too far removed from outright plunder.77 In contested zones, like the English Midlands, patterns of allegiance might draw upon deep-laid patterns and be susceptible to local partisan activism, but vital too was the role of garrisons in controlling the dissemination of propaganda. Combatant’ claims were plausible only if matched with a capacity to protect civilians, not only from opposing forces but from the actions of ‘friendly’ troops.78 In the case of the territory surrounding the Lichfield garrison in Staffordshire, royalist governance has been reckoned as becoming more regular and more effective over time, even into 1645, offering some certainty, not least in tax demands, and thereby enhancing royalist support locally, even as royalist territorial control across England was diminishing.79 But there was a price to pay. Zealous in sustaining the royalist cause in his native north-west Wales, Archbishop John Williams lamented how it was ‘utterly eaten up’ with garrisons which ‘swallow up’ local resources, but ‘to no purpose’, unable ‘to look an Enemy in the Face’. Their ‘Governors drink their Ale in these heap of stones’, not allowing any army to quarter nearby, ‘where they might do service’, lest they compete for contributions. Arguably, these were keeping their little corners secure for the king, above all by providing security for the local population, at least from all but themselves. But Williams feared the king ‘hath lost so much of England upon this foot and Reckoning’, local gain being outweighed by national loss as resources, human or financial, were not concentrated in those larger armies which alone could deliver victory.80 Perhaps the propensity of parliamentarians to publicize their divisions through London print has dignified their debates, making of them clashes of ‘parties’, perhaps even with principles, while consigning those of the royalists to ‘faction’ or blinkered localism. Like its rivals, royalism could

 Ronald Hutton, The royalist war effort 1642–1646 (2nd edition, London, 1999).  Simon Osborne, ‘Popular religion, culture and politics in the Midlands, c.1638–1646’ (PhD dissertation, University of Warwick, 1993), pp. 345–346, 357, 366–367, 377–378, 383. 79  Ian Atherton, ‘Royalist finances in the English civil war: the case of Lichfield garrison 1643–5’ Midland history 33 (2008), 43–67. 80  Williams to Ormond, c. Jan. 1646, in B. H. Beedham ed., ‘The unpublished correspondence between archbishop Williams and the marquis of Ormond’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, third series, 15:60 (1869), 334. 77 78

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witness initiatives, significant even in their failure,81 to revitalize the cause by reenergizing commitment and redirecting resources, indeed to save its soul, tempted to elevate means over ends, and succumb to arbitrary and oppressive extortion. The ‘One and All’ proclamation, issued at a moment of optimism and opportunity in September 1644, called on the populations within the king’s quarters, or those areas through which his advancing army would pass, to rise up and join him, while those in parliament-held territories shake loose from the ‘Tyranny of their fellow subjects’ and ‘march in warlike manner to assist us’.82 Failure as this may have been, it stirred energies, from the English south-west to the Marches, with aspirations to leverage war weariness towards Royalist recruitment, to revamp Royalism by ensuring it remained earthed in local communities and their traditional leaderships. Here was opportunity, but also danger. Regional gains might imperil national priorities. Royalist command faced uncomfortable choices in pressing central, and professional, control, without losing hope of refreshed commitment.83 And war weariness could turn militant in its repudiating the burdens and intrusion of war. Resulting ‘Clubmen’ movements could take multiple forms, by no means always ‘neutralist’ between opposing camps, and in some instances at least could speak a royalist dialect or even, as in Worcestershire, appeal to the authority of royalist institutions and proclamations, if against unwelcome demands of the royalist war machine.84 Just where such tensions could end may be seen in Glamorgan in 1645. A king under pressure faced conflicting complaints from the county’s commissioners of array, local men who had sustained his cause with relative success, and without accumulating much by way of unwelcome additional powers, and those of centrally appointed officers in the region,

81  A notable Parliamentarian instance was the London-based drive for a ‘General Rising’ in 1643: David R. Como, Radical parliamentarians and the English civil war (Oxford, 2018), chapter six. 82  Larkin ed., Stuart royal proclamations, ii, 1046–1049. 83  Hutton, Royalist war effort, pp. 156–159; David Underdown, Somerset in the Civil War and Interregnum (Newton Abbot, 1973), pp. 79–82, 92. 84  Hutton, Royalist war effort, pp. 159–163. For important remarks on the differing allegiances of popular movements directed against unwelcome soldiery, see A. J. Hopper, ‘The Clubmen of the West Riding of Yorkshire during the First Civil War: “Bradford Club-Law”’, Northern History 36 (2000), 59–72.

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frustrated with shortfalls in recruitment or supply.85 His response, in a call for ‘an unanimous & universal Association’ among the counties of South Wales, rallying ‘all the Inhabitants … able to bear Arms’, proposed drawing off some recruits under experienced officers, while leaving others to defend their localities under acceptable local commanders. It was a call he repeated to the counties of north Wales, in both instances waving the threat of an approaching Scottish army, ‘All Wales being, as We are informed, designed by the Rebels at Westminster as a more particular prey & reward to those Invaders’. But in Glamorgan, at least, as his secretary-­ at-­war Sir Edward Walker reflected, the upshot was that ‘like unskilful Magicians, we by this means raised such Devils as we could never lay again’.86 Gathered as a self-proclaimed ‘Peaceable Army’, they pressed their advantage, but overreached, and by early autumn had been overawed by a returning king desperate to give first place to the interests of his remaining field army. Enough among them succumbed to the blandishments of a knot of Westminster-connected figures to tip south-east Wales into the parliamentary camp.87 The Glamorgan episode is an extreme instance of a Royalism which remained credible in its claims to represent entrenched religious and political values, but decreasingly plausible in its capacity to deliver, at least without submerging those values beneath waves of oppression, and of disorder. Any credible attempt to rally Wales to a national-confessional cause could hardly exclude Prayer-Book Protestantism. Glamorgan was soon in arms against parliamentary attempts to impose a new religious order, and the quelling of revolt in 1646 included promises to ‘never urge any oath or covenant unto tender consciences’, ‘secure … honour and encourage the religious learned Clergy’ ‘and for the Common Prayer-Book we shall not disturb any in the use of it’.88 These could hardly be honoured, nor were they. By the time renewed revolt had broken out in 1647, as much 85  Letters between commissioners of Array and the regional commander, Sir Charles Gerard, March–May 1645, in John Matthews ed., Cardiff Records (6 vols, Cardiff, 1898–1911), VI, xxxiv–xxxvi; S.  A. Raymond, ‘The Glamorgan Arraymen, 1642–1645’, Morgannwg 24 (1980), 9–30. 86  W.  W. E.  Wynn ed., ‘Correspondence during the Great Rebellion’, Archaeologia Cambrensis fourth series, 6 (1875), 311; Cardiff Records, VI, xli–xliv, xxxix–xli. 87  Hutton, Royalist war effort, pp. 183–187; Stephen K. Roberts, ‘How the West was Won: Parliamentary Politics, Religion and the Military in south Wales, 1642–1649’, Welsh history review 21 (2003), 646–674. 88  Historical Manuscripts Commission, Portland MSS, i (London, 1891), 351–352.

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of England as well as Wales descended into a fresh spiral of civil war, echoes of the 1642 petition could be heard in the declaration, which challenged efforts ‘to put down the Book of Common-prayer in these parts, as they have done already in the rest of the Kingdom, which will be more wanted here, then in other parts, because the Book of Common-prayer is the sole comfort of the people here, and their way to attain the knowledge of the Principles of Religion’.89 Even in Wales, circumstances might, in time, drive some religious conservatives to accept parliamentary-Presbyterian options as a protection against worse perils of a collapse of all unity and order in religion.90 But the Welsh experience is of a match early made between Royalism and widely held national and religious aspirations and values, the challenge facing the king being that of rendering it not only secure but strong.

IV If Royalist language could be used for apparently incompatible ends, as was true too among covenanters, confederates or parliamentarians, then steps needed to be taken to regulating the acceptable limits of allegiance, not least through the binding of consciences through oaths and covenants. Wales was not exempt. The Welsh parliamentary commander, Sir Thomas Middleton, claimed that a Council of War in July 1643 took steps to impose an oath to uphold the established church, the king’s power and prerogative, and the just privileges of parliament, in defiance of forces ‘traitorously and Rebelliously raised’ against the king, his loyal subjects and the known laws of the land. He asserted that a printed order was circulated across the counties under the command of Arthur, Lord Capel, by means of JPs and commissioners of array, thence through rural deans to all clergy who were to tender it to ‘all Parishioners of the age of sixteen years and upwards’, taking the names of both swearers and refusers, and sending them back up the chain of command to Capel.91 It was not the first nor last oath or protestation employed by royalists in Wales and the Marches,92  The declaration of colonel Poyer and colonel Powell (London, 1648), pp. 5–6.  Lloyd  Bowen, ‘Preaching and politics in the Welsh Marches, 1643–1663: the case of Alexander Griffith’, Historical Research 94 (2021), 28–50. 91  A declaration published by Sir Thomas Middleton … setting forth the illegality and incongruity of a pernicious oath and protestation (1644), pp. 1–2. Capel’s command covered the six counties of North Wales plus Cheshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire. 92  Clavier, Royalism, religion and revolution, pp. 163, 181, 185. 89 90

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and has its equivalents elsewhere. In Cornwall and Devon, too, men over sixteen were required to take a protestation ‘before the Minister of the Parish’ to similar ends, folded into plans for the creation of a regional Association, targeted against the garrison at Plymouth, and resisting ‘all Forces of Scots, invaders, and others’ unlawfully levied.93 Yet more local ‘protestations’ could be used to bind communities, like those of captured towns in Pembrokeshire, to provide active support and deny it to the enemy.94 Royalists were not above pressing the contrast between the raft of ‘Oaths, Covenants and Protestations’ imposed by their opponents, and a king who ‘applies no Anti-Covenants to His followers’, who sponsored ‘Voluntary’ not ‘constrained’ bonds, and ones compatible with ‘the known lawful Oaths’ of Allegiance and of Supremacy, in turn grounded in statute law in England.95 Not that royalists had been slow to devise or impose oaths, ‘every Soldier’ being called upon to pledge faith to the king and obedience to his lord general ‘in this war … against … Rebel-Subjects’.96 In the aftermath of the 1643 cessation, the king was insistent that any troops despatched from Ireland for his service take the same ‘protestation’ as was used in England.97 What seems to have been intended was a variant of the ‘Sacred Oath or covenant’, ‘to be taken by all His Majesties Loyal Subjects’, and dated a mere three days after the royal proclamation condemning Parliament’s Vow and Covenant, though evidence is lacking for its widespread imposition. It recited uncontentious ambitions, upholding ‘the true Protestant Religion established in the Church of England’, the king’s ‘Sacred Person … just powers and prerogatives’ and the liberties and privileges of parliament, while pursuing ‘the peace and quietness of the Kingdom of England’ and subjects’ retention of ‘their liberty and property according to the Law of the land’.98 93  The Association, Agreement and Protestation of the Counties of Cornwall and Devon (Oxford, 1643/1644). 94  Hopper, Turncoats and renegadoes, pp. 123–124; J. R. Phillips, Memoirs of civil war in Wales and the Marches (2 vols, London, 1874), ii, 83–84, 84–85, 119–121. 95  Letter from a Protestant, p.  8; Certaine observations upon the two contrary covenants (Oxford, 1643), p. 5; Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the national covenant: state oaths, Protestantism and the political nation, 1553–1682 (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 69–73. 96  Military orders and articles established by his Majestie… (Oxford, 1642), p. 13. 97  Bodleian Carte Ms 6, f. 407. For drafts and orders to enforce the oath in Ireland see Carte Ms 7, f. 428; Ms 8, ff 374, 376, 378. 98  A sacred oath or covenant (Oxford, 1643); Vallance, Revolutionary England, p. 57.

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What was lacking here was the capacity of rival oaths and covenants, not only in their content but in the process whereby they were proclaimed, enacted and, not least, interpreted, to carry their subscribers forward as participants in religious and national renewal.99 Indeed, there was a defensive quality to royalists oaths, a tendency to turn from generalities to specifics more in what they renounced, from inappropriate thoughts, like acknowledging parliamentary measures enacted without royal consent, to improper actions, like divulging information to those in arms against the king.100 In Ireland, where the English oath of allegiance was not in legal force, and with Protestant support for the king’s administration leaching away towards the covenanting coalition, the Dublin council drew on a battery of spiritual as well as legal advisers to frame an oath testifying to Charles’s lawful rule of Ireland, pledging the duty to ‘the uttermost of my power and ability by all lawful ways and means to defend’ the king, his forces, ‘good Subjects and Government’, but also renouncing the Solemn League and Covenant.101 As war progressed, ‘protestations’ multiplied and clauses swelled: that to be imposed on ‘all persons’ across the border counties and into Wales in 1645 added denial of the ‘power of the Pope or Parliament’ to depose the king ‘or absolve me from my natural allegiance, and obedience’, detestation of the Solemn League and Covenant, and determination to ‘hinder popular tumults, risings, rendezvouses, meetings, confederacies, and associations of the people, towns, hundreds, and countries’, as Clubmen made their presence felt. The result might be

99  Edward Vallance, ‘“An holy and sacramentall paction”: federal theology and the Solemn League and Covenant in England’, English Historical Review 116 (2001), 61–64; Laura A. M. Stewart, Rethinking the Scottish revolution: Covenanted Scotland 1637–1651 (Oxford, 2016), chapter two; John Morrill, ‘An Irish Protestation? Oaths and the Confederation of Kilkenny’ in Michael J.  Braddick & Phil Withington eds., Popular culture and political agency in early modern England and Ireland (Woodbridge, 2017), pp. 249–250; Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic reformation in Ireland: the mission of Rinuccini 1645–1649 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 148–149, 166. 100  Sacred oath or covenant. 101  Bodleian Carte Ms 11, f. 40. The drafting process can be seen in Carte Ms 9, ff. 374, 375, 378; Ms 11, ff. 42, 43. Extracts were reprinted in London: A declaration of the lords and gentry of the provinces of Leinster and Munster … with the substance of an oath… (London, 1644), final page.

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resentment at exercises which seemed to tarnish rather than burnish loyalty.102 Whatever else they might accomplish, royalist oaths kept attention on the king, rendering concrete and particular the personal bond of subject to monarch.103 For more than a century, state oaths in England had evolved, layering loyalty to the confessional state over medieval notions of fealty to the king, but could still be construed as loyalty oaths to the monarch, not least for his or her personal protection.104 Even the Protestation produced by parliament in May 1641 could be read as giving equal weight to the defence of the king and of true religion, whatever the intentions of those behind its first draft.105 The genius of Scottish covenanting in an earlier age had laid precisely in its capacity to tie tightly together the tradition of banding in the cause of religion and the defence of royal authority,106 and in 1638 there had been hopes that a new King’s Covenant might restore that link. Royalist oath-taking in the 1640s was an exercise in excavating the roots of allegiance and ensuring their continued health. To that end, nothing was more important than one of the defining legal judgements of early seventeenth-century English law, ‘Calvin’s case’, sparked by questions around the meaning of allegiance now that Scotland and England shared a monarch, and using as a test case a Scottish-born infant, Robert Colville, heir to property in England.107 To turn around Conrad Russell’s insight that ‘a very large proportion of the Parliamentary arguments in 1642 seem to have been drawn from 102  The diary and papers of Henry Townshend 1640–1663 ed. Stephen Porter, Stephen K. Roberts & Ian Roy (Bristol, 2014), pp. 34, 187–188; John Washbourn ed., Bibliotheca Gloucestrensis: a collection of scarce and curious tracts (Gloucester, 1825), 145–146; Hutton, Royalist war effort, pp. 170–171. 103  A case made in Ann Hughes, ‘The king, the parliament and the localities during the English civil war’, Journal of British Studies 24 (1985), 236–263, which argues for a greater capacity by parliament to harmonize local and national concerns, in both structural and ideological terms. 104  Edward Vallance, ‘Loyal or rebellious? Protestant Associations in England, 1584–1696’, Seventeenth Century 17 (2002), 1–23. 105  John Walter, Covenanting citizens: the Protestation oath and popular political culture in the English Revolution (Oxford, 2017), pp. 42–44, 47–49. 106  Jane E. A. Dawson, ‘Bonding, religious allegiance and covenanting’, in Steve Boardman & Julian Goodare eds, Kings, lords and men in Scotland and Britain 1300–1625 (Edinburgh, 2014) pp. 169–70. 107  Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland 1603–1608 (Edinburgh, 1986), pp. 148–75.

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those of the losing side in Calvin’s case’, arguments which attested to the growth and suppleness of ideas of impersonal allegiance,108 the royalist position was more emphatically aligned with the winning argument.109 This was not just that allegiance was due to the ‘natural’ person of the monarch, the individual human inseparable from the kingly office. It was that oaths encapsulated an immemorial allegiance which would be embodied in the whole evolving order of laws through which the political body of the king had grown to maturity. ‘Whatsoever is due by the law or constitution of man, may be altered: But natural ligeance or obedience of the subject to the Sovereign cannot be altered; ergo natural ligeance or obedience to the Sovereign is not due by the law or constitution of man’ but ‘was due by the Law of nature many thousand years before any Law of man was made’.110 The inseparability of the king’s two bodies made of ‘natural’ allegiance a binding commitment to the whole legal order which constituted the body politic. Thus it was the laws that gave form to allegiance, in the first instance through legally mandated oaths. Indeed, it was possible to depict the forms in which allegiance had been expressed through oaths, from the time of King Arthur to the then-new oath of allegiance.111 Even without a personal oath-taking, every subject ‘is presumed by Law to be sworn to the King’ as he was sworn to his subjects through the oath taken at his coronation, ‘which oath he taketh in his natural person’.112 For Royalists, the obligation was at once personal and universal, at least amongst men: ‘every single man of twelve years of age ought by Law’ to swear allegiance,113 ‘every Subject and Christian within his Majesties Kingdoms’ was ‘bound by nature and grace’ to maintain the king’s rights, while ‘all of any quality, and the better sort have taken an 108  Russell, Causes, p. 158. For instances of Calvin’s case being deployed, to different ends, by parliamentary writers: Orr, Treason and the state, pp. 109–110, 167–168. 109  Vallance, Revolutionary England, pp. 61–62. 110  The selected writings and speeches of Sir Edward Coke ed. Steve Sheppard (3 vols., Indianapolis, Indiana, 2003), i, 224–225. 111  David Martin Jones, ‘Sir Edward Coke and the interpretation of lawful allegiance in seventeenth-century England’ in Allen D. Boyer ed., Law, liberty and parliament: selected essays on the writings of Sir Edward Coke (Indianapolis, 2004), pp. 91–93. 112  Selected writings of Sir Edward Coke ed. Sheppard, i, 175–179, 190 (quoted). 113  [Spelman,] Case of our affaires, p. 2. Spelman was referring to a requirement to swear allegiance which long predated legislation enacting the Oaths of Supremacy (1560) and Allegiance (1606).

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oath to maintain it’. If not all had actually taken an oath of allegiance, ‘all born in his Majesties Dominions are bound to it; of all it may be actually exacted’.114 The royal proclamation of June 1642, urging the king’s sole right by law to raise forces or levy war, invoked the authority of the Calvin’s case judgement to insist that subjects’ ‘Allegiance is due unto the natural Person of their Prince’.115 Westminster’s Vow and Covenant was condemned as contrary to the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, drawing subjects from their ‘natural Allegiance … to which they are or ought to be sworn, and are bound by the known Laws of the Land, albeit they are not sworn…’.116 The parliamentary assembly at Oxford reiterated the requirements of ‘Natural Allegiance’, which, like the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, bound subjects to the ‘Natural Person’ of the king, and which could be dispensed with by no other oath or covenant.117 Oaths and laws were allegiance made manifest, defining but not confining its vital power to procure protection and induce service. Legal oaths offered certainty, even as English royalism pinned itself to the upholding ‘the letter of the law’ against parliamentary recourse to ‘necessity’.118 One divine thought it a resolution of the problem of deciding to whom applied the biblical injunction to obey ‘the Supreme Governor’ to suggest that though ‘England is not named in that Epistle of Saint Peter, yet we have the matter … cleared by Act of Parliament’ in the enactment of the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, ‘and I hope that is authentical with us’.119 But it reached back to something more primal than written law. Calvin’s case reached back to a ‘protection which the Law of Nature giveth’ on the basis of ‘natural ligeance’, which extended even to the outlaw condemned by national laws of later origin’; nor did mere geography set bounds to 114  John Maxwell, Sacro-sancta regum majestas: or, the sacred and royall prerogative of Christian Kings… (Oxford, 1644), pp. 165, 178. 115  A proclamation forbidding all levies of force … (Oxford, 1642), p. 4 for a marginal reference to Coke’s report; Larkin ed., Stuart royal proclamations, ii, 770–775. 116  Larkin ed., Stuart royal proclamations, ii, 918–920. 117  ‘The Declaration of the Lords and Commons …concerning their endeavours … for the Peace of the Kingdom, and the Reasons enforcing their absence from Westminster’, John Rushworth, Historical collections (8 vols, London, 1721), v, 594. 118  Alan Cromartie, ‘The constitutionalist revolution: the transformation of political culture in early Stuart England’, Past & Present 163 (1999), 113. Protestant royalism in Ireland also sought to apply legal precision to the defence of their position: Armstrong, ‘Ormond and Protestant royalism’, pp. 130–134. 119  Thomas Warmstry, Ramus Olivae or an humble motion for peace (Oxford, 1642), p. 36.

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service.120 Scottish Royalists put on trial for their lives for their defiance of the laws of the Covenanting regime would fall back on the plea that ‘by natural Allegiance (from which no Power under Heaven can loose me) I am bound to serve and obey His Majesty whensoever he calls upon me’, ‘my adhering to my Prince in his distress by his special Command was incumbent to me by my Oath of Allegiance, and in Duty, Conscience and Honour’.121 Royalism had the capacity to transcend nation and church, even as it had the obligation to draw all subjects back to the protection and service of Charles I. How it might struggle towards those ends will be the subject of the next two chapters.

 Selected writings of Sir Edward Coke ed. Sheppard, i, 187–188, 199–200.  Practicks of the laws of Scotland … collected by Sir Robert Spotiswoode (Edinburgh, 1706), pp. xi, xxvi. 120 121

CHAPTER 2

Royalism Reborn: Scotland

A Scot within a beast is no disguise.    No more let Ireland brag her harmless nation Fosters no venom, since the Scots plantation. Nor can ours feigned antiquity maintain: Since they came in, England hath wolves again.1

Thus John Cleveland’s blistering ‘Rebel Scot’, his response to the Scottish incursion into England in 1644. A few years earlier, the English reading or listening public were being barraged with depictions and images of Ireland which rendered it anything but ‘harmless’, weltered in blood and barbarity, rife with ‘venomous’ creatures in human guise, those Irish Catholics portrayed inflicting destruction upon the Protestant population of the island. Yet by the spring of 1644, Archbishop Williams, then in Oxford, considering the recent cessation of arms in Ireland and its repudiation of the ceasefire by the largely Scottish covenanting interest in Ulster, echoed Cleveland’s appraisal. Writing to the King’s Lord Lieutenant, the Marquess of Ormond, he surmised that ‘If you could rid that island from those venomous men of the North, as nature hath done

1  John Cleveland, ‘The Rebell Scot’, in The poems of John Cleveland eds. Brian Morris & Eleanor Withington (Oxford, 1967), p. 30.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Armstrong, Royalism and the Three Stuart Kingdoms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42099-3_2

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it from venomous beasts, you might live happily within yourselves, and be the most blessed neighbours that ever this kingdom had’.2 But there was hope. In October 1643, Mercurius Aulicus, pondering the consequence of the recently negotiated Solemn League and Covenant, detected at least one good ‘effect’ of ‘this Covenant of theirs’. Some twenty-eight of the ‘best Nobility of Scotland’ had ‘solemnly engaged themselves in a Bond’ to ‘impede and oppose with our friends and followers, the raising of Forces for invading England’ and to ‘keep and defend our Houses against all Forces whatsoever that would oblige Us to the contrary hereof’. Surely this ‘will blast their vast hopes built upon their Covenant’.3 For Aulicus had detected the onset a reconstruction of Scottish royalism from the debris of collapsed schemes of the previous two years. The challenges were considerable, given the consolidation of Covenanter control in Scotland itself, but what emerged was not just a party of sufficient scale and energy to fight the king’s battles, but one which professed to do so in terms which matched with the patriotic and confessional aspirations of the nation. This was a full-blooded Scottish loyalism compatible with a wider, three-kingdom allegiance, which left space for English royalism, too, to play the patriotic card—against their fellow-Scots—to best effect. England could combat the infection spread from Cleveland’s ‘nation epidemical’, even as Scotland would be purged of its toxins. Not surprisingly, and not unfairly, it has been the weaknesses of Scottish royalism which have been most apparent in accounts of the Covenanting years in Scotland, while the startling military successes of the 1644–1645 campaigns of James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, and Alasdair MacColla [MacDonald] have mostly been no more than noises off, if rather exaggerated ones, in the wider drama of the king’s party, its fortunes centred in England. The causes of royalist failure in Scotland have been enumerated: its armies roved but lacked the wherewithal to secure safe zones to nurture and replenish support; its leadership, confined in size, proved quarrelsome in disposition; its very victories cut wounds deep into the Scottish body politic. Whatever plausibility attended royalist pretences to promote Scottish laws and religion, peace and order, its 2  Williams to Ormond, 7 March 1643/1644, in Thomas Carte ed., A collection of original letters and papers, concerning the affairs of England, from the year 1641 to 1660… (London, 1739), i, 46. 3  Mercurius Aulicus 41, 8–14 Oct., 1643, p. 571.

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credibility surely perished in the sack of Aberdeen,4 its legacy a deepened animosity between the populations of Gaelic and Lowland Scotland.5 It was a far cry from the years 1642–1643, when Montrose was one of those contesting the careful strategy of the Hamilton brothers, James, Marquess (later duke) of Hamilton and William, earl of Lanark, in possession of the king’s confidence and operating within the Covenanting regime, aimed towards keeping Scotland united and outside the quarrels of England. It was yet more distant from royalist efforts in 1638–1641, when Montrose had emerged into political prominence, energetic among the leadership of the emergent Covenanting movement, and Hamilton had striven, in the king’s name, to calm, curtail or curb the Covenanting dynamic. The years from 1638 were those of Scottish royalism’s first, and greatest, failure. It was above all a failure of politics, a sequence of poor, even fatal, choices made mostly at the behest of the monarch himself, one whose faculties were dimmed to the apprehension of the values, anxieties and aspirations which confronted him, but alert to the prospect of deploying English and Irish arms to intimidate or coerce his Scottish subjects.6 On his side, the king mustered no counterpart to the robust, sophisticated and broad-based English royalism which crystallized in 1642; rather, swords and pens in the service of the king were too often in the hands of Catholics, west Highlanders and Islanders, or convinced episcopalians to challenge a Covenanting mastery of a far wider array of Scottish minds, hands and hearts, both geographical and social. Charles had not only surrendered ideological but institutional space. The last shreds of the Scottish state securely in royal hands were lost in the comprehensive settling of accounts in 1641 in Edinburgh.7 The first iteration of royalism, which had sought to challenge Covenanting from the edges and the outside, now gave place to a second, one which took the necessary strategy not of damming the course of the Covenanting cause, 4  Gordon DesBrisay, ‘“The civill warrs did overrun all”: Aberdeen, 1630–1690’ in E. Patricia Dennison, David Ditchburn & Michael Lynch eds, Aberdeen before 1800: a new history (East Linton, 2002), pp. 258–260. 5  Edward J. Cowan, Montrose: for covenant and king (London, 1977), p. 233. 6  For outstanding analyses, see Peter Donald, An uncounselled king: Charles I and the Scottish troubles 1637–1641 (Cambridge, 1990) and John Scally, ‘The political career of James, third marquis and first duke of Hamilton (1606–1649) to 1643’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1992). 7  David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution 1637–1644 (Newtown Abbot, 1973), pp. 233–242.

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but diverting it, channelling it into support of the king, or at least away from sustaining his enemies of England. For some, as among the nobility of the south-west, it ushered in a period of questioning and doubt, which might lead to a drift from covenanting moorings.8 But it was not a strategy which won universal support among those who saw themselves as acting in the king’s best interests. The common goal of preventing Scottish ­intervention in an English war could tilt towards an openness to military action within Scotland.9 By the spring of 1643, the king was set upon a campaign of reassurance, putting his name to appeals to noblemen and burghs to ‘call together your friends, vassals, tenants and such others as have any dependency upon you’, and to offer them assurances of the king’s commitment to ‘preserving inviolably all those graces and favours which we have of late granted to that our Kingdom’ and never to act contrary to what had been ‘established, either in the ecclesiastical or civil government’.10 Hamilton’s sympathetic biographer Gilbert Burnet would claim that such letters were carried by the ‘king’s friends … to the several places where their interests lay, to see what likelihood there was of raising any force for advancing the king’s service by extreme ways’, the letter serving ‘to put a better colour on their gathering of people together’,11 though evidence for such gatherings is readiest found for that veteran anti-Covenanter, George Gordon, Marquess of Huntly.12 Tapping directly into noble support had served the king well in England, where he had some success in rallying peers to his support within parliament in the early months of 1642, even more in rallying them to his side in York, where, in June, forty of them were prepared to pledge themselves to his defence and to reject commands issued from Westminster, an explicit pledge of personal

8  Sharon Adams, ‘A regional road to revolution: religion, politics and society in south-west Scotland, 1600–1650’ (PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2002), pp. 105–115. 9  Robertson, Royalists, pp. 125–126, 129. 10  Addressees of such letters included the earls of Dunfermline, Mar and Wigton (the latter with his son, Lord Fleming) and the burgh of Glasgow: Mark Napier, Memorials of Montrose and his time (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1848–1850), ii, 75–76; HMC Manuscripts of the earl of Kellie and Mar (London, 1904), pp. 199–200; Miscellany of the Maitland Club, ii (1840), 435–436; J. D. Marwick ed., Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow, 1630–1662 (Glasgow, 1881), pp. 58–59. 11  Gilbert Burnet The memoires of the lives and actions of James and William dukes of Hamilton (London, 1677), pp. 241–242. 12  John Spalding, Memorialls of the trubles in Scotland and in England … (2 vols, Aberdeen, 1850–1851), ii, 251–253.

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allegiance.13 Hamilton had indeed urged that Scottish nobles were to be despatched back to their homeland, there to aid the king not only by ‘their votes in judicatories’ but ‘by their interest in the country’.14 However interpreted, there was a tension here between the desire to calm the nation and the imperative of stirring up support to counter the threat of an Edinburgh-Westminster axis. Precipitate action had not served the king well, in Scotland or in England, as the examples of the ‘Incident’, a last-minute effort to derail elements of the settlement being put in place in the Scottish parliament in 1641, or the English ‘Army plot’ had shown. Even the suggestion of royal involvement in a scheme to draw upon ‘papist’ and Irish support to spark off war in Scotland in the spring of 1643 did much to sink Hamilton’s efforts towards neutralist solution.15 But the cruelty of the dilemma facing the king and his supporters was pronounced. Albeit in self-defence, Hamilton insisted that he and those around him would be willing to take up arms at need, pleading inability and political considerations rather than unwillingness.16 Burnet relayed claims that the king was determined not to effect the ‘first breach’.17 Montrose and those of his mind saw a greater risk in delay, but still sought a ‘warrant’ from the king before taking action. When the actions of the most militant among them, those around the earls of Antrim and Nithsdale and Lord Aboyne, were uncovered, what was most clearly revealed were their efforts to secure supplies of munitions for their supporters, the want of which had, after all, been alleged by Hamilton’s associates as a prime ground for their inaction.18 For all concerned, to move first was fatal, but to prepare for action was essential. And how to do this, in a situation where more of the resources of Scotland were encompassed within the burgeoning Covenanting state, was a painful predicament. 13  Richard Cust, Charles I and the aristocracy 1625–1642 (Cambridge, 2013), especially pp. 275–276, 280–281, 287–288, 290–291, 300–302. 14  Burnet, Hamilton, p. 215. 15  Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, pp.  270–273; Scally, ‘Hamilton’, p.  336. Burnet’s account of events in 1643 remains vital: Hamilton, pp. 206–271. 16  Scally, ‘Hamilton’, p. 338. 17  Burnet, Hamilton, pp. 220, 226. 18  George Wishart, The memoirs of James Marquis of Montrose ed. Alexander D. Murdoch & H. F. Morland Simpson (London, 1893), pp. 26–28; Charles McNeill ed., The Tanner letters (Dublin, 1943), pp.  158–160; Jane H.  Ohlmeyer, Civil war and restoration in the three Stuart kingdoms: the career of Randal MacDonnell, marquis of Antrim (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 117–121.

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Tactically and strategically, Hamilton failed. All obvious holds within Scottish structures of authority were lost. Scottish royalism was relaunched with a coup against Hamilton: his attempt to justify himself to the king in person at Oxford was blocked, a raft of charges levelled against him and, if unconvicted, a prolonged detention in distant Pendennis castle imposed upon him.19 The case against him was by turns vicious, unconvincing, targeted and shrewd. Hamilton was accorded full blame both for exacerbating the original collision of king and people (and incidentally seeking to justify the 1638 Covenant) and for failing to block the slide towards the new and more frightful defiance now unleashed, even accused of aspiring towards the Crown. Yet there was a surgical precision in amputating Hamilton not only from those, like Montrose of course, honest in their Covenanting in 1638, but even from those who had striven alongside Hamilton in recent months. The Hamilton brothers alone must suffer so that royalism could be renewed, its diverse tendencies to be bound tight through bonds and declarations now forged in the fires of Oxford. On 22 December the king had called upon all members of the English parliament, whether expelled or withdrawn from Westminster or still there, chafing under ‘their want of freedom’, to ‘assemble themselves together at our City of Oxford’ one month thence.20 To that assembly was directed a ‘declaration’ intended to win support for imposing upon all Scots within the king’s quarters in England an interpretation of events, and of allegiance, epitomized in a second document, a ‘Bond’ or ‘Band’ for ‘loyal subjects of the Scottish nation’.21 Framed in a situation where the demand had gone out to leading Scots resident in England to adhere to the new Solemn League and Covenant or face confiscation of income this would ‘put them to the test’ a challenge some were ‘induced, or rather compelled’ to undergo ‘with great reluctance’.22 These two short texts delivered sharp, effective terms for the detachment from the current 19  Burnet, Hamilton, pp. 253–269; Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, History of the rebellion and civil wars in England ed. W. Dunn Macray (6 vols, Oxford, 1888), iii, 285–286, 317–321. 20  Larkin ed., Stuart royal proclamations, ii, 987–989. 21  Spalding, Memorialls, ii, 327–328 (the ‘declaration’) and Napier, Memorials, ii, 119–121 (the ‘bond’). The ‘declaration’ requested support for a demand that any Scots who refused to set their hands to the declaration itself would not be permitted to live under the king’s protection. The greater number of signatures given to the ‘bond’ suggests that it became the vehicle to impose this reading of events. 22  Wishart, Memoirs of Montrose, pp. 40–41; Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, p. 291.

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regime in power in Edinburgh, and of the relationship of Scottish royalism and the English war, and provided a means to activate the allegiance of those who could be brought to the king’s side. These were exercises in vindication, not only of the signatories but as ‘as far as in us lies our nation’ from the actions of a ‘faction in both kingdoms’, which in Scotland had utilized the ‘forms and glosses of public authority’ to cover deeds which could only be correctly construed as ‘high treason and rebellion’. The recent Convention, with all its acts, orders and committees, and the incitement offered by its Solemn League and Covenant, was the hinge moment when the regime rendered itself illegal and traitorous, its decisive action being its levying of armed force unwarranted by the king, and the subsequent ‘invading this realm of England’. The signatories were pledged ‘constantly to adhere to one another’ and not only to oppose the Scottish levy and invasion but also to ‘suppress the said rebels now in arms against his Majesty and his crown of England’.23 The language of ‘invasion’ spread like rash. It was present in the proclamation for the parliamentary assembly at Oxford, premised on the need to respond to ‘preparations to … invade’ and an impending ‘design of Conquest, … to impose new Laws upon this Nation’.24 The king had the opportunity to stir the embers of smouldering hostilities against the Scots. It was a temptation not resisted. The published version of the King’s speech to the assembled parliamentarians congratulated the MPs ‘as good Patriots’ in having ‘vindicated yourselves’ from association with plans by a ‘Foreign Power to invade this Kingdom’.25 The MPs echoed the call. The House of Lords at Oxford protested to the Scottish authorities of this ‘unjust Invasion’ and ‘design of Conquest, … to impose new Laws’, denied any ‘purpose to infringe your Laws or Liberties, from … this Kingdom’ and urged a ‘common Allegiance and Subjection under our Gracious Sovereign’.26 Even the king’s declaration towards his ‘Native Kingdom’ (a phrase repeated throughout) spoke just such a language, warning that ‘the Spirits of all true English men, will rise with that Anger and Indignation at this unheard of Insolence, where there is nothing pretended but a Resolution to give and impose new Laws upon them, that  Napier, Memorials, ii, 119–121.  Larkin ed., Stuart royal proclamations, pp. 987–989. 25  His Majesties speech delivered the twenty second of Ianuary 1643 at Oxford (Oxford, 1643/1644), p. 4. 26  Rushworth, Historical collections, v, 561–562. 23 24

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they will be united as one man, to oppose the pride and Tyranny of this Invasion’.27 There was much to gain from striking an English patriot pose, but it must be achieved with sufficient poise as to project defiance against Scots banded in a cross-national rebel alliance, and yet presage welcome to loyal Scots allies. This was accomplished not least through the deft deployment of a particularly weighty statute, the ‘Act for the confirmation of the treaty of Pacification between the two kingdoms of England and Scotland’, passed by each parliament in 1641 and reprinted at Oxford in pamphlet form in 1643.28 Votes passed on 26 January warned all subjects in England and Wales that they ‘are, both by their Allegiance, and the Act of Pacification, bound to resist and repress all such’ as enter England ‘as Traitors, and Enemies to the State’ or themselves fall into that condition should they abet this ‘Hostile Invasion’. Scots subjects, too, were ‘bound by the Act of Pacification, to resist and repress’ those in arms against England.29 Historians have noticed the statute, which incorporated the treaty terms concluded after the Bishops’ Wars, principally for one of two reasons, its inclusion of measures to bestow pardon and amnesty upon actors in earlier contests, and of mechanisms (‘Conservators of the Peace’) to prevent future Anglo-Scottish conflict. But royalist argument would present it as foundational, almost as a kind of fundamental law, for relationships between the two realms. The Act had made provision that any subjects who would rise in arms or make war against the other kingdom, without consent of their own parliament,30 would be ‘held reputed and demained as traitors to the Estates whereof they are subjects and that both the Kingdoms in that case be bound to concur in the repressing’ of them, ‘convening forces … as in case of invasion’, even that it would be ‘lawful for any of the subjects to convene to suppress such evil affected persons’. Measures that were intended to restrain royal action through parliament could be flipped, not just to give sharp legal definition to treachery or invasion (as seen in the votes of the parliament at Oxford), but to 27  His Maiesties declaration to all His Subjects of His Kingdom of Scotland [Jan. 1644] (Oxford, 1644), p. 13 . 28  Anno Regni Caroli regis Angliae, Scotiae, Franciae & Hiberniae, decimo septimo … An Act for the confirmation of the Treaty of Pacification between the two kingdoms of England and Scotland (Oxford, 1643). 29  Rushworth, Historical collections, v, 564. 30  It was important for the royalist case that it was not a parliament which had met, but a Convention of Estates, and one which the king had consented meet for specific purposes only.

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articulate with precision a perspective on constitutional relations of the kingdoms, liberating for royalists in both nations. The spring of 1643 had seen not only contests within Scotland over competing statements from the king and the Houses at Westminster but an ill-fated, perhaps ill-conceived, effort at mediation between the warring English camps, repudiated on the king’s part through a careful parsing of the Act of Pacification. Efforts by the Conservators to mandate such a mission were repudiated, and parallel attempts by the Scottish kirk to tease at the ragged edge of the Treaty, which had addressed the question of church government with a mixture of kind words towards Scots’ wishes for ‘conformity’ across the nations, with a reservation of any such ‘reformation’ in England to be considered by its parliament ‘in due time’, were rebuked. In prying into such matters, the Scottish commissioners were probing an issue ‘from which the Law expressly restrains them’ and where they ‘have not the knowledge of the Laws and Policy of this Kingdom’, England. The Conservators’ remit was confined to breaches between the kingdoms, not ‘matters of Difference’ internal to one of them, making their delegates no more than private persons pretending a public role; it did not fit the dignity of the king or of ‘this Nation’ to ‘allow His Subjects of another Kingdom’ to act as ‘Umpires and Arbitrators’.31 In putting his protests into print, the king could be further burnished as defender against attempts to ‘intermeddle or interpose in the Affaires of this Kingdom or Church, which are settled and established by the proper Laws of this Land, and till they be altered by the same competent power, cannot be inveighed against’. Scots churchmen should ‘rest abundantly satisfied with such alterations in their own Church as We have assented unto’, and not hitch ‘the continuation of what is there settled by Law’ to alterations in England.32 Security cut both ways. The king could no more alter the episcopal government of the English church ‘if We were inclined to it, then to restore or set up Episcopacy in the Church of Scotland … neither can any man imagine, that the Religion of Scotland is more in danger by preserving the Discipline so long settled, & happily enjoyed in England, then the 31  His Maiesties declaration to all His Subjects of His Kingdom of Scotland … with his majesties message to the Lords of his Privy-Councell of Scotland in December 1642 and the severall papers presented to his Majesty by the Scotch committee at Oxford … with his Majesties severall answers… (Oxford, 1643[4]), pp. 34–35. 32  To the king’s most excellent maiesty, the humble petition of the commissioners of the generall assembly … with his maiesties gratious answer thereunto… (Oxford, 1642/1643), pp. 10–12.

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Peace and Liberty of that Kingdom [Scotland] is in danger by the Laws and Civil customs of this, which so much differ from those of the other’.33 Within Scotland, the king’s stance had been to reiterate, with all the resources of rhetoric or conscience, his commitment to the settlement he had agreed in 1641.34 Promoting his message, and discountenancing that of Westminster, had produced jars within Edinburgh institutions and, in January 1643, a notable royalist statement in the ‘Cross Petition’, notable enough, indeed, to prompt a much lengthier condemnation from the Commission of the General Assembly, printed for use in all the pulpits of the kingdom.35 The Cross Petitioners’ expressed desire was ‘for Establishing His Majesties Royal Authority, and continuing the happy Union betwixt the two Kingdoms’, ‘which can never truly be conceived to be intended to weaken the Head, whereby it is knit together, and without which it can have no subsistence’. Such goals could not but be ‘cherished’ by ‘we British Subjects’, a self-description which has caught the eye of historians.36 Harking, as was almost obligatory, to what they rather tellingly referred to as ‘the late Treaty of Peace, and Act of Union’, they trod a careful line, heartily wishing its fulfilment in ‘Unity of Church-­ Government’, while foreswearing any intent to ‘pass our bounds, in prescribing, and setting down Rules and Limits to His Majesty and the Two Houses of Parliament [of England] … in the way of prosecution thereof’. The ‘Mutual Union of the two Kingdoms, by the several and respective Unions to our Prince and Head’ must not be reckoned to ‘weaken the strong Bond’ of the king to his ‘Ancient and Native Kingdom’, a tie ‘of so many Ages, and unparalleled lineal descents of an hundred and seven Kings’, nor to leave ‘Scottish Subjects … in any sort liberated from the Dutiful Obedience, which as Scottishmen we own to our Scottish King, or from that due Loyalty, which as Scottish Subjects we owe to our Native Sovereign’, old obligations only reinforced by the National Covenant.

 His Maiesties declaration to all His Subjects of His Kingdom of Scotland…, p. 9.  The Kings Majesties declaration to all his loving subjects of the kingdom of Scotland… (Edinburgh, 1643), pp.  7–8. The text, and the council authorization, were also printed in Oxford. 35  The Cross Petition was not printed. It can be found in Burnet, Hamilton, pp. 206–209 and the signatures in Register of the Privy Council of Scotland vii: 1638–1643 ed. P.H. Brown (Edinburgh, 1906), p. 597. 36  Edward J. Cowan, ‘The Solemn League and Covenant’ in Roger A. Mason ed., Scotland and England 1286–1815 (Edinburgh, 1987), pp. 196–197. 33 34

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Advocacy of a more active policy, countenancing ‘force’ to restore the king’s authority, by Montrose’s close associate Lord Napier, could appeal beyond keeping up the treaty to sustaining the ‘authority that is only able to do it’. ‘At the best our treaty with England is but a civil, a legal or politic paction of men, which can never be destructive of our obligation to our Prince, imposed upon us be the law of God and nature.’37 For the gentleman-­poet William Drummond of Hawthornden, it was a ‘strange sort of conceiving Articles of a Treaty between Scotland and England, that the English shall rise in Arms against the Native King of the Scots, all sworn to maintain his Person and Authority, fight him in open Field with displayed Banners and (which God avert) take him, imprison him, and depose him; and the brave Men of Scotland all the while shall lie still quiet, conjured with the Magic of some Paper Articles’. ‘To take Arms for our Native King, now King of England, is not to take Arms against the subjects and Kingdom of England, but against the Rebels and Traitors of England; which cannot be named the Kingdom of England; and the Articles of the Treaty of Peace and Act of Parliament cannot be otherwise understood.’ As earlier undertakings would have obliged Scots to have fought to install James VI as rightful King of England, had he been challenged, so ‘the Oath of our Covenant … being the same’ now bound Scots to restore his son. Beyond that, ‘are we not by that Oath of Allegiance, Fidelity and Homage, which as Subjects we swear to our Prince, obliged to stand to the Defence of his Person, Authority and Honour’, even as nobles and gentlemen stood bound by their tenures ‘in a lawful War, to repair to the King’s Standard’. ‘Did we not always follow our Kings into England?’38 Much was in play here. Relativizing the treaty and the Act was not casting them aside, but it was digging beneath them to more primal obligations. ‘British’ allegiance was present, certainly, hitched to that royal authority which alone could hold the Union together and justifying action undertaken across the kingdoms, but defined in terms which kept the kingdoms separate as well as joined, and made space not only for a Scottish legal order, civil and ecclesiastical, but also for a bone-bred Scottish 37  Napier, Memorials, ii, 57–59. Mark Napier identifies Lord Napier’s hand; Cowan, Montrose, pp. 133–134 suggests a date of summer 1642. 38  Drummond, ‘EKIAMAXIA or a defence of a petition tender’d to the Lords of the Council … January 1643’ in Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh, 1711), pp. 201–202.

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allegiance to an ancient Scottish monarchy. A run of over one hundred Scottish kings were painted for display before Charles on his visit to Edinburgh for his coronation in 1633, alongside the portraits of ‘Scottish worthies’. There are echoes here of royalist language used in England, that reliance upon legal precision as the defining body within which dwelt a spirit of allegiance, the essence and origin of the life of the nation. And yet perhaps paradoxically, the fact that the National Covenant with ‘its tedious recapitulation of the parliamentary acts that favoured a presbyterian polity gave Scotland’s “laws and liberties” a statutory substance that they had hitherto lacked’,39 also meant that such substance could be adduced by royalists to maintain the walls of separation between the realms, pushing aside inappropriate and ignorant ambitions to be ‘concerned in the Government of another Kingdom, because it is not according to the Customs of that in which they live’.40 Conversely, the rather limited purchase which monarchy held as ‘a truly British institution’, even its ‘Anglicizing’ under the first two Stuart kings of England,41 not only liberated both Crown and King to rally English opinion around law and religion, but also, the reconstruction of 1641 complete, fitted the Crown and King of Scotland to act as a magnet for old loyalty and new legal order, even as the ghost of British kingship allowed those loyalties to transcend as well as serve within, individual kingdoms. To gain purchase, royalists needed not only arguments but structures to give substance to their claims and credibility to their efforts. Boxed out of the expanding structures of Scottish state power, they must fall back upon the resources of political power which could be generated through personal connexion, to their king and to those pledged ‘constantly to adhere to one another’ and all other faithful subjects. Where Aulicus had presented the bond of October 1643 as a counter to the Solemn League and Covenant, it might be more accurate to see in it a recrudescence of a variant tradition in Scottish political activity to that of the national covenant, that of the ‘political bond’, a subset within the wider pattern of ‘bonds of friendship, maintenance and manrent’, especially apparent in 39  Roger A. Mason, ‘Debating Britain in seventeenth-century Scotland: multiple monarchy and Scottish sovereignty’, Journal of Scottish historical studies 35 (2015), 15. 40  To the king’s most excellent maiesty, the humble petition of the commissioners of the generall assembly … with his maiesties gratious answer thereunto… (Oxford, 1642/1643), p. 12. 41  Keith M. Brown, ‘The vanishing emperor: British kingship and its decline 1603–1707’, quoted at p. 87. My argument does not run with the grain of Brown’s, but draws upon his important insights.

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time of political crisis during the sixteenth century, and perhaps taking its rebirth in one of Montrose’s earlier initiatives, the ‘Cumbernauld Bond’ of August 1640. The old world of bonds held their strength from the ‘personal, not the legal, relationship’ they embodied, fading after 1600, a demise which included those ‘political bonds [which] invoked the same language and ideas’ but bound adherents ‘imbued with political responsibility and a desire to serve the state’, to counter ‘the troubled and parlous state of the commonwealth’ and to ‘maintain the true—that is, reformed— religion’.42 The 1638 National Covenant was not the only inheritor of the rich legacy of sixteenth-century bonding, even as it was not a simple duplication of earlier endeavours, drawing upon a range of sources in thought and practice, not least that of federal theology.43 In newly turbulent times, there was gain in formalizing ‘friendship’ ties, equal or otherwise, or demonstrating commitment by subscribing further pledges to uphold the momentum of the wider cause.44 The Cumbernauld Bond has caused some puzzlement as to its purpose, but it was the very pledge to act together which mattered, action undertaken to combat the ill intent of ‘a few’ and to uphold the cause of religion, king and laws as epitomized through the National Covenant.45 And so in 1644.46 The Oxford bond or band was a personal pledge, which could bind even the reluctant to an alternative expression of the public or national good, in this case one undergird by the legal framework negotiated in 1641. Montrose and his associates were those who were redeeming their nation from its stain of rebellion, by bond and, soon, by blood. If, as Montrose had been urging for some time, military support was to be rallied within Scotland itself, then an alternative, identifiable and royally mandated military leadership would also be required.

42  Jenny Wormald, Lords and men in Scotland: bonds of manrent, 1442–1603 (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 145, 156, 161. 43  Dawson, ‘Bonding, religious allegiance’, p. 171. 44  Keith M.  Brown, Noble power in Scotland from the Reformation to the Revolution (Edinburgh, 2011), p. 87; Allan I. Macinnes, The British confederate: Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll c.1607–1661 (Edinburgh, 2011), pp. 138–139. 45  Napier, Memorials, i, 254–255; Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, p. 207. 46  Montrose seems to have sought to win support for a ‘band’ in the north-east in early 1643, drawing in Huntly and some of his associates: Cowan, Montrose, pp.  140–141. Spalding, Memorialls, ii, 232 for rumours of a ‘band’ sponsored by the ‘banderis’ (his term for supporters of the Cross-Petition) which ‘came to no effect’.

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A commission issued to Montrose on 1 February 1644, premised upon the levying of war and invasion by Scots in ‘manifest forfeiture of their Allegiance and breach of the Act of Pacification’, appointed him lieutenant-­ general under the nominal authority of the king’s nephew, Prince Maurice, in turn named ‘Lieutenant Governor and Captain General’ of all forces raised in Scotland or brought thence from the other kingdoms.47 By autumn 1645, Montrose was in receipt of a commission bestowing these higher offices directly upon him.48 Certainly, from the first, the powers which Montrose was mandated to exercise would appear as remarkably extensive: with authority to raise and command troops, he was accorded ‘full power and authority to make and ordain Laws, Ordinances and Proclamations from time to time as shall be requisite for the better Government of Our said Kingdom, and the Forces therein’, to pursue enemies and traitors, but also make ‘public Proclamation’ of royal pardons.49 The 1645 commission more carefully stated that laws were to be proclaimed ‘from time to time as the case shall require for the good government and order of all the forces that are or shall be under your command’ and laws of war may be intended in both instances. But 1645 expanded his powers in other directions: he was empowered to move troops to other of the king’s dominions ‘oppressed by any of our Scottish Subjects’ acting in rebellion, and might confer knighthoods upon ‘Natives or others employed under your charge and command’.50 A careful observer noted that Montrose had ‘an imprinted copy’ of his commission affixed to the market cross in Aberdeen in September 1644, though the ‘letters patent was not past our Scottish seals’,51 for the king 47  National Records of Scotland (N.R.S.), Ms. GD 220/3/126, summarized in HMC, 2nd Report (London, 1874), p. 172. 48  Two copies of such a commission exist, dated 4 May and 25 June 1645, at N.R.S., GD 220/3/128-9 (calendared H. M. C. 2nd Report, p. 172). A copy also exists of a commission, dated 13 February, which accords Montrose the positions earlier granted to Maurice, but duplicates the 1 February document in its description of his powers (N.R.S., Ms. GD 220/3/127; H. M. C. 2nd Report, p. 172), and refers to Montrose as Marquess, though the grant was only formalized in May 1644 (N.R.S., Ms. GD 220/3/132). It is likely that Montrose operated under the 1 February commission, since he still described himself lieutenant-general to Maurice in January 1645: Napier, Memorials, ii, 172–173. 49  N.R.S., Ms. GD 220/3/128; H.M.C. 2nd Report, p. 172. 50  N.R.S., Mss GD 220/3/128, GD 220/3/129; HMC 2nd Report, p. 172. 51  Spalding, Memorialls, ii, 409, though Spalding reported Rupert, not Maurice, as captain-general. He noted that Montrose intended to publish his proclamation in all parish churches but was interrupted by the arrival of Argyll’s forces.

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lost control of the instruments involved in the formal processing of grants of office. A chink of legality had opened up with the fall of Hamilton and the repossession of the Scottish signet from the hands of his brother, Lanark. Later, and on trial for his life, Sir Robert Spottiswood, lawyer son of the late Scottish primate, and long since deemed an ‘incendiary’ by the Covenanting regime, denied being formally appointed as Secretary in succession to Lanark, insisting he held ‘no Ordinary Place or Office’ but only acted in the absence of the secretary, ‘signeting Commissions … although I was not actual Secretary … by His Majesty’s special and express Command’. His claim that the king had had recourse to English officials to authorize Scottish documents appears to be correct.52 Pressed by such impelling obligation, formality might slip. The earl of Glamorgan, despatched on a personal mission to win peace in Ireland, would later admit he did ‘not stick upon having this commission enrolled or assented unto by his [the king’s] Council, nor indeed the seal put to it in an ordinary manner, but as Mr Endymion Porter and I could perform it, with rollers and no screw-press’.53 Back in 1639, the pledge that had been given was that, should the order to append Scotland’s Great Seal to the commission of lieutenancy issued to the earl of Antrim and Sir Donald MacDonald of Sleat not be obeyed, ‘the present signature and commission’ signed with the kings ‘own royal hand, and whereunto his … signet is affixed’, would suffice.54 As Antrim and MacDonald had been authorized to raise the western Isles and the highlands and bring fire and sword against ‘rebellious subjects’ in arms against their king, so the renewed war in 1644 meant fresh commissions to royal lieutenants within Scotland and calls on the 52  Spottiswood would later claim that the ‘Commission of Lieutenantry docquetted by me … is but a Double … the Principal having been sent long before the English Secretary, who was the sole mover and procurer of it’: ‘Answers to the dittay given in against Sir Robert Spottiswood’, in John Spotiswoode, ‘Memoirs of Sir Robert Spotiswood’s Life’ in Practicks, pp. xi–xii. The two copies of Montrose’s commission, both attested by Spottiswood, and dated 4 May and 25 June 1645, can be found at N.R.S., GD 220/3/128-9. The latter specifically indicates that it is ‘a double of the former commission granted’ to Montrose. The 13 February commission bears the name of Edward Walker, secretary-at-war from 1642 and by 1644 a secretary extraordinary of the privy council (Hubert Chessyre, ‘Walker, Edward’, Oxford DNB). 53  State papers collected by Edward, earl of Clarendon ed. R. Scrope & T. Monkhouse (3 vols, Oxford, 1767–86), ii, 202. For Glamorgan see chapter three. 54  George Hill, An historical account of the Macdonnells of Antrim (Belfast, 1873), pp. 444–446.

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potentially loyal to rally to their support.55 James Grant of Freuchie was to act as commissioner and lieutenant in Moray against those intent on making ‘an invasion upon this our kingdom in favour of their fellow traitors’, an action which necessitated the king to ‘denude those men of the authority we have formerly given them’ and put it into the hands of those ‘whom honour and duty will oblige not to be accessory’ to such actions.56 Commissions were not merely instrumental but ideological, a retention of the king’s hold on his right to award offices and commands, indeed of his obligation so to act in defence of the realm. If standard authorizations to raise regiments or command garrisons bespoke a direct line of service from subject to monarch, so much the more when, as for Montrose, the process was initiated with the king’s own signature (the ‘sign manual’). More than not just an executive instrument, it was the epitome of conception of government not set over against the rule of law—as intense debates in England indicate, the king’s right of appointment was readily cast in legal terms— but rather a challenge to a particular instrumentalization of power, a challenge peculiarly necessary in Scotland. Without even the often lamentably trained bands of England, linked to a regularized office of county lord lieutenant, the Scottish Crown had looked to its nobility to sustain the kingdom’s defence, their martial sensibilities rising to meet royal need in an ‘affective bond’ of service. Commissions of lieutenancy had been used to confer ‘exceptional’ powers, usually to high-ranking nobles, often to deal with specific crises of order, and would be again with the onset of the Covenanting troubles. The Covenanters themselves bestowed like powers and responsibilities on such chosen agents as the earl of Argyll. But while the Covenanting revolt had seen the Scottish nobility step forth into military leadership, calling their kindred to arms, the mutation had begun whereby that leadership would be exercised rather through the infiltration, even domination, of political and military infrastructures.57 A new institutional order took its rise from the Covenants, its agencies charged with ‘nationwide imposition of

55  David Stevenson, Revolution and counter-revolution in Scotland 1644–1651 (London, 1977), p. 4. 56  William Fraser ed., Chiefs of Grant (3 vols, Edinburgh, 1883), ii, 7–8. For Grant as at best a royalist from expediency see Barry Robertson ‘The Covenanting north of Scotland, 1638–1647’, Innes Review 61 (2010), 43. 57  Brown, Noble power, pp. 60, 97–98, 137–138, 140–143, 146–148; HMC 4th report, pp. 491–492.

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ideological conformity’ as well as ‘financial supply and military recruitment’,58 pressing the ‘good of the public’, sometimes in hard financial terms, upon ‘cold Covenanters’.59 Wartime royalism never attained this kind of routinization of power, no ‘Scottish Oxford’ as hub for an alternative infrastructure of state.60 It could still look to the formidable mobilizing capacity of Highland clanship, indeed might resonate with ‘traditional values … paternalism, protective and inclusive kinship … projected nationally unto the political stage’.61 The western Highlands and Islands, in particular, had been less integrated into the new covenanting order; its clans riper for enlistment into the royalist endeavour, not least when its goals could be rendered compatible with entrenched regional rivalries reignited in parlous times.62 Montrose had been mandated to call upon all sheriffs or others holding authority in county or burgh to despatch to him ‘such numbers of … Subjects armed and apt and meet for the wars’ as he might require.63 The sheriff-depute of Perth alleged that he was driven to send out copies of letters ‘to several gentlemen in the country’, in Montrose’s name, requiring them to join him ‘with all the force possible you can make, as you will answer to his Majesty’.64 More directly, ‘all and whatsoever true subjects’ between sixteen and sixty could be directly addressed, required ‘to repair to our army, with their best arms … under the pain of burning and slaying’.65 Similar summonses might be issued on behalf of the Covenanting regime, advantaged in propagating their call through their network of committees, though the pains and penalties for failure were less starkly

 Allan I. Macinnes, The British revolution 1629–1660 (Basingstoke, 2005), p. 129.  Stewart, Rethinking, pp.  243–245, using the records of the Kirkcudbright committee of war. 60  Stewart, Rethinking, p. 253. 61  Macinnes, British confederate, p. 205. 62   Sherrilynn Theiss, ‘The Western Highlands and Isles and central government, 1616–1645’ in Sharon Adams & Julian Goodare eds, Scotland in the age of two revolutions (Woodbridge, 2014), pp. 41–58. 63  N.R.S., Ms. GD 220/3/126. 64  Deposition of Patrick Maxwell, quoted in Mark Napier, Memoirs of the marquis of Montrose (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1856), ii, 436. 65  Montrose note, N.R.S., Ms. GD 220/3/182 (9 September 1644); Napier, Memorials, ii, 162–163. For Montrose issuing summonses in these terms see Spalding, Memorialls, ii, 446–447, 454; Napier Memoirs, ii, 491–492. 58 59

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displayed.66 At Aberdeen, Montrose’s printed commission may have been accompanied by a printed proclamation calling down fire and sword on subjects who would not swear and subscribe the oath of allegiance, the intention to publish such an order in all parish churches interrupted by the arrival of Argyll’s army.67 If rightly understood by the observant John Spalding, this might suggest a novel, even startling, deployment of a Jacobean oath, hitherto directed at officeholders, ostensibly targeting papal claims, explicitly binding swearers to uphold royal authority against all rivals, but which had flagged a reorientation in the expression of allegiance away from the public, confessional form endorsed in the late sixteenth century to one more private, more robust in its declaration of obedience.68 Ever moving, by January 1645, Montrose’s forces had reached Kilcumin (later Fort Augustus), where a ‘Band of Union’ was undertaken, to ‘stand to the maintenance of the power and authority of our sacred and native sovereign, contrary to this present perverse and infamous faction of desperate Rebels’.69 From one angle of vision, this was the expression of a ‘constitutional ideal’, an endeavour ‘to forge a nation, uniting Highlander and Lowlander, protestant and catholic, in the name of the king’;70 from another, it was an imprecise alternative to the covenants, of limited practical benefit beyond saving some signatories from plunder.71 The Montrose army does seem to have secured the ministrations of Catholic priests as well as Protestant ministers,72 and the ‘Band’ to have been extended to fresh adherents without securing their consistent service.73 It breathed an allegiance minimalist in its agenda, with no allusion to covenants or 66  See, for example, the August 1643 proclamation, printed in Spalding, Memorialls, ii, 269–270, and which threatens confiscation of goods. 67  Spalding, Memorialls, ii, 409. 68  Register of the Privy Council of Scotland vii: 1604–1607 ed. David Masson (Edinburgh, 1885), pp. 374–375; Stewart, Rethinking, pp. 97–98. For additional clerical oaths pressing obedience see Karin Bowie, Public opinion in early modern Scotland c.1560–1707 (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 102–103. 69  N.R.S., Ms. GD220/3/184; Napier, Memorials, ii, 172–173. 70  Cowan, Montrose, pp. 180–181. 71  David Stevenson, Highland warrior: Alastair MacColla and the civil wars (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 152, 166–167. He notes that only MacColla signed among the Irish. 72  Fiona A.  Macdonald, Mission to the Gaels: Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Ulster and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland 1560–1760 (Edinburgh, 2006), pp. 104–111, 134–140. 73  Cowan, Montrose, pp. 245–246.

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reformed religion (if promising ‘recovery’ to ‘thralled and oppressed subjects’), condemnatory in tone, primal yet profound as drawn ‘out of the deep sense of our duty to God, our Consciences, King, and native Country, yea to all Lawes and Justice divine and humane’, and binding them to their king ‘like as we are by God and nature tied’, and to action ‘as we would be reputed famous men, and Christians’. Such digging down to expose the roots of allegiance did not mean grubbing up all that had grown up in the soil of Scottish nationality and religion. Montrose may have had form, from his days as a Covenanter stalwart, of acting to ensure that those of a ‘contrary religion’ to that professed in the National Covenant—indeed ‘papists by profession’—who were willing to ‘concur … in the common course of maintaining the lawes and liberties of the kingdom’ and bind themselves thereto, be made as secure as Covenant subscribers.74 In the height of his power, between the royalist victory at Kilsyth (15 August 1645) and defeat at Philiphaugh (13 September), a vista opened upon a royalist future. The prospect ahead was of ‘a parliament’, the most fit remedy for the distresses afflicting Scotland, summoned by Montrose to assemble at Glasgow on 20 October.75 There laws might be enacted to provide for the security of the crown, the ‘order of government’, and ‘relief and liberty of our poor distressed subjects’, subject to ‘exorbitant taxations, excises, imposts and other insupportable burthens, under which they groan’, with the promise of ‘just and equal reparation’ for ‘faithful subjects’, sustained ‘through the unjust oppression of the rebels, or the progress of our royal army’.76 John Spalding had reckoned the new tax demands of summer 1643 as unheard of in any king’s reign, but he duly tracked and cross-referenced fresh impositions in after years, recording the 74  James Gordon, History of Scots affairs, (3 vols, Aberdeen, 1841), ii, 232 for a ‘remarkable document’ (Cowan, Montrose, p. 70) from 1639, supposedly produced and signed by Montrose and Huntly, but expressing a ‘syncretism’ soon cast aside by the march of events. (Montrose had also, of course, sought to secure Huntly’s adherence to the new order, without demanding Covenant subscription from him, an approach not ratified by Edinburgh: Gordon, Scots affairs, ii, 231.) 75  The ill-fated Spottiswood delivered copies of a proclamation and Montrose’s commission as lord commissioner, but his claim that Montrose had already ‘indicted a Parliament before it came to his Hands, by virtue of a preceding Warrant’ seems plausible: ‘Answers to the dittay given in against Sir Robert Spottiswood’, in Practicks, pp. ix, xii; HMC 2nd Report, p. 172. 76  Thomas Birch ed., A collection of the state papers of John Thurloe, (7 vols, London, 1742), i, 70–71.

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‘great grief’ of assembled citizens as new demands were announced, and charting the pathway of his ‘miserable country overburdened with uncouth taxations’, notably the excise, in the ‘footsteps of Holland’.77 He was hardly reconciled by pulpit defences of ‘this grievous excise, sore against the peoples will’, by considering it imposed to raise an army sent to England ‘to fight against his sacred Majesty’.78 Now relief would be offered alongside forgiveness, ‘an absolute remission, and free pardon’ for all answering the summons to parliament, ‘an act of grace thereupon of any part they have had of the foresaid rebellions’, except ‘special authors and principal fomenters’ of rebellion.79 But in the meantime Montrose needed to speak in action, to bring credibility to pledges of peace, order and liberation. Hundreds of protections were listed as issued to towns or to individuals, while no small numbers beat the path to his camp to swear loyalty, or responded to the armed persuasions of MacColla’s forces as they moved across Ayrshire.80 If pragmatism doubtless prevailed, there may be ground to suspect some sympathetic responses to the turn of events, as in Glasgow where Montrose planned civic celebrations and a print campaign touting his victories,81 if this was hastily covered over once Covenanting control was resecured. Scotland (no more than Ireland) was not awash with the tide of controversial print such as that which swirled out of London to English readers. A surviving printed ‘declaration’ issued in Montrose’s name indicates at least temporary access to the press. It allowed space to ‘solemnly declare… the Ground and Intention’, indeed the ‘invincible necessity’, of the king’s setting ‘his service a foot’ in terms of covenant obligations to the true Protestant religion, the king’s ‘just and Sacred Authority’, privileges of parliament and the subject’s ‘Peace and Freedom’, and ‘thus far and no more doeth his Majesties require the service and assistance’ of his

77  Spalding, Memorialls, ii, 267, 270, 279, 311–314, 322–324, 465. He was aware of protests in Edinburgh against the excise (ii, 311, 434). 78  Spalding, Memorialls, ii, 470–471. For the scale and nature of change see Laura A. M. Stewart, ‘Fiscal revolution and state formation in mid-seventeenth-century Scotland’, Historical Research 84 (2011), 443–469. 79  Birch, Thurloe, i, 70–71. 80  Napier, Memorials, ii, 224, 325–332; Stevenson, Highland warrior, pp. 204, 205–206, 209–210. 81  Andrew Lind, ‘Battle in the Burgh: Glasgow during the British Civil Wars, c.1638–1651’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance 12 (2021).

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subjects.82 If control of the press and of the pulpit routinely rested with a reformed and reinvigorated kirk,83 pronouncements were not always heard nor spirits stirred in the desired manner. Spalding recorded bitter responses to successive fasts called to address national sins, but offering ‘no repentance for the main mother sin … the change of government, both in church and policy, within this land, and bringing in a reformation, whereof the kirk was wicked instruments, misregarding the King’s authority in their preposterous zeal’, compounded by the sending of forces to England and the ‘grievous oppressions laid upon the shoulders of his Majesty’s dear and loyal subjects’. For someone who had etched with pained horror the atrocities perpetrated by royalist forces in Aberdeen, he fell back on the justification that the king had been ‘forced to draw his sword to suppress his disloyal subjects’ and recoiled from the sustained and collective vitriol he attributed to the Aberdeen preachers in the denunciation of Montrose and his army.84 Piercing denunciation of clerical belligerence characterize the polemic of William Drummond of Hawthornden, living in seclusion, if not silence, near Edinburgh, his property accorded protection by Montrose on 28 August 1645. Drummond wondered whether he might, in turn, act  as ‘my patron and protector of my papers’, offer for publication work he had earlier suppressed, but which might prove fitting now ‘the Golden Age is returned, his Majesty’s Crown re-established, the many-headed monster near quelled’. The reply, calling him ‘to repair to our Leaguer, bringing with you, or sending, such papers, that we may give order for putting of them to the press’, might be considered merely polite, were it not that Montrose’s reference in the plural to ‘some pieces vindicating Monarchy from all aspersions’ (where Drummond had mentioned only to one unnamed ‘piece’ or ‘essay’) and his referencing ‘another named IRENE’ indicates some familiarity, at least in Montrose’s circle, with Drummond’s work.85 Irene, likely a product of 1638, may have been a problematic text for royalists in 1645. If the urge to renounce all ‘League and 82  A declaration of the right honourable James Marques of Montrose, presumably printed in Aberdeen (no date given). 83  R.  Scott Spurlock, ‘State, society and politics in Scotland 1637–1660’ in Michael J. Braddick ed., Oxford handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford, 2015), pp. 361–78. 84  Spalding, Memorialls, ii, 413, 417, 425, 464. 85  Napier, Memorials, ii, 224–226. David Masson speculated on whether an ‘early presentation copy’ of Irene had been intended for Montrose: Masson, Drummond of Hawthornden (London, 1873), pp. 346, 405.

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Confederations … without Warrant and Leave granted by Royal Authority; for it belongs to the Prince to confederate and league his People’ might just have been reconcilable with the king’s subsequent (1641) endorsement of a Covenant-based settlement, the text was forthright pushing back against such bonds among subjects. ‘A League giveth Law to a King, and is an Usurpation of those Rights, Preheminencies and Prerogatives, which the Crown reserveth only to the Prince’, prompting ‘Confusion and Oligarchy’, division and ultimately dissolution and ‘a popular State’. Drummond had much to say on the virtue and the blessings of obedience: ‘Union, Concord and Peace’ was to be found in ‘reasonable and lawful Command, and due Obedience, which two, when joined together, make up the first Law of States; nay, rather, it shall be found to be Obedience alone’. But the Prince ‘that vital Spirit of the Commonwealth, which giveth Life to so many Millions of Lives, the fairest Image of God upon Earth’ was the bringer of peace and harmony, for ‘there falleth no such Variance between Princes and their People, which may not reciprocally be forgiven and forgotten’. ‘Religion came not down from Heaven, to banish the Virtues found upon the Earth, not to demolish the most admirable Work Reason hath produced and brought forth, Humane Societies.’86 The ferocity of Drummond’s assault on clerical ‘Heralds of War … Preachers turning Soldiers’ exercising an ‘Arbitrary Power over the Lives, Liberties and Estates of the Lieges of this Kingdom; and who strive not only to be above Men, but Mankind’ is even more apparent in his Skiamaxia, his contribution to the debate surrounding the Cross Petition of 1643. ‘They encroach every Day more and more upon Prerogatives, impudently do they abuse Scriptures, using those Holy Records, as Horsemen do Stirrups, lengthening and shortening them at their Pleasures.’ Drummond challenged the representation of the petitioners as only directing their calls towards ‘the Suppression of insolent Papists, malignant Schismatics, disloyal Brownists87 and Separatists’, passing by ‘the Prelates’, indeed casting aspersions on ‘those who are most zealous for the Reformation in England’. He denied that ‘That we wrest and misapply our National Covenant for private Ends’. But though he voiced the case for conformity of English church government to that of Scotland as  Works, pp. 164–166, 169, 171.  ‘Brownist’ was generally used in a negative sense to refer to those advocating separation from the Church of England (or its equivalent) and supportive of autonomous ‘gathered’ congregations, as advocated by Robert Browne. 86 87

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‘our Wish, the earnest Desire of our Hearts … so it might be peaceably brought to pass, and without troubling the State of our Neighbour Country’, he admitted that the English and their King may not be enamoured of ‘this great Change’, seeing their own episcopal order as ‘more conform to the Monarchical Government of the State than our Presbyterial, which is more conform to the Government of a Republic and Cantoned Towns’. To seek to pursue such change by arms was to ‘tyrannize over the Consciences’ and even were it ‘lawful to propagate Religion by Arms, where find ye it lawful to shed Christian Blood for the external Form of the Government of the Church?’ Indeed, he rather mischievously reckoned that ‘our’ church order ‘hath been no small Impediment to the Progress of the Doctrine of it. And some Countries might have received the Doctrine, if they had not been terrified with the Form of Government. Neither is it likely, Pagan Kingdoms, as is that of China, would alter their Idolatrous Religion, and exchange it with the Form of our Church-­ Government, not because of the Doctrine, but Contrariety of the Church-­ Government to their Forms’. War with England was represented as a schism within a common Protestantism. The National Covenant could be invoked as a defence of the king’s authority: ‘Ye have done contrary to your Oath, and are in the highest Degree Covenant-Breakers’. ‘Shall not the King and his Council, shall not the former ancient Practick and Laws of this Kingdoms show how to apply this aright, and make it understood? That Power the Kings of Scotland have in raising of their Subjects of Scotland, to take Arms with them, is no new Thing to be applied and understood. It was never doubted but the undoubted Right of the King is to arm or disarm any Subject at his Pleasure. … Churchmen should not be our Guides in the Way of Loyalty to our Princes, but in the Way of Knowledge of our own Duties in difficult Points of Religion.’ ‘Some have now begun to aver, that ye are bound to preserve the King in his Person and Authority only relatively, viz. in so far as he will approve your new Models of Religion and imaginary Liberties. For less was it ever thought on, or could it enter into the most capricious Brains, that we should be challenged by that Oath, and obliged to alter the Government of the Church of England: For … That it is only within our own Kingdom, and according to the Laws thereof …’.88 In the nature of the case, it is not possible to determine how far Drummond’s case might have resonated. The possibility of simmering  Works, pp. 191, 195–196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 204.

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hostility to clerical calls, as well as enthusiastic support for the Reformation project, cannot be discounted, though Drummond combined his attacks with unrestrained anti-populist complaints.89 Those claiming Montrose’s protection in 1645 were not inclined to rally to his banner, though through what combination of alienation, trepidation or sheer war-­ weariness is of course uncertain. Any likely ability on the part of royalists to coerce or constrain support in more heavily covenanted regions of Scotland over which they held sway was fleeting. But even in Ayr, a solidly covenanting shire, indeed one incubating some ‘radical’ tendencies, individuals were found against whom plausible charges of collusion with the royalists could be laid. The type of accusations can be telling. Sir John Mure was accused of publishing the call for a rendezvous of levies at Montrose’s call and claiming ‘ “that we have been all too long misled with a number of damned devils”, “there was not a more religious nobleman in all this kingdom than my Lord Marquis of Montrose”’ and alleging that ‘ “all the judgments which were come upon this land were occasioned”’ by the Solemn League and Covenant. The minister John M’Quorn, too, allegedly claimed that ‘“the covenant with England was unlawful; that we had nothing to do but keep our own league; and that he did not understand what the people had taken up arms for, seeing that the king had given them all they wanted”’.90 One text from Montrose’s circle managed to weave together strands supportive of elements of Covenanting and of national religion and liberties, whilst challenging the innovative impositions and repression of the current regime, transcending the confinements of nation or religion, even the constraints of law, by appealing to more fundamental bonds of allegiance, bonds which in turn underwrote those very liberties and laws. If the pen is in the hand of Archibald, Lord Napier,91 the text seeks to speak

89  For Drummond see John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: literature, history and politics 1603–1707 (Oxford, 2008), chapter four; Stewart, Rethinking, pp. 76–86. 90  James Paterson, History of the county of Ayr (2 vols, Ayr, 1847–1852), i, 118: I owe my knowledge of this source to Adams, ‘Regional road’, p. 189. 91  Napier, Memorials, i, 214.

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the voice of Montrose.92 Forthright in condemnation of the ‘perverse practices of the sometime pretended prelates’ and defending actions taken when Scots were ‘constrained to renew our Covenant’, it was not uncritical of steps taken by the covenanting movement between 1637 and 1641. But it was Hamilton who emerges as ‘the prime fomenter of these ­misunderstandings betwixt the King and his subjects’, much as in the charges levelled against him at Oxford. Those the text claimed to represent were presented as already anxious about the progress of the Covenanting cause in 1640, but driven by their commitment to true religion to maintain their attachment up to the settlement of 1641, when, having ‘obtained all which by our national Covenant we could ask or crave—all which we are resolved to stand by to the uttermost of our power’, it was clear the ‘prevailing party’ intended to act contrary to the National Covenant, indeed to the ‘prejudice of our reformed Religion, ruin of lawful authority, and liberty of the subject’. This, then, was the foundation on which a Scottish future must be built. Far from repudiating the 1638 Covenant (‘the occasion of our revolt from them to be their revolt from their National Covenant’) or the Presbyterian settlement, the abolition of episcopacy was represented as ‘nothing else but the restoration of that which our first Reformers had before Prelacy … which … was then as free of Brownism as of Prelacy’. Presbyterianism was to be defended as ‘the middle way of our reformed Religion’. If the danger from a ‘Brownist faction of the ministry’ driving on the alliance with Westminster seems at first sight an implausible rendering of the Covenanted kirk, allegations of ‘Brownism’ had been heard in general assemblies as early as 1639, focusing both on patterns of congregational worship and the space

92  Napier, Memorials, i, 215–229. David Stevenson long since warned against conflating documents from Napier with the opinions of Montrose: Stevenson, ‘The “Letter on sovereign power” and the influence of Jean Bodin on political thought in Scotland’, Scottish Historical Review lxi (1982), 25–43. In this instance, the text not only presents a reading of events from 1637 which would align with the stance taken by both Montrose and Napier, but the inclusion of a passage indicating how ‘we’ were constrained to depart for England rather than submit to the Solemn League and Covenant shows an aspiration to speak with the voice of Montrose (as Mark Napier recognized: Memorials, i, 221). In any event, the document is important is its presentation of a sustained royalist case from the circle around Montrose.

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allowable for private religious gatherings.93 The proclamation for a parliament sought the pursuit of laws ‘most fit for God’s glory and the well of religion, and suppressing of all ungodly sects’.94 As among English Royalists, political subversion mirrored religious disorder sprung from ‘novations’ ‘contrary to our Religion by our first Reformers’. But if Scotland’s unity of (Presbyterian) faith was to be upheld, present rebellion, not least ‘entering in our neighbour nation … contrary to our Covenant and promise to his Majesty and Parliament and Pacification’, necessitated looking beyond those ‘obliged in Covenant with us’. Thus ‘it was lawful for his Majesty, or his Commissioners, to make use of any his lawful subjects, rather than to suffer his authority to be trampled under the feet of subjects, or his Majesty’s subjects to be brought in bondage with their equals’, even if those subjects included MacColla, a ‘professed papist’, but who had joined us ‘for manifestation of his loyalty to his Prince, and love to his native nation’. As was the case in Royalist arguments made in the other kingdoms, Royalism could be made to transcend religion or nation without thereby repudiating the legal order of either. The ‘Remonstrance’ was a formidable effort at articulating a royalist case in Covenanting diction. ‘Brownism’ had sounded as a drumbeat in English royalist propaganda, as much as ‘popery’ for parliamentarians, and was being sounded out to allow Scots to march in step. Royalism did not need to bend the knee to Presbyterianism as it found robust, indeed belligerent, expression amongst the governing voice of Commission of the General Assembly,95 indeed could, as with Drummond, cast such bodies as usurping an arbitrary authority. But it must, in Scotland, make its peace with it as it currently stood as the embodiment of a widespread attachment to reformed religion, its social ordering as well as its piety, perhaps indeed with that Presbyterian narrative now in the ascendant as the most 93  David Stevenson, ‘The radical party in the Kirk, 1637–1645’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History xxvi (1974), 135–165. What emerges from Stevenson’s treatment is the weight of opinion in favour of uniformity of worship and a strict control by Presbyterian structures of the religious life of the nation. He notes how several of the changes to worship sought by the ‘radicals’ were conceded in the Directory of Worship adopted in 1645, which is duly denounced in the ‘remonstrance’. Stevenson notes in passing how Montrose ‘might make play’ with the argument of Brownist corruption (160). 94  Thurloe ed. Birch, i, 70. 95  The body which held executive functions between the annual meetings of the General Assembly.

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convincing rendering of the nation’s post-Reformation history and, indeed, constitutional order.96 It is impossible to know whether the texts from Napier or Drummond or indeed Spalding are, if articulate, yet highly unrepresentative responses to the Covenanting dynamic. What they disclose are a multitude of anxieties and aspirations, towards order but away from oppression, of primal sin and primal obligation, of the dignity and fittingness of Scottish law and customs, and Scottish reformed religion as well as of its distortions and perils for the wellbeing of the Scottish nation. There is no direct path from the royalism of 1644–1646 to the Engagement of 1647, the attempt to realign Covenanters with the King against English sectarian religion, an unfettered army, and a settlement which might bind the monarch and banish Scottish influence. The Engagement reflects the manner in which royalism could mutate, incorporating changes, a royalism ratcheted up to a higher notch of Scottish constitutional and church order. Realignment would mean that these were now the channels through which an invigored royal authority would flow, ensuring order, security, unity and peace. It was not impossible that Royalism could accommodate Covenanting, as it might ingest Irish confederacy, not easily, but no more impossibly than it had swallowed some elements of English reformism by 1642. If the king found Presbyterianism ultimately indigestible, he might at least hold down the Scottish serving.97 Certainly, it would mean redefining royalism, as would have been true in Ireland. A royalist covenanting would be one which placed itself back under royal authority, reconnecting with the aspiration expressed in the 1581 King’s Confession, a reading of the Covenants as at once ‘advancing the work of Reformation’ and ‘fixing the Crowns of these Kingdoms upon the Head of the Sovereign’.98 That such a re-engagement with royal authority could hardly have left interpretive authority over the meaning and implications of covenants and confessions in the hands of churchmen was not without its attractions in some quarters. Royalism was, in the end, always a choice—for the king as well as for his subjects—a choice not to  Stewart, Rethinking, chapter three.  The Engagement shows the manner in which Charles wriggled at the imposition of Presbyterianism in England: he was not himself ‘obliged to desire the settling of a Presbyterian government, nor to present a bill to that effect’, nor would any suffer in estate or body for not submitting to such an order, which even then it was only to be put in place for three years: Gardiner ed., Constitutional documents, pp. 347–352 at p. 352. 98  Lanark as quoted in Stewart, Rethinking, p. 267. 96 97

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see kingship so imperilled or diminished as to be unable to defeat whichever threat was perceived as most prevailing, whether ‘prelatical’ or sectarian, ‘popish’ or popular or that of a clericalist Presbyterianism. All successful modes of royalism needed to align the king, and his authority, with a ‘1641 settlement’ understood as the maintenance of the rule of law and a upholding of a national religion as a bond of unity, an alignment which upheld royal authority even as it in turn upheld such a settlement, quelling old and new dangers to the national ‘project’.99 In its immediate effects there is little reason to dispute the grounds set forth by historians for the failure of the Montrose initiative, failures logistical and political, some contingent on the very manner in which military success was, temporarily, achieved. Royalism in 1644–1646 failed to achieve cultural purchase in Scotland, or only within some quarters of Gaelic Scotland, and then in a manner alienating elsewhere. To achieve this it needed to cultivate the sentiments of the Kilcumin Band and those of Napier’s ‘Remonstrance’, looking to the taproot of allegiance and the shoots of covenanting liberties and Presbyterian order. The creativity of the royalist enterprise can be too readily underestimated. Potent ideological materials were present, from a Scottish royal patriotism to the pledge of the ‘Peace and Freedom of the Oppressed and Thralled Subject’.100 The reinvention of Scottish royalism set English royalism free to be patriotic, to press to the full latent, and more patent, anti-Scottish and anti-­ Presbyterian tendencies,101 without shutting down royalist aspirations to draw widely upon loyal subjects regardless of nation or even religion. And though Montrose himself would be marginalized, and eventually sacrificed, to Stuart-Covenanter convenience, his campaigns represented a fixed point of honour for the future, ‘passionate to vindicate the Honour of this Kingdom … by setting up a party of true and loyal hearted Scotsmen for his Majesty, whereby it might be seen that it is not a national Defection, but only stirred up by a Faction therein’.102 It could be recycled at future need. Forty years later, Sir George Mackenzie could argue that Scottish 99  Where settlements had been put in place in Scotland and England, satisfactory at least to some reform demands, in Ireland the Ormond treaties sought to find a way to construct such an architecture, the principal struggle being to find a means to render Catholicism a ‘national’ faith whilst maintaining a legally secure position for the ‘king’s religion’. See chapter three. 100  Declaration of … Montrose. 101  Russell, Causes, pp. 15, 38, 122–123. 102  From a paper attributed to Spottiswood at the time of his execution: Spottiswood, Practicks, p. xxxvii.

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surrender of their monarch was no more a ‘National Act’ than the regicide was for England, since all the while ‘honest Men suffered with him, and for him; … the honest Party of Scotland, were at that time fighting under the Great Montrose’.103 The same Oxford propaganda machine which denounced the ‘Monsters of ingratitude and disloyalty’ who had turned Scotland, again, against its generous monarch also testified of Montrose’s early victories that ‘the World will be this far satisfied … that they will not take the whole Nation to be involved in the guilt of this unnatural Rebellion against their own native Prince’.104 Even Cleveland was moved to admit of exceptions in A Land that brings in question and suspense, Gods omnipresence, but that CHARLES came thence: But that Montrose and Crawfords loyall Band. Atton’d their sins, and christ’ned half the Land.105

103   Sir George Mackenzie, A vindication of his majesties government (Edinburgh, 1683), p. 5. 104  A true relation of the happy successe of his maiesties forces in Scotland under … Montrose… (Oxford, 1644/1645), pp. 2, 13. 105  Cleveland, Poems eds. Morris & Withington, p. 30.

CHAPTER 3

Royalist Peacemaking: Ireland and England

Preaching to the MPs gathered at Oxford in the spring of 1644, George Wilde thought it fit to charge his listeners that ‘to beg Peace at Gods hands, and scarce stretch out our Own to take it, what is this, but to play handy dandy with our maker? … How much better therefore the posture of the men of Judah, whom we find with a Petition in their mouth, and a sword in their hand?’. Energetic in pursuit of true and lasting peace, through many modes of action, praying and battling not least, his listeners must strive ‘through fire and water, engage … Life and Fortune for the Peace of Jerusalem’.1 Both sides in England made much of their earnest desire ‘that all Hostility may cease, cease for ever, and a blessed and happy Accommodation and Peace be made’, not least when the clamour for peace took form in petitions directed to both the King and Westminster.2 War in England was punctuated by two set-piece ‘treaties’ (as contemporaries referred to such fixed, formalized talks), at Oxford in early 1643 and at Uxbridge nearly two years later, talks historians have deemed ‘doomed from the start’, stymied not least by calculations of the greater gains that 1  George Wilde, A sermon preached … third of March … before the great assembly of the members of the … House of Commons… (Oxford, 1643[4]), p. 9. Wilde was more inclined to play up the need to pray and fight towards peace than to spend time on other options. 2  The humble petition of the inhabitants of the county of Herford … also, the humble petition of the inhabitants of the county of Bedford … (Oxford, 1642/1643), quoting the king’s ‘answer’ (unpaginated); Mercurius Aulicus, 1, 1–7 January 1643, p.  6; 2, 8–14 January 1643, pp. 113–14.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Armstrong, Royalism and the Three Stuart Kingdoms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42099-3_3

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might be won by battlefield success, characterized by ‘preposterous’ proposals and internal in-fighting, and prone to tendencies to prioritize winning the contest of appearances over offering meaningful compromise.3 Ireland followed a different trajectory, if to an equally tragic conclusion. The talks begun in Oxford in the spring of 1644 had produced a resoundingly inconclusive outcome. The remission of negotiations back to Ormond in Dublin heralded a halting progress towards a signed peace deal by the summer of 1646, a peace which collapsed even as it was proclaimed, and with it the extended cessation which had at least curbed some of the contestants from all-out war since the autumn of 1643. But Royalist peacemaking efforts could cover many gradations, from formal to informal negotiation, through efforts to subvert or suborn, co-­ opt or coerce. They engaged not as proponents of a platform akin to that of their opponents, with their programmes of constitutional and confessional renovation.4 Rather, all efforts were bent towards pressing forward processes designed to return the kingdoms to morally and legally regulated allegiance and obedience. To that end, it serves best not to too readily shuffle actions into the categories of the pragmatic as against the principled, to separate wrangling over ‘issues’ from more furtive discussion of personal advancement, or to box players into competing strategies matched to their political values or affiliations. Even those royalists most often pegged as ‘constitutional’ in their instincts could utilize peace talks to turn or overturn their opponents, or ‘extremists’ prove open, on occasion, to the possible gains to be made by negotiation.5 Setting English negotiations alongside Irish highlights three features of peacemaking: the importance of the different geopolitical configurations in the two kingdoms; the politics of the personal, operating both within and alongside formal peace processes; and the royalist commitment to legalism, deployed to multiple ends. 3  See Michael Braddick, God’s fury, England’s fire: a new history of the English civil wars (London, 2008), pp. 260–261, 348, 352–353; Woolrych, Britain in revolution, pp. 300–301; Richard Cust, Charles I: a political life (Harlow, 2007), pp. 371–373, 392–397. For a narrative of negotiations, see David L. Smith, Constitutional royalism and the search for settlement, c.1640–1649 (Cambridge, 1994), chapter five. 4  Gardiner ed., Constitutional documents, pp.  262–267 (Oxford), 275–286 (Uxbridge); The propositions of the Roman Catholicks of Ireland, presented by their commissioners to this sacred majestie… (Waterford, 1644), pp. 9–26. 5  Scott, ‘Rethinking’, pp.  40–47; James Daly, ‘The implications of royalist politics’, Historical Journal 27 (1984), 747.

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Ireland was riven with divisions apparently more profound than those of a more ostensibly unified England: ‘the Irish fight against Men of another Religion, of another Nation; We like wild Beasts fight Protestant against Protestant, Englishman against Englishman, Brother against Brother’.6 Where the case has been made against too readily predetermining the outcome of the war in England as military defeat for the king,7 in Ireland, the king’s authority had been scoured away from most of the island during the first months after the rising of 1641, and yet further reduced with the defection of regional Protestant forces to the Anglo-­ Scottish covenanted alliance. Royalist Ireland by 1644 stretched little further than Dublin and a redrawn Pale. But in Ireland, the king could lay claim to the full panoply of governmental and legal institutions, in place and operational, with executive authority in the hands of the lords justices (later replaced by Ormond as Lord Lieutenant) and council, functioning law courts and a continuing parliament. And with fewer cards in hand, royalists were playing for an enticing prize. Confederate pledges that, their grievances met, they would ‘convert our forces upon any design your majesty will appoint’, took concrete form in the ‘Remonstrance of Grievances’ presented in the spring of 1643 at the beginning of the process that would culminate in the cessation, with a pledge to supply 10,000 troops to defend ‘your royal rights and prerogatives’.8 The Dublin House of Commons had moved to expel those it reckoned tainted by rebellion, and then acted to block Catholic members by imposing the oath of supremacy on MPs.9 But the Dublin parliament remained a machine which might manufacture the instruments of peace. The king’s public stance was that the king had moved ‘with … caution and deliberation’ to a cessation, ‘this Preparation to Peace, and to that purpose do continue Our Parliament there’.10 It might legislate for confederate-­ sought reforms, and Royalists insisted it could, indeed must, provide legally incontrovertible means to overturn actions against ‘rebels’, processed through the law courts, and which the king ‘cannot in course of

 Bramhall, Serpent salve, p. 195.  Malcolm Wanklyn & Frank Jones, A military history of the English civil war (Harlow, 2005). 8  Gilbert, Irish confederation, ii, 132, 241; False Remonstrance, p. 16. 9  Colman Dennehy, ‘The Irish parliament after the rebellion, 1642–1648’ in Patrick Little ed., Ireland in crisis: war, politics and religion 1641–1650 (Manchester, 2020), pp. 100–118. 10  The grounds and motives inducing his majesty to agree to a cessation … (Oxford, 1643), p. 5. 6 7

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justice’ simply declare void.11 Parliament mattered. The most sustained political discourse to emerge from royalist Ireland in these years, from the pen of Lord Chancellor Sir Richard Bolton, was a demonstration of the Irish parliament’s central place in the making of law for the Irish kingdom, as against that of the parliament of England, a work, rather tellingly, later reckoned the work of a leading confederate, Patrick Darcy.12 Defences of a ‘free’ Church of Ireland were likewise directed both internally against Catholic claims and externally against the danger posed by an intrusive Westminster—or Edinburgh—agenda.13 But outside royalist ranks, Parliament mattered more for what it represented in terms of perceptions of its past constitutional standing and accomplishment, as appealed to by reformist MPs of both religious persuasions in the months before the rising,14 or of future political opportunity, rather than as an agent of present power or authority. Ormond baulked at confederate calls for a new ‘free’ parliament where ‘grievances may be redressed’, and to which the king showed a readiness to accede, but which he reckoned would be composed of none but confederates ‘as the times are now composed’.15 The residual Dublin parliament performed its duty towards the king in a fulsome denunciation of the Solemn League and Covenant, though it was not without members vocal in their unease about a future peace deal. Confederates, for all the robustness of the institutions they had created, insisted their ‘National Assembly’ at Kilkenny was ‘not intended … to be a Parliament, or to have the power of it’, ‘confessing that the calling and dissolving of that great body is an inseparable incident to your Imperial Crown’.16 The propositions which Ormond delivered on behalf of the king at the opening of the peace talks, relocated from Oxford to Ireland, echoed the twin elements of the short sets of articles presented in the king’s name during English negotiations, that the  Gilbert, Irish confederation, iii, 294–295.  Patrick Kelly, ‘Sir Richard Bolton and the authorship of “A declaration setting forth how, and by what means, the laws and statutes of England, from time to time came to be of force in Ireland”, 1644’, Irish Historical Studies 35 (2006–2007), 1–16. 13  Alan Ford, ‘Dependent or independent? The Church of Ireland and its colonial context, 1536–1649’, Seventeenth Century 10 (1995), 163–87. 14  Michael Perceval-Maxwell, The outbreak of the Irish rebellion of 1641 (Montreal, 1994), chapter seven. 15  Gilbert, Irish confederation, ii, 241–242, 285; False Remonstrance, p. 16; Thomas Carte, An history of the life of James, duke of Ormonde (3 vols, London, 1735–1736), iii, 166. 16  Gilbert, Irish confederation, ii, 131. 11 12

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king’s ‘own revenue, magazines, towns, forts and ships … be… restored unto him’ and for the restoration of the rule of law.17 This was sharpened to an insistence that ‘all such power, jurisdiction or government as hath been assumed’ by the Confederates ‘be henceforth abrogated, deserted and deemed void; and that all his Majesty’s subjects … shall be henceforth amenable to the laws of force in this kingdom, and obedient to his Majesty’s government and Courts of Justice’. All confederate military resources were to be taken ‘under the command of his Majesty and his Majesty’s Lieutenant’.18 But for all the heavy ground that would have to be covered if a peace deal was to be negotiated in Ireland, the whole raft of unfinished business surrounding old ‘grievances’ which had been nudging towards a resolution in the 1641 parliament, as well as the more fraught questions surrounding the place of Catholicism in a legally Protestant kingdom, the very shakeout of power had created some potential. There was a provisional quality to confederate institutions which might render them negotiable or, as it turned out, capable of being reincorporated into a redesigned state order, as against the constitutional fundamentalism which attached itself to the English Parliament. Royalist negotiators would never let the confederates forget that they had early made promises that they would evidence the healing of the relationship to the king through military service. The Dublin parliament might serve the king’s ends but could also be dispensed with at need. Rearguard action in its defence ended in the concession of a new parliament under the terms of the articles agreed in 1646, but with its scope determined by the treaty terms themselves, a parliament full, perhaps, but hardly free.19 In England, it was Royalists who spoke long and loud for a ‘free’ Parliament, and a full one, neither of which the Houses at Westminster were reckoned to represent. Yet they were fettered to the Houses, bound to accept a ‘perpetual’ parliament by the 1641 Act, which required the present parliament to consent to its own dissolution, prorogation or

17  The proceedings in the late treaty for peace… (London, 1643), pp.  7–8; Gardiner ed., Constitutional documents, pp. 286–287. 18  Additional ‘demands’ on behalf of the ‘Protestant clergy’ and the ‘Protestant subjects, and their Party’ expanded ‘restitution’ to encompass the reclamation of goods and properties from which they had been dispossessed since the onset of the present conflict: Propositions of Roman Catholicks …, pp. 68–72. 19  Gilbert, Irish confederation, v, 288–289.

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adjournment.20 This might be legislation ‘void from the beginning’ in Charles’s eyes, since ‘it is not in the power of the king to bar himself from the power of dissolving it’, but this was a stance few leading royalists were prepared to countenance, and the king was rowed back from putting any such intention into effect, if only from a pragmatic concern for the impact such an action would have on ‘not only the people in general, but those of his own party’.21 Royalists could score some points, of course. The Declaration issued after the collapse of the Treaty of Oxford reiterated a royal desire ‘that differences might be debated in a full and free Convention in Parliament, and to that end the Parliament might be restored to the natural and genuine Condition, … into that state wherein they were when the Houses were full and free’, ideally by adjournment from London to ensure security from ‘tumults’, though ostensibly open to Westminster’s providing alternative means of security against disorder.22 The peers and MPs gathered at Oxford in 1644 urged talks which would address ‘particularly, how all the members of both Houses may securely meet in a full and free convention of Parliament’ to address all the great national questions.23 English Royalists were in a tight space constitutionally. But there was gain in not shaking loose from the hold of the ‘perpetual’ parliament. There were sound grounds for believing that the two Houses at Westminster still sheltered enough members so strongly inclined towards a compromise peace as to make a merger with the Oxford assembly one which could have tilted the reintegrated parliament towards a settlement, at least not incompatible with the aspirations of many royalists.24 And till then, there were contacts and opportunities to exploit, where softer-edged political skills could be put to use. Algernon Percy, earl of Northumberland, was parliament’s lead spokesman at the Treaty of Oxford. In his History, Edward Hyde suggested that a move to nominate Northumberland as a mutually acceptable lord admiral might win the earl’s ‘gratitude and faithfulness’ and even a ‘few days’ addition’ to the talks, but might also have ‘made some rent and division in  Gardiner ed., Constitutional documents, pp. 158–159.  The Life of Edward [Hyde], earl of Clarendon (3 vols, Oxford, 1827), i, 206–209. 22  His Majesties Declaration to all his loving subjects, in answer to a declaration … upon the proceedings of the late treaty of peace… (Oxford, 1643), pp. 26–27, 29. 23  Clarendon, History, iii, 303–304. 24  J.  W. Daly, ‘The royalist constitutional position 1641–1645’ (PhD, University of Toronto, 1963), pp. 320–327. Daly reckons the ‘real ace up Charles’s sleeve’, even in 1645, ‘might well have been a parliament’ including a newly elected one: ‘Implications’, 754. 20 21

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the two Houses’ beneficial to the king, even if would not have ‘produced a peace’ but would rather have discontented other aspirants for that office.25 But years later, in his Life, he opened the matter out, suggesting that the parliamentary commissioners had indicated that they were ready to waive some of the demands they had been mandated to present, not least on church matters, if they could secure some ‘other particulars’ and, more especially, be guaranteed their security through ‘condescensions in the point of the militia’, which would allow them to deploy their power in both houses ‘to oblige the violent people to accept or submit to the conditions’. Northumberland’s appointment was folded into such a plan, an earnest which would allow ‘many … to separate themselves’ from the ‘violent people’ in the Houses, even as Northumberland himself would aim to use his appointment to further peace.26 Whatever reality underlay such accounts, and however reliable the offers, or the recollections, the incident is revealing. Nor does it stand alone. The murky and tangled episode known as ‘Waller’s plot’, in train at the time of the Oxford treaty as an attempt to deliver London into the king’s hands, would be represented by one of its participants, from the gallows no less, as an effort to ‘make a moderate party here in London to stand betwixt the gap, and in the gap, to unite the King and the Parliament’, on the promise of ‘countenance’ from a majority in the Lords, and ‘divers’ in the Commons.27 In the aftermath of the Oxford treaty, a move developed at Westminster to press forward with soft terms to facilitate renewed negotiations. If gently defiant on the removal of the Houses from the vicinity of London, they were hazy but not hostile on the readmission of royalist members,28 and appear to have been accompanied by some dabbling with the prospect of using friendly generals to coerce the reluctant or recalcitrant in their own parliamentary ranks, just possibly in conjunction with similar efforts on the royalist side.29 What is telling is not just the understandable manoeuvring for victory, both in the fighting war and in the internal contests that beset all sides, but how for royalists crafting terms and cultivating connexions were always, must always be, about

 Clarendon, History, iii, 10–11.  Clarendon, Life, i, 179–180. 27  Mr Challenor his confession and speech… (London, 1643), pp. 4–5. 28  HMC, 5th Report (London, 1876), pp. 98–99. 29  Scott, ‘Rethinking’, pp. 46–47. 25 26

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finding ways to restore the overarching authority of the king and dissolving all rival claimants to primary political allegiance, by whatever means. Beyond laws, treaties and institutions, the trust which peace-making requires must be vested in persons, the least scrutable but most vital of securities. In the politics of Scotland and of England in 1640–1641, structural change had been pressed on a reluctant monarch in tandem with the pitching into posts of reliable individuals, ambitious not only for power or gain but to be the agents and guarantors of a renewed order in church and commonwealth.30 So in any wartime settlement, confederates pressed that the opening of office to Catholics be made good ‘actually and with particular instances’.31 Westminster pressed particularly hard for military power to be placed with such ‘persons of quality and trust’ to be ‘nominated by his Majesty, as the two Houses of Parliament shall confide in’.32 If Hyde’s remark that questions of ‘the disposal of … offices and places of trust’ made it ‘evident to all men where the difference now lay between them’33 is suggestive of a royalism peculiarly attuned to the politics of the personal, of bonds and obligations, trust and reciprocity between individual humans, then most hung upon the predilections and prejudices of the man Charles Stuart. Hyde insisted of his master that ‘there was nothing more suitable and agreeable to his magnanimous nature, than to forgive those, who had in the highest degree offended him: which temper was notorious throughout his whole life’.34 The king’s own words suggested that an understandable gap remained between pardon and reward. At Uxbridge, for ‘gaining of particular persons’ he allowed ‘the power to promise them rewards for performed services’ and even the award of ‘places’, though not ‘of great trust’ nor by the dispossession of ‘honest men’,35 and he could prove equally grudging in Ireland. Hyde suggested two sides to Charles’s disinclination to embrace the appointment of Northumberland as Lord Admiral in 1643. If he would suffer in his honour by ‘an inclination to a person who had requited his former graces so unworthily’, Northumberland should not despair of being restored to that

 An aspect particularly apparent in Adamson, Noble revolt.  For example Gilbert, Irish confederation, iv, 291–292. 32  Proceedings, pp. 17, 53, 59. 33  Clarendon, History, iii, 4. 34  Clarendon, Life, i, 184–185. 35  ‘Memorials’ for Sir Edward Nicholas, February 1645, in Diary and correspondence of John Evelyn ed. William Bray (4 vols, London, 1887), iv, 140. 30 31

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office ‘when the peace should be made; or upon any eminent service performed by him, when the peace should be despaired of’.36 The choreography of allegiance prescribed careful, sometimes complex dances, upon wilful performers. The tortuous movements made to insinuate the earl of Holland and his associates back into royal graces after time spent in active participation in parliamentary rebellion were marred with false steps.37 Holland never ‘made the least apology to the King for anything he had formerly done; nor appeared to have the least sense that he had committed any error’, even when the king expected some such in their private conversations. Hyde pressed his friend. Even if his ‘fault’ was ‘unwarily’ done or ‘unmaliciously’ intended, he must ‘make confession and apology’ for the king could not ‘with safety of his honour avow the receiving him into any trust without it’. Instead, Holland insisted that any restoration to the king’s ‘grace and confidence’ would win from him ‘as humble apologies … as could be expected’, but he would not make ‘the first advance’ of submission.38 Christian virtues could rub up uncomfortably against honour codes but Charles was offended both as a gentleman and a Christian. The prevalent theology of royalist Oxford acknowledged that all forgiveness was of God, dependent on no merit in the sinner, but insisted nonetheless that the process was one where ‘I must first believe, repent and return … before God will pardon’.39 In the height of his power, Montrose counselled his king that ‘in my poor opinion, it is unworthy of a King to treat with Rebel subjects, while they have the sword in their hands’,40 a view unlikely to have met with disagreement from a king who thought that it might do good if his commissioners at Uxbridge had a private word with their counterparts to put them in mind that they were ‘arrant Rebelles and that their end must be damnation, ruin, and infamy, except they repented, & found some way to free themselves from the damnable way they are in (this Treaty being the aptest)’.41

 Clarendon, Life, i, 183–184.  Hopper, Turncoats and renegadoes, pp. 24–34. 38  Clarendon, History, iii, 195–198. 39  If ‘nothing in us can have anything to do’ with our justification (‘the accepting our persons and pardoning of sins’), not even our faith, yet the Gospel requires ‘necessary qualifications … without which we shall not be justified’—‘faith, repentance, firm purpose of a new life’: Henry Hammond, A practical catechism (London, 1648), pp. 66–9. 40  Napier, Memorials, ii, 178. 41  Quoted in Smith, Constitutional royalism, p. 122. 36 37

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The political was inescapably personal. Ormond echoed English royalist assumptions about ambitious parliamentarians cloaking themselves in religion in considering the wish to access ‘places of honour and advantage’ was ‘strong in the most moderate’ of confederates, though they held ‘religion fittest to engage the people; which will be the thing they will break upon, if they fail the expectations in this and other things conducing unto it’. But he and George, Lord Digby, the ever-sanguine secretary of state, were ready to lean in to the prospect of ‘gaining on the ambition of leading men’, whether by leaving posts vacant or awarding them to ‘Irish that are Protestants’ to encourage hope, or possibly breaking the ice which froze Catholics from the privy council by admitting Ulick Burke, earl (later marquess) of Clanricard, ‘a very popular man of his Religion, even with the Protestants themselves’, though no confederate. Possibly ‘many considerable persons of the Irish … might be gained with addition, others with new creations, of honour’, though it must be done ‘without danger of scandal’.42 For all that this bespoke a certain cynicism it was a recognition, too, that the ‘honour and advantage’ that only monarchy could accord was an essential part of the process of reconciling rebels to rule, and Catholicism to Stuart monarchy, tangible tokens of incorporation. If for the Queen ‘the cause of monarchy was inseparable from the cause of honour’, and honour resided nowhere more clearly than in protecting one’s followers and servants, this might provide a foundation for social, and one might add, moral order.43 Restoring the kingdom was as much a matter of the rendering honour where it was due, newly earned or old-­established, as enacting Christian principles of repentance and mercy. Staunchness could of course find no surer demonstration than service in arms. Those who ventured their reputation in the eyes of the world to deliver the swift, delusively decisive military action upon which the king so persistently set such store would win pledges of his especial trust, tied up with the private, sometimes covert, manner of their commissioning. If the best-known case remains that of Glamorgan, the most sustained was surely that of Randal Macdonnell, earl of Antrim.44 Yet his endeavours to recruit 42  Carte, Ormonde, iii, 226 (13 January 1644), 390–391 (4 March 1645), 398 (28 March 1645). 43  Bulman, ‘Practice of politics’, 66–71. 44  For a telling instance, allegedly in 1646, of Antrim being reminded of how he had trusted the king’s verbal promise before and was being pressed to so again, see Ohlmeyer, Civil war and restoration, pp. 134, 178.

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in Ireland for the king’s wars in England and Scotland represent but one strand of the multiple threads spun out to wind rebels back into loyalty through service. Antrim’s January 1644 terms of reference allowed for recruitment both within and outside the peace process in train between king and confederates; if their agents would ‘contain themselves within reasonable bounds in their demands’ this could activate the loan of 10,000 troops for service in England, but otherwise Antrim could look to his ‘own interest’ and that of ‘faithful’ persons ‘to draw as many as you can to take service under you’.45 As confederate agents made their way to Oxford in early 1644, both Ormond and Antrim’s fellow-courtier and fellow-­ countryman, Daniel O’Neill, deputed to assist him, urged the advantages to confederates of a ready honouring of the Remonstrance’s offer of an army, a ‘most probable way’ to gain ‘good conditions’, not only by engaging the King’s honour but through the enhanced freedom of action he would obtain by the delivery of such formidable armed assistance.46 Charles’s conviction that sufficient quantities of goodwill and energy could procure for him thousands of troops from Ireland persisted, perhaps almost to the end of his life,47 a visionary army of 10,000 which Antrim, Ormond and later Glamorgan bent their wills to bring into being. Reality had a habit of reasserting itself. It was hardly ‘frivolous’ reasoning on the confederates’ part that, from the start, they wanted the reassurance of being ‘owned as subjects’ and no longer labelled as rebels before they would commit to a mass deployment of forces to England, nor that they would be wary lest ‘they would betray much the trust put in them by the Kingdom, without more assurance than we can give to put out of their power their men, arms and ammunition’.48 As alternatives to the hardtack and distasteful compromise of prolonged negotiations, and even before Antrim’s despatch to Kilkenny, the king had given countenance to schemes to collect smaller contingents or individual regiments of Irish, Catholic troops under such military entrepreneurs and more-or-less agile political

45  He was separately, and successfully, to recruit 2000 troops to serve in Scotland: Gilbert, Irish confederation, iii, 88–90; Ohlmeyer, Civil war and restoration, pp.  132, 134, 136–137, 150. 46  Carte, Ormonde, iii, 249 (24 February 1644) 253 (6 March 1644). 47  John Adamson, ‘The frightened junto: perceptions of Ireland, and the last attempts at settlement with Charles I’ in Jason Peacey ed., The regicides and the execution of Charles I (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 36–70. 48  Digby to Ormond, 2 March 1644, Carte, Ormonde, iii, 250–251.

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operators, as Theobald, Lord Taaffe49 or colonel Jack Barry.50 Digby mooted attractive options to divert the resources held in Ireland by Londoners and other English ‘rebels’ to sustain such recruitment and reward the recruiters, but was hard-headed enough to recognize that an army on the scale envisaged by Antrim could not be provisioned without the backing of the confederate organization, and for that, there must be ‘a peace and perfect settlement with the Irish’.51 Ormond believed he, too, could collect and despatch recruits from among the ‘Irish’, to supplement those he was drawing off from his own forces, and with little ‘noise’ or any alignment with the confederates’ pretended power, but only if he could be given ships, munitions and supply, and that could hardly be.52 A complex calculus was needed to determine the balance between utilizing and disaggregating the confederate organization. Those same early months of 1644 which saw confederates sidle towards talks witnessed Ormond seek and secure the power to bestow pardons and rewards as means to seed division and sprout loyalty in Catholic ground, should the cessation collapse into war, but for the moment he determined to use such options cautiously lest they imperil a greater harvest of a confederate loyalty.53 As staunch a royalist, and solid a Catholic, as Clanricard, who had maintained a diminishing enclave for the king in his west of Ireland base, had expressed surprise, and possibly unease, that the king ‘would have made use of the Irish forces of this Kingdom in a body’ for service in England, ‘until they had been first declared good subjects by a settled obedience’ to Ormond’s government.54 But by the summer of 1644, as the drift of local Protestant to the Covenanter alliance brought renewed war to his home turf, he was one of a cross-religious clutch of peers who appealed to the king, pressing the case for driving a deal with the confederates forward alongside the declaration as enemies of ‘the Scotch 49  Taaffe had been involved in efforts to recruit Irish troops for Spanish service in 1641. Involved in facilitating the talks process which culminated in the cessation of autumn 1643, by November he seems to have won the king’s approval for an attempt to draw 2000 Irish, presumably confederate, troops across to England for royal service: Padraig Lenihan, ‘Taaffe, Theobald’ in Oxford DNB; Carte, Ormonde, iii, 197. 50  Digby to Ormond, 23 December 1643, Carte, Ormonde, iii, 222. 51  Digby to Ormond, 29 March 1644, Carte, Ormonde, iii, 271–273. 52  Ormond to Digby, 8 March 1644, Carte, Ormonde, iii, 255–256. 53  Ormond to Digby, 13 January 1644, Carte, Ormonde, iii, 225–226. 54  Carte, Ormonde, iii, 262–263 (17 March 1644); Aoife Duignan, ‘“To hold a good opinion of my loyalty and zealous affections”: the earl of Clanricarde and the royalist cause in Connacht, 1643–1646’ in Little ed., Ireland in crisis, pp. 61–78.

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Covenanters and their adherents … in this Kingdom’. Confederates ‘who keep the Cessation, and seem more ready to return to their obedience, will doubtless give their best assistance’.55 This was not too far from the merger of armies being urged in some confederate quarters. Ormond had already stalled on reintegration through arms. His reasoning demonstrates the inextricability of the pragmatic and the principled. To take direct command of confederate forces would not ease his position, but undermine that of the king in threatening the loss of his present Protestant support, as well as all hope of winning back Protestant defectors. But it would also ‘mix … rightful power, and unblemished, though small, forces with the wild usurped authority, and yet unlawful arms of the other party’. It would impugn long generations of family honour, untainted by disloyalty, which he would not tarnish by actions which might ‘carry an appearance of present security and future advantage’.56 For Clanricard and his associates, co-operation could be a step towards renewed obedience. For Ormond, mutual aid was possible, at least defensively, but he shied away from redrawing the Pale of obedience to place Protestant rebels outside, even as Catholics were losing their rebel tinge. Even Digby attempted to demarcate: Ormond’s ‘taking the command of the Irish Army’ was ‘not to be ventured upon, but in case of great extremity or of a settled peace with the Irish’ for fear of the scandal it would cause in England; but the prospect that he would ‘join with’ the confederates ‘against the Scots’ had already been mooted in Oxford, and that was left in Ormond’s hands.57 Ormond needed to leave the door open even for such miscreants as were now bred in Protestant quarters. Royalism needed to be capacious, to find means to regain Catholic and Irish allegiance but alongside, not in place of, other wandering, sinning souls. It needed to reorder allegiance, not merely confer its blessing upon the confederate order. As talks with the confederates ground on, in fits and starts, Ormond continued to keep other pots boiling. By March 1645 he had transmitted to court a bill which included the conferral (for six months) of power to the chief governor and council ‘to receive to his Majesty’s grace and mercy such as they shall think fit’, which may be ‘of very great use for the preservation of his Majesty’s interest and Protestant subjects here, in case the approaching

 Carte, Ormonde, iii, 325–326 (13 July 1644).  To Digby, 9 July 1644, Carte, Ormonde, iii, 321–324. 57  To Ormond, 13 August 1644, Carte, Ormonde, iii, 345–347. 55 56

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Treaty should end in a breach’.58 He remained cautious about deploying any form of pardon, and Clanricard too feared that a proclamation of pardon would serve to unite rather than divide the confederates.59 Writing to the king in May 1645, Ormond ventured the opinion that the ‘answers already given’ in the negotiations, plus ‘the use to be made of one of the bills now transmitted’ would serve ‘to ruin their supremacy by dividing their party; but in that case, neither can your majesty expect assistance from hence, nor I undertake but that in the end we here shall all be rooted out by the Scots and such as adhere to them’.60 For all the desire to render allegiance a clearly demarcated, if expanding, borderline, it proved much more a frontier zone with a complicated patterning of loyalties. In the summer of 1645, Ormond authorized a miniature model of reintegration for the western province of Connacht. The ever-adaptable and always-ambitious Viscount Taaffe was commissioned to command ‘all such forces as shall join with you’ against pro-­ Covenant protestant forces, and to receive the obedient to ‘mercy and pardon’. His patched-together force included not only soldiers serving under the royalist Clanricard, but new-raised troops under grandees and officers with confederate attachments and even ‘auxiliaries’ from confederate ranks, a conglomeration serving under a royal banner without pressing too hard on other loyalties. But over the summer of 1645, the experiment blended some genuine military success with outright political failure, any tilt by Taaffe towards Catholic interests rendering local Protestants more irreconcilable. Clanricard lamented endeavours with ‘a seeming show both of honour and profit, which cannot be permanent in the midst of so many distractions in the government’; all must ‘serve and obey one master’.61 The most notorious and most audacious attempt at an Irish peace, as the king’s military situation in England spiralled towards ruin, was that pursued by the earl of Glamorgan in the latter part of 1645. Offering concessions on religion which Ormond would not approve, beyond what the king had at least openly offered, the Glamorgan deal was the epitome of an arrangement borne upon the shoulders of personal honour, dependent upon Glamorgan’s pledge that he could secure royal

 To Digby, 28 March 1645, Carte, Ormonde, iii, 398.  To Ormond, 10 January 1645, Carte, Ormonde, iii, 367–370. 60  Carte, Ormonde, iii, 401–404. 61  Armstrong, Protestant war, pp. 146–148. 58 59

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acquiescence, and upon service in arms as the enactment of allegiance, with the immediate despatch to England of the mythical 10,000.62 Attention has been given intentionally to the penumbra surrounding the prolonged and painstaking negotiations between Ormond and the confederates across 1644–1646.63 The ‘Ormond peace’ as agreed in March 1646 was the most extended royalist effort to negotiate a path back to allegiance in time of war, in any of the three kingdoms, whether considered in terms of the prolonged negotiating involved or the detailed final text. The provision for full and healing pardon was embedded in the promise of a comprehensive act of oblivion, while Ormond continued to dodge any corresponding damnation of unreconciled covenanters.64 Offices of honour and influence were not only promised, but a list of posts to be awarded was appended to the deal. Though the confederacy would dissolve into renewed allegiance under law and under Ormond, commissioners from within their ranks were to be mandated to manage the transition and, not least, as pledge to pursue the despatch of the 10,000 troops to the English war.65 As Ormond assured the king he would be ‘obliged to nothing’ unless such assistance was delivered, so he pressed on his confederate brother-in-law Viscount Muskerry that it was ‘a necessary adjunct to the Peace, and a means, not only to secure it, but to make this people truly considerable in the maintenance of that power’, the King, ‘from whence, and from whence only, they were reasonably to expect performance, protection, and what else could be expected from a gracious Prince opportunely assisted by his subjects’.66 Even so it remained incomplete. The question of the status of Catholicism within a legally Protestant kingdom was not resolved but only postponed, and that failure would collapse the treaty almost immediately. But it demonstrates, perhaps more clearly than any other event of the war 62  John Lowe, ‘The Glamorgan mission to Ireland 1645–1646’, Studia Hibernica 4 (1964), 155–196. 63  Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649 (Dublin, 1999), chapters 2–3; Robert Armstrong, ‘Ormond, the confederate peace talks and Protestant royalism’ in Micheál Ó Siochrú ed., Kingdoms in crisis: Ireland in the 1640s (Dublin, 2001), pp. 122–40. 64  Clanricard was perplexed that such could still be considered ‘loyal subjects’: Carte, Ormonde, iii, 463–464 (10 May 1646). 65  Gilbert, Irish confederation, v, 286–311 includes the final ‘articles of peace’ and appended documents. 66  To Viscount Muskerry, 6 April; to Charles I, 7 April 1646, Carte, Ormonde, iii, 458–459, 459.

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years, crucial characteristics of royalist aims and methods. The imperative of delivering a kingdom united in allegiance, at least outwardly, could encompass elements of reconstruction. In the Irish case that meant addressing the absence of any ‘1641 settlement’ such as had been accomplished in the other kingdoms, addressing accumulated grievances, some dating back to the campaign for ‘Graces’ in the 1620s, others associated with the Strafford regime of the 1630s, pressed for in the pre-war Irish parliament, but blocked by Dublin and Westminster interests. It also entailed some redesign of the engine of government, part of the longer-­ term project for an Irish kingdom coexistent with all of the island and of its inhabitants and compatible with a wider Stuart monarchy.67 The Ormond peace came closer to a royalist mode of a settlement than those offered or delivered in the other kingdoms for it envisaged an opening out, rather than a closing down, of the sphere of royal action. It meant an addition of fresh military resources rather than enacting curbs on royal control of the militia, and extending the possibility of state service to loyal Catholics and Irish, rather than restricting it to those approved after a parliamentary vetting. Even in the unresolved question of religion, the parties were circling around some resolution which involved opening up a legally secured space for religious divergence from the ‘king’s church’. As the king reluctantly moved towards a legal basis for Catholic exemption from penal laws in Ireland, rather than one founded on the discretion of his prerogative, so he had permitted an expansion of the legislative security offered  for ‘tender consciences’ in England. One of the few changes of substance between the royalist propositions at the treaties of Oxford and Uxbridge was the expansion of an offer to allow some clauses for the relief of the troubled within a bill upholding the Book of Common Prayer to the framing of legislation ‘for the ease of tender consciences, in such particulars as shall be agreed upon’.68 From Oxford to Dublin to Uxbridge, royalists asserted that the king had ‘made the Laws and Statutes of the Kingdom the rule of what is, or what is not to be done, Which will be always the most Impartial Judge between him and his people’. A resolution which would allow that ‘the Law of the Land may have a full, free, and uninterrupted Course’ would be ‘clear evidence … of a future Peace, and no ground left the continuance 67  Michael Perceval-Maxwell, ‘Ireland and the monarchy in the early Stuart multiple kingdom’, Historical Journal 34 (1991), 279–295. 68  Proceedings, pp. 7–8; Gardiner ed., Constitutional documents, pp. 286–287.

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and growth of these bloody dissentions’.69 A relentless reiteration of the obligations of legal precision characterized the English negotiations and their reportage in royalist publications. But parliamentarians insisted that law was weaponized by royalists, wielded to smash the machinery built to wage their war. Even the more technical debates at Oxford, such as those over the terms for a ceasefire to accompany the negotiations, could be revealing. Within the apparently uncontentious demand there be ‘no Plundering or violence offered to any of his Subjects’, parliament’s commissioners uncovered an intention to extend this beyond ‘the robbing of the Subject by the unruliness of the uncommanded Souldier’ to any forcible seizure of property ‘for not submitting to Impositions and Taxes’ imposed by parliamentary orders or ordinances. The insistence that ‘none of his good subjects might be imprisoned, otherwise then according to the known Laws of the Land’ related not to the use of ‘Military Discipline’ but to the coercive element in taxation measures. Without compulsive power ‘this Article under the specious show of liberty and Law, would altogether disable them to defend their liberties and Laws and would produce to your Majesty an absolute victory, and submission under pretence of a Cessation and a treaty’.70 It could hardly go ill for the king to pose as the defender of the people against those potentially poised to ‘impose new Taxes’, of which ‘their pleasure is all their bound’, to be scooped up by their army,71 or his supporters to posit that the ‘side which confesses it cannot subsist without using violence and oppression, and forcing their estates from them, acknowledges that the people, whom they pretend to fight for is clearly against them’.72 Even as the treaty rumbled on, successive royal proclamations targeted the raft of taxation measures which Westminster continued to introduce as ‘unlawful and unwarrantable’ and commanded subjects to ‘to resist all such Acts of injustice, and Violence’.73 The king rather mischievously offered that both sides forgo illegal taxation and rely on ‘the known justice of his’ or their ‘Cause, and the affection of his people … in which (if the Kingdom be of their mind, and believe the cause of the contrary army to be really their own) the advantage will be  Proceedings, pp. 59, 70.  Proceedings, pp. 13, 21, 29. 71  Proceedings, p. 39. 72  Dudley Digges, The unlawfulnesse of subjects taking up armes against their soveraigne (Oxford, 1643), p. 153. 73  Larkin ed., Stuart royal proclamations, ii, 869–871, 886–888. 69 70

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wholly theirs’.74 And for all the extortion of resources by royalist forces, some necessitous, some wilful, there was substance to the royalist insistence that they tacked closer to established legal forms in the administration of justice and the collection of revenue as it worked itself out across England and Wales.75 Royalist insistence on upholding ‘the letter of the law’ left them room to denounce their opponents’ more ‘flexible conception’ as dangerously unstable, what the earl of Newcastle called a ‘law in the clouds … which no men ever read or heard of but yourselves’.76 Parliamentarianism could endorse the view that what was necessary was legal, that is to say, what was required for the preservation of the kingdom could not in the end conflict with law, and parliament was authoritative judge as to what served the public good.77 Royalists, in effect, reversed the polarity: what was legal was what was necessary if the realm was to be rendered secure; if unseen necessities arose, the law could expand or adapt, but must not be set aside. Westminster might make the case that, even admitting the king’s right by law to name the command of ‘Ships, Forts and Castles’, this was no basis for him ‘to refuse his consent to alter that Law, when by circumstance of time and affairs, that power becomes destructive to the Common-wealth and safety of the people: The preservation whereof, is the chief end of the Law …’.78 One royalist answer had been to foreground the protection of existing office-bearers, to look to the ‘common principles of Justice’ which would see them deprived of possession only for some identifiable offence or delinquency, an instance of making ‘the Laws and Statutes of the Kingdom the rule of what is, or what is not to be done’ rather than airy ‘fears and jealousies’.79 Parliament’s stance at Oxford was represented as being ‘by terror of Arms to demand new Laws’, sweeping away existing ecclesiastical government by bishops ‘though no other form be yet offered  Propositions, pp. 36–367.  John Morrill, Revolt in the provinces: the people of England and the tragedies of war 1630–1648 (Harlow, 1999), pp. 112–117; Braddick, God’s fury, pp. 284–286. 76  Alan Cromartie, ‘The constitutionalist revolution: the transformation of political culture in early Stuart England’, Past & Present 163 (1999), 113. 77  Cromartie, ‘Constitutionalist revolution’, 112–119. 78  Of course Parliament’s commissioners ‘by no means can admit’ that this was ‘by Law absolutely vested’ in the king, ‘He being only trusted with them for The defence and safety of the Kingdom’: Proceedings, p. 84. 79  [Peter Heylyn,] A letter to a gentleman of Leicestershire (Oxford, 1643), pp.  16–17; Proceedings, p. 59. 74 75

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or showed’ as its replacement. Their militia bill would require ‘a blind implicit Faith’ on the king’s part, since the Houses themselves seemed not to know ‘into what hands, or for what time, or in what manner they will order or dispose of it’.80 Royalist writers would urge that ‘Arguments from Convenience are good considerations in framing of Laws or founding of States, but that the State being framed it was most ridiculous and dangerous to retire from the Law to a disputable convenience or Necessity, and put ourselves back again into the same Maze of Debates and Questions, which Laws were framed to be rules to deliver us from’.81 At Uxbridge, too, the scale of parliamentary-covenanter demands, extending to ‘the utter abolishing of that Government, Discipline, and public Form of the Worship of God, which hath been practised and established by Law here, ever since the Reformation’, and which in turn ‘takes away many things of the Civil Government’, was as clear an instance of the gap between acceptable emendation and fundamental alteration in the English polity as could well be.82 That royalists demanded to have full cognizance of a proposed Presbyterian church order before offering agreement to the destructive work of abolishing episcopacy may have had elements of stalling, but it was of a piece with an approach which demanded precision and certainty. Three ‘key features of the king’s official position on religious matters’ have been identified, ‘in essence always on the table’: the possibility of reform to both church government and liturgy by means of parliament (including, of course, the king); the gathering of a national synod; and some legal accommodation of ‘tender consciences’ at least in matters ceremonial.83 They were paradigmatic of the whole royalist approach to acceptable change in the law. To move towards a ‘regulated’ episcopacy was to concede ‘disagreeable expedients’84 but in order to preserve elements of an ecclesiastical order tied to royal authority and bound 80  His Majesties Declaration …, in answer to a declaration … upon the proceedings of the late treaty of peace…, pp. 3–4. 81  A letter from a grave gentleman once a member of this House of Commons, to his friend, remaining a member of the same house in London, concerning his reasons why he left the House, and concerning the late Treaty (1643), p. 2. 82  Extending also to the alienation of church lands and the imposition by Covenant of ‘consent to a new Government’ by king and subjects: A full relation of the passages concerning the late treaty for a peace begun at Uxbridge… (Oxford, 1645), p. 38. 83  Milton, England’s second reformation, pp. 182–183. 84  Anthony Milton, ‘Anglicanism and royalism in the 1640s’ in Adamson ed., English Civil War, p. 73.

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to the wider law and polity of England. To legislate for conscientious scruples was to take into the purview of law elements of royal discretion which might in other circumstances have been entrusted to the king, not unwholly unlike ‘that connivance’ of Catholicism in Ireland ‘which had been used in the Kingdom ever since the Reformation’, but which had been renounced in parliament’s ‘unseasonable Declaration at the beginning of the Rebellion’, one which threated a war of religion and ‘a National quarrel, and to eradicate the whole stock of the Irish’.85 At Uxbridge, royalist negotiators were confronted with expressions of incredulity from their parliamentary-covenanter counterparts that they could ‘think it fit there can be any Agreement of Peace, any respite from hostility with such Creatures as are not fit to live’, but were at large in Ireland; ‘if we must perish, yet let us go to our graves with that comfort, that we have not made Peace with the Enemies of Christ, yea even Enemies of mankind, declared and unreconciled Enemies to our Religion and Nation’.86 Papers exchanged on Ireland did not really constitute a debate but tended to get bogged down in rehashing the whole sequence of past actions on both sides or contesting the legality of the still-ongoing cessation. But royalists represented the implications of the battery of provisions directed at the third kingdom as presenting in particularly sharp terms the effective cession of royal authority. Old arguments were reiterated as to how it was ‘not agreeable to His Majesties honour, or the justice and protection which He owes to His Subjects of His Kingdom of Ireland’ to cede the nomination of the Lord Lieutenant and other officials, ‘commit the whole power of that Kingdom to others’, or bind himself to pass all acts presented as needed to pursue the war. The king would divest himself of all his royal power in Ireland, and ‘reserve no power or authority … over that War, which is most necessary for His Kingly office to do’. The chain of command constructed by their opponents was not least problematic in its intrusion of the third kingdom into the relations of England and Ireland, for ‘in truth that whole Kingdom be thereby delivered into the hands of His Majesties Subjects of Scotland’.87 However reluctantly approved by some at Westminster, what was presented at Uxbridge was a tightly interlocked arrangement for the control of the military resources of the kingdoms of Scotland and England. For  Full relation, p. 225.  Full relation, pp. 138–139. 87  Full relation, pp. 116, 129–132. 85 86

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royalists, it was law, rightly applied, which could disassemble the mechanism, ostensibly to the benefit of each kingdom, into separate but matching components. Short of a ‘union of the Laws of both Kingdoms’, a ‘mixture of power’ would foster jealousies, not amity, and any further, future ‘intermingling of power’ must await ‘a Peace established’ and the separate consent of each parliament, as well of the king. The protection of Scottish law and government was hitched to a restraint of Scottish influence on English affairs to the bounds set by the Act of Pacification.88 The Scots, ‘though our Subjects’, were ‘strangers’ to the ‘Government’ of England. Insofar as a joint panel of English and Scottish commissioners would be charged with ‘hearing and determining of Civil matters for the preservation of the Articles of the Peace’, they would become a body ‘not being tied to any certain Law, whereby to judge’; English ‘common Law not being the rule in such case (because part of them are to be of the Scottish Nation), they may without control exercise what arbitrary power they please’. The king’s commissioners neatly claimed that, had he looked only to himself, he might have given acceded, ‘hoping that the good affections of our Subjects in Scotland might in time have restored us to that power which the two Houses of England would take away’. But his conscientious obligation ‘to maintain the Rights of Our Crown, so far as to be able to protect Our Subjects’, and a reckoning of likely future jealousies between the kingdoms, meant he could only conclude that such steps ‘would alter the whole frame and constitution of the Government of this Kingdom, both Civil and Military’, and indeed ‘in the conclusion … would occasion the ruin and desolation of all Our Kingdoms’.89 Charles was himself unable to see quite how he could give either kingdom ‘a hand in the government of the other, without breach of trust to either’, yet he indicated that he would leave it to the ‘discretions’ of his team ‘what to do, in case you shall find a Peace may be gotten by it’.90 English royalists shut down any such option. Royalists drew together the threads of their case at Uxbridge in a culminating paper. The parliamentary-covenanter alliance was seen to have offered peace only by submission to propositions ushering in ‘such 88  Full relation, pp.  83–84. If there were to be any future ‘intermingling of power’, it should be done ‘after a Peace established’ with the consent of the king with each of the two parliaments (i.e. separately). 89  Full relation, pp. 208–211. 90  Montrose was to be consulted in matters which ‘merely concern Scotland’: King to Nicholas, 11 February 1645, Diary and correspondence of John Evelyn, iv, 138–139.

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alterations, as by constructions and consequences may dissolve the whole frame of the present Government, both Ecclesiastical and Civil, in this Kingdom’. A king stripped of the power of the sword could not ‘execute His Kingly Office in the behalf of His Subjects, to whom He is Sworn to give Protection’. A ‘Neighbour Nation, governed by distinct and different Laws’ would be introduced ‘to a great share in the Government of this Kingdom’. As between Scotland and England, the royalist case was rather that the common status of subjects should be filtered through the particular constitutional and legal order of the separate kingdoms, their intermixture presented as a threat to the subject’s legal protections since, without carefully defined powers, arbitrary rule ensures.91 With Montrose mounting towards the height of his power, such a stance entailed no shrugging off of Scotland, any more than of Ireland, where Ormond’s progress, if slow, must not be blocked by Westminster or Edinburgh. As English royalism relied on presenting the king as upholder of law and lawful religion, in terms many English subjects could find intellectually credible and plausible when set against his actions and capacities, so royalism’s best hopes in the other realms were to pursue as comparable an alignment of their subjects’ values and ambitions as the royal conscience could bear. Royalists could not but be constitutionalists when it came to peace-­ making, or at least to talking about peace-making. But as negotiation took legal form, it was clear that as law could be used to construct, so it could be used to dismantle, as it could preserve, so it could distinguish and distribute rights and powers, offer certainty. That subtle royalist thinker Dudley Digges argued that Westminster, in justifying its actions on grounds of ‘necessity … as being the only cure of fears and jealousies’, was rejecting ‘the ordinary means of safety appointed by law’. In so doing, they were leading the country into a ‘maze and confusion’ from which only law could provide the way out. And, he added, they were fighting ‘not for certain and known Laws, not for a certain and known Religion’. They sought ‘not the Protestant Religion as it is settled in this Kingdom and established by Act of Parliament, but some moveable Creed’, which they could alter and shape as they wished.92 Law gave form to the body politic, but wholeness required the nurturing of moral bonds. Formal negotiations had never stood alone. Redrawing the boundaries of  Full relation, pp. 149–52.  [Dudley Digges,] The unlawfulnesse of subjects taking up armes against their sovereigne ([Oxford,] 1643), pp. 168, 170. 91 92

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allegiance might be most emphatic and effective if they meant, at the stroke of a pen, the delivery of a whole national-confessional movement back within the bounds of loyalty. But advancing allegiance by careful use of rewards and pardons, of winning the willing to acceptable terms, above all through reenlisted service in arms, all could pare back the sphere of rebellion. None of this stood in open contradiction to peace through negotiation, always more appropriately veiled as processes of grievances heard, offers of mercy and grace extended and accepted, and honour satisfied on both sides through service offered and received. And to all these questions royalist thinkers would bend their minds, and Oxford busy its presses.

CHAPTER 4

Thinking Royalist

Francis Quarles may have spent some of the last months of his life in Oxford. Certainly, it was the Oxford press which sent out in print a sequence of prose pamphlets by ‘probably the most successful English poet of his age’.1 Quarles opened his Loyall Convert with a paean to England as ‘the happiest Nation on the habitable earth’, blessed with ‘the fruition of the Gospel, which settled a firm Peace; which Peace occasioned a full Plenty, under the gracious Government of wise and famous Princes, over a thriving and well-contented People’. This was in contrast to its present sad state, of course, but it was a description against which the reader is presented with a narrator ‘amazed’ at the ‘Riddle’ of the king and the two houses voicing similar slogans, to ‘maintain’ the true Protestant religion, ‘preserve’ the liberty of the subject and ‘protect’ the privileges of parliament, a puzzle which his recourse to reason or ‘policy’ could not resolve. These were stock characterizations, to be sure, and for Quarles, the greater mystery of the nation’s fall, and the small, intense dilemma of personal decision met in the kingdom’s ‘neglect of that Truth we once had’ and a resolution which ‘hied me to the Book of God, as the Great Oracle … ushering my Inquest with Prayer’ and finding ‘such strict Precepts, backed with such strong Examples, that my Judgement was enlightened, and my wavering Conscience so thoroughly convinced’ as to 1

 Karl Josef Höltgen, ‘Quarles, Francis’ in Oxford DNB.

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leave him unmoveable in his attachment, ‘unless some clearer light direct me’.2Sheltered, published and buried in wartime Oxford, Sir John Spelman gave careful consideration to ‘the case of our affaires’. Recognizing that ‘the Bonds of all Duty are originally and principally founded in God and tied by Religion’, he was clear that ‘what subject soever would find the true rule and bond of his obedience, must in the first place look what the State is wherein he lives, and in whom the Sovereignty is to which his obedience and faith is inevitably bound. Our State of England … is a Kingdom …’.3 Royalist political writing of the war years took its rise from war conditions and the particular pressures that imposed, of course, but sought to respond to those challenges by working out from the existing situation, the lived experience, the structures of, and values embedded within, the kingdom of England, where ‘the Kingdom be also a Church of God’.4 To borrow a notion from recent theological scholarship, royalist political texts were not so much ‘propositionalist’ as ‘regulative’ in their approach, in other words not so much concerned to advance arguments framed as universal truth claims about how political life worked or ought to work, but operating within a received and recognized political culture, trying to explicate what its rules were when rightly understood, something like the way in which grammar could explain an already existing language, setting bounds to usage, certainly, but so as maintain a language’s integrity, to make it fit for purpose. Of course, the parallels are far from exact. Such an approach ties Christian theological work firmly to the texts of Christian (and Jewish) Scripture, read with close attention to ‘the kind of text it is taken to be’ and to the grand overarching narrative which it reveals, but also strives to fix doctrine closely to practice, the already living and ever-­ evolving life of a religious community, whether liturgical or ethical.5 The royalist authors discussed here took their starting point within the life as well as the thought of a national community, at once kingdom and church,  [Quarles,] Loyall convert, pp. 1–3.  [Spelman,] Case of our affaires, p. 1; David L. Smith in Oxford DNB. 4  [Sir John Spelman,] Certain considerations upon the duties both of prince and people, (Oxford, 1642/1643), p. 4. 5  George Lindbeck, The nature of doctrine: religion and theology in a postliberal age (London, 1984), p. 120. For a stimulating reading of Luther as having ‘offered his theological ideas only in the context of his recommendations for practice’, see Lindbeck, “Martin Luther and the Rabbinic Mind’ in Lindbeck, The church in a postliberal age ed. James J. Buckley (London, 2002). 2 3

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explicating as well as regulating those impulses which can be reckoned the ‘instinctive’ side of royalism. They drew not upon one textual source but two, the laws of England and the books of the Bible, but read both with the spectacles of history. Royalists would almost endlessly reiterate the notion that their case was grounded in actually existing law, not some ‘meaning … esoteric … behind, beneath, or in front of the text’.6 Scripture set the bounds of the acceptable, like law, it regulated what might be appropriate behaviour within a Christian monarchy, what ideas might be perilous, acids to dissolve Quarles’s ‘happiest Nation’. But Scripture needed to be read as history not just as ‘precept’, and law needed to be placed within an unfolding national story, to determine whether it was either relevant or pertinent to current crises. Modern scholarship has placed much emphasis on law and theology as discourses for the discussion of politics in the seventeenth century, perhaps seeing them as constituting separate spheres where mutually appropriate concerns could be raised—theology for obedience, law for property rights, for example—and dangerous when operated to other purposes.7 Or they could be thought of as encroaching on, or even absorbing, discussion of ‘politics’, especially where the latter has been defined in terms more suitable to later generations’ understanding of a distinct and identifiable arena where a very particular set of concerns may be debated, and possibly even resolved.8 For present purposes, they will be treated, alongside history— English, Christian, classical or universal—as several streams flowing into an intellectual reservoir, which writers might not only scoop from but swim within. The focus here will be on published texts, almost entirely on the products of the Oxford press,9 during the years between the outbreak of war in England and Charles’s rendering himself a captive of the Scottish army, as offering the most sustained instances of royalist political writing and those intentionally aimed at a public audience. Two consequences  Lindbeck, The nature of doctrine, p. 120.  Glenn Burgess, The politics of the ancient constitution: an introduction to English political thought 1604–1642 (Basingstoke, 1992). 8  Conal Condren argues that the ‘domain of the political in seventeenth-century England was altogether less secure and well-formed than we have been apt to think’, in part because ‘of metaphorical incursion from adjacent and more authoritative realms of discourse’. What ‘we’ modern students ‘see as a clear content domain of political activity could always be, and usually was, reconstituted wholly or in part through the domains of law and religion’: The language of politics in seventeenth-century England (Basingstoke, 1994), p. 6. 9  The principal exception is Bramhall’s Serpent salve, likely printed at York. 6 7

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follow. One is to leave out of consideration the two writers who have drawn most attention as ‘royalist’ thinkers, Sir Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes,10 the other to give a very English flavour to such writing. That said, some of the most extended and capable treatments were the work of a trio of bishops of the Church of Ireland, one English by birth (John Bramhall), one Welsh (Griffith Williams) and one Scottish (John Maxwell). Their Irish-born counterpart, James Ussher, composed his own lengthy treatise, The power of the prince as communicated by God and the subject’s duty, around 1640, though it was only printed posthumously, in 1661.11 Of the three, only Bramhall had had an extended career in the Irish church, and all three addressed their work principally to matters English, though at least occasional reflections on Irish parallels appear, most especially in the case of Williams. Maxwell dedicated his principal piece of political writing, Sacro-sancta regum majestas, to Ormond, celebrating ‘that more than admirable piece of prudence in that Treaty of Cessation’ and Ormond’s ‘true discreet zeal to Christ’s Church, and loyalty to your Master our most gracious King’, which raised the question, ‘who knoweth but at this time You are set at the Helm to help the Lord, right his Anointed, and to save a poor Church threatened with ruin?’. And like Bramhall later, he would turn his polemical fire on the specifically Scottish mode of Presbyterianism.12 Amongst royalist writers of these years Dudley Digges, dead in Oxford by October 1643, aged about thirty, has drawn merited attention for the sophistication of his argument, notably in his posthumous The unlawfulnesse of subjects taking up armes against their soveraigne, in what case 10  Both are subjects of sufficiently extensive and effective scholarship to allow the spotlight to fall elsewhere here. Filmer’s first venture into print with a political tract was in 1648, his best-known work, Patriarcha, written before the English wars, was not printed until 1680. Hobbes’s Elements of Law had a restricted manuscript circulation from 1640, while De Cive was published in a limited edition in 1642 (reaching a broader audience in its 1647 edition); Leviathan appeared in 1651. 11  Ussher’s sermon The soveraignes power was published at Oxford in 1644. The works of another Scottish-born bishop of the Irish church, Henry Leslie, mostly fall outside these years, with the exception of his sermon The blessing of Judah (Oxford, 1644). For Ussher see Alan Ford, James Ussher (Oxford, 2007). 12  [Maxwell,] Sacro-sancta, Epistle dedicatory. Maxwell’s An answer by letter to a worthy gentleman who desired of a divine some reasons by which it might appeare how inconsistent Presbyteriall government is with monarchy (Oxford, 1644) (later republished as The burden of Issachar) had much to say about Scottish practice; Bramhall, A fair warning, to take heed of the Scotish discipline (London, 1649).

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soever.13 If an earlier work, for which he was at least partially responsible,14 opened with the claim that in ‘this discourse concerning Regal authority, it is needless to waste time in declaring the original; since it is granted to be at least mediately from God’,15 allowing for a brisk move forward to contested ground, in Unlawfulnesse he was prepared to give considered, if scattered, discussion of the question of the origin of political power. He sketched ‘mankind’ in a primeval freedom ‘wherein each single person looked upon the world as his enemy’, where ‘it was not so delightful to do whatever they liked as it was miserable to suffer as much at it pleased others to inflict’, an ‘unhappy condition amidst fears and jealousies’, this last a telling phrase in the 1640s. The only ‘remedy of so great evils’ was to ‘reduce themselves into a civil unity, by placing over them one head, and by making his will the will of them all, to the end there may be no gap left open by schism to return to their former confusion’.16 He spoke of ‘mutual compact’, ‘contract’, ‘mutual obligation’, even ‘Covenant’. This ‘consent and mutual obligation’ only to use that strength ‘as Law shall require’ was not just a negative commitment not to resist that ‘body in which the supreme power is placed’, but a positive obligation to give their aid to it ‘according to the nature of the contract’ entered into.17 Digges must leave no room for any resumption of power. It simply was not possible, for ‘government is an effect not of a peoples divided natural powers, but as they are united and made one by civil constitution’. Since ‘this power is simply one … there is not left … any civil, that is, any legal, power, which can appear in resistance’, and to ‘allow any power to Subjects against their ruler’ is to ‘thereby dissolve the sinews of government, by which they were compacted into one, and which made a multitude a people’.18 13  John Sanderson, ‘But the people’s creatures’: the philosophical basis of the English civil war (Manchester, 1989), chapter three; Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: the challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge, 2010), chapter four; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 273–277. 14  The book collector George Thomason attributed the tract to a collective including viscount Falkland, William Chillingworth and Digges, though Mortimer reckons it more closely matches Digges’s other work: Reason and religion, p. 90. Digges himself appears to suggest authorship of the earlier text: ‘I took this method in my Answer to the Observations’ (Unlawfulnesse, p. 62). 15  [Dudley Digges,] An answer to a printed booke, intitled Observations… (Oxford, 1642), p. 1. 16  Digges, Unlawfulnesse, pp. 2–4. 17  Digges, Unlawfulnesse, pp. 4–5, 6. 18  Digges, Unlawfulnesse, p. 7.

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So far, so Hobbes, one might say. But what Digges was prepared to concede, quite literally for the sake of argument, he was not prepared to defend as a matter of fact. Rather, he was willing to play an away match, to have his opponents ‘lay down their own Scheme of Government, and let them make what advantages they can’. He presented himself as ‘unwilling to weary the Reader with an unprofitable debate, and different stating of the original of power’. Why? Because ‘though it be most true, that paternal authority was regal, and therefore of Gods immediate constitution, and founded in nature’, it ‘is not much pertinent to the present decision, nor can it necessarily concern modern controversies between Rulers and People’.19 What was ‘pertinent’ now was the product of history. But that did not mean letting go a grip on a primal patriarchy as an inherently Christian understanding of government. It could not be imagined that ‘Anarchy was before a regulated Government, and that God who had digested one Chaos into order, should leave the most noble creatures in a worse confusion’. In the ‘infancy of the world … it was no more possible in right … to choose their rulers, then to choose their Fathers. Thus Regal power sprang first from Paternal …’.20 With the ‘multiplying of mankind’ came ‘Anarchy’, not from ‘want of all Law and Rulers’ but the ‘multitude of Governors … when in every family was a Kingdom’.21 The imagining of ‘I know not what rude multitudes, living without laws, without government’ was suitable only to ‘heathen Politicians’ who ‘dreamed that the first men were bred as Insects, out of the mud of the earth’.22 The determined royalist controversialist Henry Ferne also had detected pagan premises among those who would ‘suppose a multitude of people meeting together to contrive a Government, and these either to spring on a sudden out of the earth … or to live dispersedly in caves & woods, and so to be brought together by some Orpheus his pipe’.23 For Spelman, too, it was from such ‘original Stock-fathers’ that ‘Kingdoms and Monarchies, I suppose for the most part, have had their beginning’. But history happened, usurpation by violence as much as election by consent, and all of this called

 Digges, Unlawfulnesse, pp. 14–15.  Digges, Answer, pp. 4–5. 21  Digges, Unlawfulnesse, p. 15. 22  Digges, Answer, p. 4. 23  Henry Ferne, Conscience satisfied that there is no warrant of the armes now taken up by subjects… (Oxford, 1643), p. 9. 19 20

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for caution. God in his providence might permit tyrannies to emerge ‘But with such absolute Dominion England hath nought to do’.24 Digges, too, would make much of history, as will be seen. But he had a final, vital move to play. Doubling back to the depiction of a ‘multitude, not a nation … without Laws, without Empire, free to do or suffer wrong, and loose from all positive obligations’, he was adamant that as none possessed ‘a right to take away the life of man’, so ‘they could not bestow it upon another, for what is not, cannot be alienated’. This was the jus gladii, the right of the sword. It could come only from God, who gives life and takes it away. ‘The people could not agree together to dispense with Gods precept, Thou shalt not kill, nor distinguish shedding blood with the sword of vengeance from murder.’ So ‘jus gladii (to bear the sword innocently, and to cut off offenders without deserving greater punishment then they inflict…) must refer to God as the author’. Subjects facing a conqueror could, through their consent to his rule, create a ‘moral bond’, but their consent was no ‘adequate cause, but a necessary qualification to make him capable of receiving a larger commission from God. The sword of Justice is blunt, the peoples agreement could not put an edge upon it to cut off offenders, this is done by the Magistrate, as Gods delegate.’25 Even at its furthest reach, far removed from a patriarchal world, either by the flow of time or in imaginative reconstructions of political origins, human consent could never confer such ultimate, terrible power: at most, it could activate, or detonate, what was divinely bestowed. ‘Sovereign power is armed with Potestas vitae & necis, power of life and death, which cannot flow or issue from man, for no man hath it. None can lay claim to it, but the living God, the author of life, who killeth and giveth life again.’ Thus John Maxwell, a royalist thinker usually pitched at an opposite extreme from Digges, among the more robust of advocates of monarchical power. He disavowed any idea of ‘Regal power resident in the people’, even versions which would make irrevocable any ‘contract, compact or covenant’ divesting them and investing such power in a ruler. He suggested that he ‘was sometime in love with this opinion, nor do I much condemn it, for it enableth Sovereign authority of a King with an entire and sufficient power’, yet he ‘dare not to aver it, nor maintain it’ for 24   [Sir John Spelman,] A view of a printed book intitled Observations… (Oxford, 1642/1643), p. 13. Michael Mendle, Henry Parker and the English civil war (Cambridge, 1995), p. 107, rejects the attribution to Spelman. 25  Digges, Unlawfulnesse, pp. 33–34, 63, 77.

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neither Scripture nor ‘pious Antiquity’ could vouch for it. Rather ‘Monarchy is founded in paternal Sovereignty; and the best way to find out … the Sovereign’s prerogative, is to consider well what in Scripture, what in nature, we find to be the true and natural right of a father’. As with Digges, Christian witness must outface ‘heathen’ ascription. Maxwell’s exercises in imaginative reconstructions did not go very far. He allowed himself a momentary thought for ‘a multitude … dispersed by a War, a Persecution, or some other necessity imaginable’ who ‘meet in a strange Land, or some Territory not inhabited’ desperate to find out a ‘Sovereign power to govern and protect them’ or ‘a confused mixture of more Nations, more Families, when they have not one common father’. ‘Necessity forceth them to a government (without it they can have neither society, nor safety, nor peace, nor happiness).’ Here ‘all their part is only to design or declare the man … but the power is only from Almighty God, … the Authority, the Sovereignty is of God, from God, God’s’.26 These are hardly thinkers whose ideas can be conflated but there are points of convergence, none more so than the recognition that genuinely political power, pushed to the limit of legitimized killing, could only be divine. It did not rest, latent, within human persons, individually or collectively. The furthest extent of their participation might be to designate the holder, add their collective energy to enable him (or them27), to bring it to bear; their obedience gave it scope, but only a divine gift gave it life. The contest with parliamentary writers could be fought out on very narrow ground, strategically vital to hold. As with the ‘distinction between abiding doctrinal grammar and variable theological vocabulary’,28 so it is important to attend closely to the words they chose to use and how they were being employed, in order to detect what bounds were being set to right thinking and right actions. One was the question of whether the conferral of rule came ‘immediately’ from God. It was a common enough royalist stance to distinguish, as Digges did, between the unique conditions prevailing in the monarchies of ancient Israel, when ‘jurisdiction’ was ‘derived from divine ordinance … immediately … when God designated the person, which now no State will pretend’, and conditions in other  Maxwell, Sacro-sancta, pp. 18–19, 49–50, 85–86.  Even Maxwell wished that ‘none misconstrue me, as though I condemn Aristocracy and Democracy as unlawful governments’, for all that they may be ‘degenerate from the true and most perfect species of Government, Monarchy’: Sacro-sancta, pp. 5, 85. 28  Lindbeck, The nature of doctrine, p. 113. 26 27

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times and places where divine action was indirect.29 Peaching on the anniversary of the king’s accession in 1644, another displaced bishop of the Irish church, Henry Leslie, offered particularly relentless advocacy of monarchy’s superiority, and determinedly narrow allocation of any role to ‘the People … in making of a King’, allowing them little more than ‘the solemn declaration, and signification of his power’, ‘only a ceremony, of no absolute necessity’. It was ‘God who advanceth the person of the King into that Office’, and this was not ‘peculiar unto the Kings of the Jews’. True, these ‘were of Gods own choice’ but it was wrong to ‘think that other kings are not so’. As God was ‘the Author of the soul of man immediately by creation and infusion, albeit an humane act do intervene’ in the biological production of new life, ‘so he is the Author of regal power immediately, though some humane acts do intervene to the investing of the King with that power’. Where ‘designation’ by soldiers, senators or the sword as well as the people ‘cannot be denied … yet in all these actions, God is the Pilot and supreme Director, men are only instruments and secondary agents’. And when kings succeeded by inheritance, ‘it is God who gives children, who makes heirs, as in a private family’.30 For Maxwell, too, ‘Sovereignty refers to God, as to its immediate Author and Donor’, ‘the interposing of an humane act … as election, succession, or conquest, impedeth not the constitution and making of a King to be immediately from God’.31 Vocabulary mattered, but what matters far more was that divine grammar that was the providential ordering of creation. ‘Governing power’ was more than a ‘precept’ implanted by God in his Creation, but ‘an Efflux [a flowing outwards] or issue of that providence, which sets up & pulls down, which translates Kingdoms, and governs the whole world’, day and daily.32 ‘Creation is begun conservation, and conservation is but a continued Creation.’33 Whether God spoke by the mouth of an ancient prophet, or guided the processes whereby individuals attained supreme power, whatever vocabulary one used to describe such intermediate actions and processes, political power remained a divine gift. Henry Ferne, ever precise in his defence of both church and king, challenged the manner in which his critic, the Independent divine, William  Digges, Unlawfulnesse, pp. 28–9.  Henry Leslie, The blessing of Judah (Oxford, 1644), pp. 7, 13, 20, 22. 31  Maxwell, Sacro-sancta, pp. 18–19, 21. 32  Ferne, Conscience satisfied, p. 7. 33  Maxwell, Sacro-sancta, p. 81. 29 30

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Bridge, made his distinctions between power ‘from God’ and ‘the qualification of that power … and the designation of the person’. Each manoeuvred around such Scripture texts as 1 Peter 2: 13–14 (‘Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well’) or Romans 13 (beginning ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God’). Ferne could accept that God ‘designs his Vicegerents on earth mediately’, by election, succession or other ways, even that the ‘manner of executing’ governing power ‘according to the several forms of government’ was ‘the invention of man’. But he honed in on Bridge’s attempt to render power in abstract, not concrete terms, to apply Scripture texts demanding obedience as being directed to the ‘power of Magistracy, abstractively taken’. Rather, ‘the higher power here’ in the texts must ‘be understood concretely with commutation of the persons that bear the power, for they are here proposed as objects of our obedience, which cannot be directed but upon power in some person’—‘power cannot be … existent, but in some person’.34 For Maxwell, his ‘adversaries’ ‘tortured’ Scripture, putting ‘a gloss upon it to destroy the original text’. ‘They say, the Apostle speaketh abstractly, not concretely of the power itself, not of the person clothed and invested with the power.’ Maxwell sought refuge in grammar, historically understood: ‘Saint Paul writing to the Romans, did keep the Roman usual diction in this’. ‘I content myself with the dialect of Canaan in Scripture; in which frequently expressions in the abstract, express existents in the concrete.’35 Whether authors chose to play up monarchy as the best form of government (from which all others were deteriorations) or the only form directly instituted by God, all were determined to insist upon the parallel, even continuity—both over time and in terms of hierarchy—with the household or family. ‘When all complications have been allowed for … parliamentarians tended to distinguish between the family and the state in a way that royalists did not.’36 Where ‘Domestical government is the very  Ferne, Conscience satisfied, pp. 12–13, 64.  Maxwell, Sacro-sancta, pp. 30–31. 36  Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (London, 2012), p. 143. Parliamentarians could argue that ‘the submission of women was derived from a natural inequality that had nothing to do with the political world strictly defined’ (p. 140). 34 35

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Image and model of Sovereignty in a Common-weal’,37 not only the father: child, but the husband: wife relationship was repeatedly pressed. It was mistaken to conclude that ‘because the Wife upon the death of her Husband is loosed from her former obligation, and is free either to continue a Widow, or to elect a new Husband, that therefore her Husband in his Life time did derive his Dominion from her’.38 To rise up, even in the cause of religion, against a superior was ‘forbidden’. ‘And what the son may not do against his father, nor the wife against her husband, nor the servant against his Lord; that certainly no man may do against his King, which is the father of his Country, the husband of the Commonwealth, and the supreme Lord over all his subjects.’39 As was long since remarked, for all the diversity among royalist writers, ‘there is one thing that unites them all. Whether they appeal to St Paul or to the law of the constitution established, they all appear to agree that a recognition of a right of rebellion in any one for any cause would make stable government impossible’.40 Royalists held a ‘theory of monarchy … designed not to make royal power unlimited but to make it unconditional (and hence irresistible)’.41 And once it could be determined that biblical injunctions applied, not abstractly but precisely to the king, then the most onerous of all questions was ‘whether to fight against the King, be not to resist the Supreme Power, to which God hath threatened damnation’, which could be understood quite literally. ‘The matter of this discourse is of high concernment. For as things now stand, on it hang Heaven or Hell, our salvation or eternal damnation.’ Thus ‘we stand on the very brink of Hell, ready to be turned into the Lake of everlasting woes’, for if, in battle against the king, ‘we fall, we perish eternally’.42 With sovereignty ‘fixed in the person of the King’ and allegiance ‘assigned’ by law, ‘then comes in Religion, and fortifies, and enforces all those bonds of duty and obedience, and that under the severe menace of damnation’.43  Spelman, View, p. 9.  Bramhall, Serpent-salve, p. 87. 39  Griffith Williams, Vindiciae regum, or, The grand rebellion (Oxford, 1643), p. 21. 40  J. W. Allen, English political thought 1603-1644 (London, 1938), p. 483. 41  Burgess, Ancient constitution, p. 22. 42  Digges, Unlawfulnesse, pp.  31, 59, 61. For an important consideration of Digges’s understanding of the relationship between ‘natural right’ and the obligations imposed by Christianity, and the contrast not only with parliamentarian, but other royalist, writers, see Mortimer, Reason and religion, pp. 92–104. 43  Spelman, Case, p. 21. 37 38

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If the authors under review here, often allocated very different locations on a spectrum of royalist thought, converged in setting boundaries to acceptable modes of thought and thereby appropriate forms of action, these included notions included upon some definitions of ‘absolutist’ thinking: that ‘the ruler in any state holds sovereign authority, cannot be actively resisted … and should be obeyed by his subjects provided that his commands are not contrary to those of God or nature’.44 The present discussion has deliberately sought to avoid entering into debate about the applicability, or value, of such terms as ‘absolutism’, an altogether more extended question, of international import. For Sir John Spelman, ‘What Subject soever would find the true rule and bond of his obedience, must in the first place look what the State is wherein he lives, and in whom the Sovereignty is to which his obedience and faith is inevitably bound’. His answer was clear: ‘Our State of England … is a Kingdom, an Empire, a well-regulated Monarchy; the Head thereof a Supreme Head, a Sovereign, a King whose Crown is an Imperial Crown, the Kingdom His Kingdom, His Realm, His Dominion, the People His People, the Subject His Subject’.45 This was what history had delivered to the English. For the likes of Ferne or Digges, there was no need for ‘Conscience [to] be put to drive into the obscure fabulous times before Caesar or Brute. … We are upon the English government, which followed the Saxons, or rather upon the Norman which followed the Conquest’.46 What ‘our Laws were under the Danes or Saxons (by whom we were likewise conquered) doth not much concern us to examine (no more indeed then it doth to know the ancient British Laws and Privileges, which were taken away by them, and the true owners beaten out of their rightful possessions and inheritances)’, for William of Normandy ‘inverted the Government, altered the Laws, disposed of Possession to his Norman followers … the Laws given us by him, and which we live by now, are written in his language’. But history was always in motion. Conquest might not give a ‘right, yet it is the mother

44  J.  P. Sommerville, Royalists and patriots (London, 1999), p.  228. Less certain in its universal applicability is the further point, elided in the quotation from Sommerville, that the ruler ‘can change constitutional arrangements in a case of necessity (though they ought otherwise to maintain them)’; though present in some cases, several wartime royalists shied away from treating this topic. 45  Spelman, Case, p. 1. 46  Ferne, Conscience satisfied, p. 68.

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of it’.47 It ‘was no injury to his Majesty to say, He cannot rule as Conqueror, for he is not a Conqueror, but claims from him that was’.48 ‘His Majesties original Title to this Kingdom was not Election, either of the Person, or of the Family, but Conquest, or rather a Multitude of Conquests, the very last whereof is confirmed by a long Succession of four and twenty royal Progenitors and Predecessors, glorious both at home and abroad, in Peace and War’, but this reality was not ‘to enslave our Nation as Conquered Vassals … as if so many good Laws, so many free Charters, so many acts of Grace in so long a succession had operated nothing’.49 History could be interpreted as a story of declension, as it was for John Maxwell. Even ‘wise and able Princes being plunged into inevitable and unavoidable difficulties, to obtain Subsidies and assistance of their subjects, to extricate to themselves out of such labyrinths, are forced to suffer their rights to be wrested out of their hands, and to make sale of them’. Maxwell might try to offer a parallel insistence ‘that as the subject cannot without sacrilege, royal and divine usurpation, trench upon the sacred Prerogative of the King; no more can the King by any right from Almighty God trench upon the Liberty of the person, and the Propriety of goods of his subjects, without presupposal of a lawful act of Jurisdiction’, but he was not much interested in discussing how law might offer such protections. More to his purpose was the argument that times may determine ‘that the Sovereign must exerce and exercise an Arbitrary power, not stand upon private men’s interest, or transgressing of Laws, made for the private good of individuals; but for the preservation of itself and the public may break through all Laws. The case may be, and sometimes is, as when sudden foreign invasion, or strong home-bred sedition, threaten King and Kingdome, State and Republique with present and almost unavoidable ruin.’ He pressed rulers ‘cheated out of their sacred right by fraud or force’ or where ‘subjects have used or abused’ concessions to damage sovereignty, and their own good, to take any occasion to ‘resume’ their rights.50  Digges, Unlawfulnesse, p. 116.  Ferne, Conscience satisfied, p. 33. 49  Bramhall, Serpent-salve, p.  8. For an important argument that history, specifically the conquest of 1066, was not determinative of, but enlisted in, political and constitutional argument, see Johann P. Sommerville, ‘History and theory: the Normal Conquest in early Stuart political thought’, Political Studies 34 (1986), 249–261. 50  Maxwell, Sacro-sancta, pp. 142, 144, 171, 176. 47 48

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Williams was prepared to step right into this minefield. He not only shared the hope that a wise parliament would reverse the exclusion of bishops from the upper house,51 but cast doubt on the legitimacy of such a measure, not only from the circumstances of its passage, but because ‘no act of Parliament can prevail to deprive the King of His right and authority … I see not how this act can deprive the King of the service and counsel of all his Bishops and clergy, but that it is void of itself and needeth no repeal’.52 He gave another hostage to fortune with regard to the act against the dissolution of the present parliament. A somewhat weasel sentence attributed to ‘many wise men’ the case that, since the parliamentarians at Westminster ‘contrary to their own faith and the trust of the King … abuse it to overthrow the fundamental Laws of this Kingdom’, ‘they see no reason that this trust being forfeited, and the faith reposed in them betrayed, the King may not immediately re-assume that power of dissolving them, into his own hands again, and both our unjustly abused King and our much injured people, declare this act to be void’, allowing Williams to ‘heartily wish, that because it still carrieth the countenance of a Law, the faction would be so wise as to yield it to be presently dissolved by a Law’.53 But these were positions which ran athwart dominant tendencies in royalist thinking. The king’s own instinct to deny the title of parliament to those still gathered at Westminster did not win out.54 No bishops were summoned to the Oxford parliamentary assembly, and the official line taken was to defend the Church as it stood ‘after the reforms of 1641, rather than a defence of the pre-1640 settlement’.55 History’s legacy, the current constitutional order, right up to the changes brought about in 1641, could be seen positively, one wherein the ‘end of Parliaments is to temper the violence of Sovereign Power’. ‘Degenerate Monarchy becomes Tyranny, and the cure of Tyranny is a mixture of Governments; Parliaments are proper adjuments to Kings’, before whose Sun-like glory, parliament and councils in their ‘lower Spheres’, by their ‘motions ought to allay the violence of the highest Orb

 So Bramhall, Serpent-salve, p. 34, and Williams, Vindiciae, p. 13.  Even so, he concluded his discussion with the ‘hope’ that ‘the wisdom of the next Parliament, together with their love and respect to the Church and Church-men will nullify the same’: Williams, Discovery, p. 32. 53  Williams, Discovery, p. 18. 54  Smith, Constitutional royalism, pp. 171–172. 55  Milton, England’s second Reformation, pp. 262, 269–270. 51 52

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for the good and preservation of the universe’.56 The ‘restraint of regal absoluteness in point of making Law’ thus emerged when ‘wise and pious Christian Princes’ had brought the kingdom to ‘just and regular Government’ and ‘for the preservation of what they had done, began to yield the absoluteness of their power, without which they could never have brought that State into any perfect frame, unto some retardation of motion, and regulation of power’, drawing in bishops and barons, and later the Commons, so that ‘at last that as to the power of making Law, their Sceptre should thenceforth be locked up under the cautelous ward of a triple hand’.57 When it came to law-making, so often the focus of more recent debates over seventeenth-century notions of ‘sovereignty’ or the nature, or for that matter, the existence, of ‘absolutism’, royalists could be emphatic. ‘Our Laws give this honour to the King, that he can join or be a sharer with no man. … The King like Solomons true Mother challengeth the whole Child, not a divisible share,58 but the very Life of the Legislative Power: The Commons present and pray, The Lords advise and consent, The King enacts’.59 But they were also subtle. To ‘speak properly the Legislative power is solely in the King, although not in the King being sole’. It was inadmissible to assert that such power was ‘partly in the King, partly in the Kingdom’, but such a statement was ‘true in this sense’ that the assent of the two Houses was ‘necessarily required’ to ‘make or alter any law’.60 Speaking properly might mean speaking plainly, that there could be no ‘co-ordination, or co-equality … nor any competition of the Subjects power … with the virtual and primary influence of the Sovereign’s power; but a plain subordination and subjected ministration of the one under the Sovereignty of the other’.61 But it might mean recognizing that the two Houses ‘are in a sort Coordinate with His Majesty … to some act or exercising of the supreme power, that is to the making of Laws by yielding their consent’, a ‘Co-ordination to some purposes, but not such as’ a parliamentarian like Henry Parker ‘urges for it, in the matter of Supremacy’ itself.62 Language could slide towards the contorted as Griffith Williams  Bramhall, Serpent-salve, pp. 89, 120.  Spelman, Case, p. 5. 58  1 Kings 3: 16–28. 59  Bramhall, Serpent-salve, p. 64. 60  Spelman, View, p. 19. 61  Spelman, Case, pp. 2–3. 62  Ferne, Conscience satisfied, pp. 6, 13. 56 57

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sought to push back against a redefinition of the ‘three estates’, conventionally taken to comprise temporal lords, spiritual lords (bishops) and Commons, but now reckoning the king as one of them, alongside Lords and Commons. He jibbed at the effect: ‘so both the King and the two Houses might be only co-ordinate, when as indeed they are, as in some respect concurrent, so also subordinate unto him, as to their Head’.63 At least some royalists determined ‘not to quarrel about words’.64 Plainly their differences extended beyond making right choices in vocabulary, for all that later commentators have sought to parse these with care. But convergence could occur all the same, and not merely so as to construct a persuasive case for those undetermined or uncertain in their allegiance, but more importantly to do so in a manner which gave practical fortification to the royalist cause. Bramhall sought a ‘resolution, whether the King be under the Law and how far, I mean not the Law of God or Nature but his own National Laws’. He answered, ‘First by a voluntary submission of himself’ as ‘Christ was under the Law no otherwise then by voluntary submission’.65 Of course if the king was not ‘otherwise under the Law, then as our Saviour Christ was, who did subject himself to the just execution of the positive Laws of the Kingdom, of which he himself was the Head and Fountain’,66 readers would know this was not only an utter submission but one Christians could not but be bound to emulate. ‘Secondly, the Law hath a directive Power over Kings, and all good Kings will follow it for example sake to their Subjects, for Conscience sake to themselves.’ ‘But’, and this was the crucial corollary, ‘the Law hath no coercive Power over him’.67 Across time and space, some kings were ‘more restrained by their laws then some others, so are their powers the less absolute; and yet all of them being absolute Kings and free Monarchs, are excepted from any account of their actions to any inferior jurisdiction’.68 Whatever vocabulary was chosen to describe the legislative power, or how far soever an author might go in stipulating that ‘the King of England is already restrained and limited, so that He cannot rule and govern absolutely as He will, as in making of Laws … and in declaring of Laws’,69 the  Williams, Discovery, p. 81.  Digges, Unlawfulnesse, p. 68. 65  Bramhall, Serpent-salve, pp. 66–67. 66  Cf Spelman, Case, p. 15. 67  Bramhall, Serpent-salve, pp. 66–67. 68  Griffith Williams, Jura Majestatis, the right of kings both in church and state (Oxford, 1644), p. 146. 69  [Hyde,] Transcendent, p. 15. 63 64

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result was to bind him inextricably into those processes. Williams might be cagey on the benefits of past concessions by monarchs to their subjects but not about the ensuing obligation. ‘And hence it is that the Kings of this Realm, according to the oaths and promises which they made at their Coronation, can never give, nor repeal any law, but with the assent of the Peers and People.’ But this ‘does no ways translate the legislative power from the King unto his assistants … the consent of the Lords and Commons is no sharing of that power, but a condition yielded to be observed by the King, in the use of that power’.70 Much depended on how ‘we use the word Parliament’, in practice employed in ‘divers senses’ which might raise an ‘apparition of contradiction’ if care was not taken to ‘reconcile’ and discriminate its use. When discussing judicial appeals, it might be used ‘for the House of Lords only’, and some contexts could justify using ‘the word Parliament for the two Houses of Parliament only’ but ‘as to making of Law’ parliament was as ‘a Chair of three feet, the two Houses make but two of the three, which without the third is lame and useless’. The opposition claim that ‘the Parliament hath an absolute indisputable power of declaring Law’ was ‘most true’, but could only refer to parliament as a whole, including the king.71 Digges could accept the term ‘co-ordinate’ so long as he could define it. If co-ordination was taken as ‘a division of Sovereignty, that is against the nature of it, and a clear contradiction’ but ‘if they mean an equal right in the King and the two Houses of a negative voice, in respect of new Laws to be enacted, or old abrogated; this is granted’.72 What was being protected, by whatever means, was the king’s negative voice, his right to say no. The challenge to that right, as in itself as mark of the subject’s ‘slavery’ has been located as close to the heart of the emergent parliamentary case from 1642.73 As ‘our Parliament is so sweetly tempered and composed of all estates, to secure this Nation from the evils which are incident to all Forms of Government: he that shall quite take His Majesties negative voice away secures us from Tyranny, but

 Williams, Discovery, pp. 96–97.  Spelman, Case, pp. 7–8, 10; [Spelman,] View, p. 6. 72  Digges, Unlawfulnesse, p. 88. 73  Quentin Skinner, ‘Classical liberty and the coming of the English civil war’ in Skinner & Martin Van Gelderen eds, Republicanism, ii, The values of republicanism in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 9–28. 70 71

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leaves us open and stark naked to all those popular evils or Epidemical diseases which flow from Ochlocracy; as Tumults, Seditions, Civil Wars’.74 There was a further important consequence to delineating the ‘great restraint of regal absoluteness in our State … in the two points of declaring and making of Law’, for this meant that ‘then in all other things that are not expressly restrained by any Law … the Sovereignty both of judgement and power ever hath been and still is in the King alone, freely and at his own discretion’. This meant not only ‘providing for the present safety against sudden danger … levying of Arms, suppressing of tumults and rebellions’, but a whole raft of named powers, from making peers to treating with foreign states, to bestowing rewards and pardons, to coining.75 The Houses ‘are the people only to such purposes as the law nominates … for consenting to Laws or Taxes … To all other purposes (wherein the Regal power is not expressly limited) the King is the whole people, and what he doth is legally their Act. … In such matters wherein he is absolute … there he is … legally the English Nation’. And not least in acting to ‘protect His Subjects, and to make use of those means with which the law hath invested him to enable him to compass that end, and these are the Militia or arms of the Kingdome’.76 For Bramhall, the king’s obligation was to protect his people and promote their wellbeing. ‘But this Protection must be according to Law, this Promotion according to Law.’ Yet ‘in case of evident necessity, where the whole Commonwealth lie at stake; for the safety of King and Kingdome, His Majesty may go against particular Laws. … all human Laws and particular proprieties, must veil and strike top-sail to a true public necessity’.77 Unsurprisingly, in the fraught circumstances of the war years, royalist writers were not much inclined to explore when such necessity might arise, and what form such actions outside law might take, but rather to throw the burden of arbitrary and illegal actions upon their opponents, actions directly related to erroneous and downright falsified ways of interpreting and representing the textual authorities which made England a lawful, and Christian, kingdom. What royalists sought to counter was a conjuration of dangers, spectral, imagined, nightmarish, rather than palpable. The battery of protestant arguments against Romish error could be deployed. Good protestants  Bramhall, Serpent-salve, p. 136. Ochlocracy is government by the populace, or mob-rule.  Spelman, Case, pp. 3–4; [Hyde,] Transcendent, p. 15. 76  Digges, Unlawfulnesse, pp. 146, 151–152. 77  Bramhall, Serpent-salve, pp. 33, 62–63. 74 75

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would all ‘know in how great stead’ pious frauds, ‘holy falsehoods, and religious untruths stood the Church of Rome’, how ‘truth prevailed slowly, and with a few only, because the minds of most were craftily prepossessed with prejudice against it, begot and nourished by feigned Stories’ and should be alert to ‘the same effects in a Civil State’.78 The ‘prevalent Faction of the House’ of Commons had silenced MPs from ‘speaking their minds freely’ against them, and matters were carried not by ‘strength of argument’, but with ‘the greater number’ content ‘to say Amen to Master Hampden by an implicit faith’, and surrender their judgement into the hands of the Committee of Safety ‘and with an implicit Roman faith believe all that they say, and assent to all that they do only because these (forsooth) are men to be confided in, and upon their bare word’.79 This was not only to make the Houses ‘the Judge, what is law’ but ‘to make them Arbitrary; and all their commands Laws, and to lead the people after them by an implicit faith’. ‘Rome will ring of this … that a concealed Tradition of a reserved power of resistance should so far prevail, and the people be so finely led on by an implicit faith to build upon it, that by virtue thereof the Oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance should be so easily dispensed with.’80 Claims to judge of danger apart from the king, and oblige him and the people to ‘go their way for repelling the same’, and even to ‘take from the King the power of the Kingdom’, was to call upon ‘the fundamental Law of the Land’, but ‘never yet could any the most learned instruct us where to find out this fundamental Law; which hath lain buried so long that no Law-book, Record or Chronicle, makes the least mention thereof’, until ‘a certain Pamphleter … hapt upon it, but not amongst the Laws of this Land (he was necessitated to dig a little deep for it), but amongst nature’s principles’.81 Those there were among the king’s enemies who ‘are sure of everything, even of God’s secret counsel’,82 who like the ancient Gnostics ‘know very much, even of the secrets and counsels of God … as men of the cabinet counsel of God, they broach their illusions for divine revelations, and persuade the People that what they say or do is all from God; and therefore this War which they prosecute, was preordained of God for the destruction of the wicked’.83  Digges, Answer, pp. 47–48.  Williams, Discovery, pp. 89, 93. 80  Ferne, Conscience, pp. 75, 83 (misnumbered 57). 81  Spelman, View, p. 26. 82  Williams, Vindiciae, p. 61. 83  Williams, Discovery, pp. 52–53. 78 79

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In complex matters of government, ‘wherein the greater part of men can have no deep insight’, they should act ‘as they shall be commanded by their governors, and not to rule their law-givers by disputing the unreasonableness of what is enjoined’; there were also ‘things in which God will require from everyone a liberty of judging, and a conformable obedience’ to those ‘plain and familiar truths laid down in scripture’ or ‘moral duties easily discerned even by weak apprehensions’.84 Guidance could be sought—in particular ‘it is the Divine that must settle the conscience’— but the subject should be careful not to ‘resign up his faith to men, and receive their dictates as the immediate rule of his Conscience’.85 Faced with those who would urge action ‘for the glory of God and the good of his Church’, each conscience must find ‘sufficient warrant’, which for Spelman meant ‘either the express word of God, or else such manifest inference and deduction from it, as by the concurrent judgement of the Church universally in all ages, is agreed for truth, not such judgment as some particular ministers take upon them to make’.86 Who could hope to stand ‘before the Tribunal of God … and consider whether it will excuse him there, when he hath shed the blood of others, and expended his own, to say, I verily supposed and believed my Prince would change Religion, overthrow our Liberties’?87 Who could risk not only their life but their soul, upon a supposition? As war had slid into view in England in 1642, the king’s supporters pressed the legality of his case and tied it closely to the textual integrity of laws written, received and known, and not upon cloudy speculations. They laid ‘charges of arbitrary government’ against those at Westminster, charges ‘denied half-heartedly and justified with full vigour’ as actions necessary ‘to save the kingdom’, the legality of which the houses were the sole judge.88 For royalists, arbitrary actions mirrored arbitrary reading and unfettered interpretation. If it fell to the king to be the final interpreter of the law, this was ‘not in plain and evident cases (for these need no declarer; to challenge a right to declare all Laws, were in effect to make them …)’. In the meantime, the subject must not ‘overthrow the literal sense at pleasure to the prejudice of their Sovereign’.89 Ferne urged adherence to ‘the  Digges, Unlawfulnesse, pp. 11–12.  Henry Ferne, The resolving of conscience (Oxford, 1643), pp. A2, 34. 86  Spelman, Certain considerations, p. 7. 87  Ferne, Resolving, p. 35. 88  Mendle, Henry Parker, p. 81. 89  Digges, Unlawfulnesse, p. 78. 84 85

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literal sense of the Oath of Supremacy and Allegiance’. Nor had those who took the 1641 Protestation to maintain the privileges of parliament meant that to mean ‘whatever they declare to be such; for this were too much to resign up our faith to man’.90 But arbitrary interpretation held most danger when applied to Scripture. Francis Quarles claimed to have offered his readers ‘the Harmony of Scriptures, without Corruption, and the Language of reason, without Sophistry’. He called them to ‘faithfully examine, and ponder the plain Texts which thou hast read, and yielding due obedience to them, stop thine ears against all sinister expositions, and remember, that historical Scriptures will admit no allegorical interpretations’. Digges thought it ‘should startle all good men, to see some interpretations of obscure prophecies out of Daniel and the Apocalypse cast out to justify the breach of plain duties’, let alone the use of ‘several exceptions and corrupt glosses by which they endeavour to avoid this plain obligation of non-resistance’.91 In interpreting the Bible, it was as important to separate ‘precept’ or law from history. In many places, ‘Scriptures … set down … the truth of things how they were done, not the equity of things that they were rightly done’.92 Ferne reckoned his critics used Scripture ‘wildly’, making ‘desperate shifts … when pretences and simulations must be made Scripture grounds’.93 The reader ‘must distinguish betwixt rare and extraordinary cases that were managed by special commission from God; and those patterns that are confirmed by known and general rules, which passe through the whole course of Scripture, and take heed that we make not obscure commentaries of humane wisdom upon the clear Text of holy Writ’.94 The most sustained royalist endeavour to ascertain, and then demonstrate, how appropriate and correct interpretation could proceed can be found in Edward Symmons’s remarkable Scripture vindicated, from the misapprehensions, misinterpretations and mis-applications of Stephen Marshall…, a sustained critique of the most famous of 1640s parliamentary sermons, frequently preached and published as Meroz cursed, referring to a verse in the biblical book of Judges which proclaimed a curse  Ferne, Conscience, p. 35.  Digges, Unlawfulnesse, pp. 48, 50. 92  Digges, Unlawfulnesse, p. 104; Williams, Vindiciae, p. 56. 93  Ferne, Conscience, pp. 43, 50. 94  Williams, Vindiciae, p. 61. 90 91

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upon the inhabitants of Meroz for failing to come to the aid of their fellow Israelites. Symmons’s framing device was of an encounter with captured parliamentary soldiers who defended their actions as a fight against Antichrist, resident in England as well as in Rome, one in line with Scripture prophecy, as ‘godly Divines’ had attested. Symmons claimed his own doubts about the accuracy of their claims were quelled when he ‘fortuned to be in a Booksellers shop in Ludlow, where I chanced to see a sermon of M.  Marshalls upon that Text, Iud. [Judges] 5.23, Curse ye Meroz’, which he read, with horror and shock.95 The title of his text indicated his own threefold endeavour to right the damage inflicted by Marshall’s hermeneutic failure. ‘Misapprehensions’ referred to Marshall’s failure to locate his text correctly in terms of time and occasion. There ‘is a great difference between the Ancient times, those before Christ, and those since his coming’ for Christ ‘brought with him a new spirit, which both must and doth manifest itself in all his true servants’, ‘times of mercy and favour, times of grace and pity, of patience and forbearance, of life and Salvation’.96 Westminster’s failure to grasp that ‘times were changed’, that if Meroz ‘been standing in the days of the Gospel’, it would have faced reproof and the prospect of repentance, not been ‘loaden with a Curse’, were nowhere clearer than with regard to Ireland. To directly apply Marshall’s language to the Irish was ‘fully to curse them, vehemently to curse them, and never leave cursing them, even to annihilate them by cursing them, whereupon the Popish Irish, fearing to be quite outgone in cruelty by these new Reformers, grew desperate’. Symmonds surmised that God’s displeasure ‘with those bloody purposes, those over-harsh degrees, those cursing doctrines, contrary to the Gospel’ caused him to ‘suffer those wild and savage Irish, to be more prevalent in that Kingdom’. And he could not but ‘note the original cause’ of ‘deeds of barbarousness and inhumanity’ perpetrated in England, that ‘the Preachers of that side

95  Edward Symmons, Scripture vindicated, from the misapprehensions, misinterpretations and mis-applications of Stephen Marshall… (Oxford, 1645 [Thomason date 1644]), ‘Preface to the Readers’. See Donald E. Kennedy, ‘Holy violence and the English civil war’, Parergon 32:3 (2015), 17–42 at 37–41. 96  Symmons, Scripture vindicated, pp. 3–4. For an important argument about tendencies among some Church of England divines to place greater emphasis on distinctions (though by no means complete) between the New Testament gospel dispensation and both the Old Testament and the ‘realm of nature’, see Sarah Mortimer, ‘Kingship and the “apostolic church” 1620–1650’, Reformation and Renaissance review 13:2 (2011), 225–246.

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infuse by their doctrines such blasphemous and bloody Principles into their men’.97 ‘Misinterpretations’ indicated how Marshall had misconstrued his text. He had not attended properly to questions of how the Bible had presented the speaker or the subject of the curse, the reasons for it, or the scope of the punishment involved.98 And from such errors sprang a wrenching of words from context and a wresting of meaning towards Marshall’s own purposes. Marshall was stepping out of the sound interpretive norms laid down in ‘times past’, ‘the judgement of learned men, that the speeches in Scripture spoken unto, or written of, some then alive, if they receive any specification from them to whom directed, or of whom spoken, ought not to be propounded or applied, by us Ministers, as spoken to or of all men at all times: now it cannot be denied, but these words of the Text, have a special relation to Meroz’. Any ‘true sense of the words’ needed to attend closely and carefully to what was said. (Which of course revealed that the word spoken was to ‘supreme Magistrates’ and to be enacted by them.) As he tracked Marshall’s ‘misapplications’ across the other texts which he adduced in supposed support of his doctrine, Symmons detected a readiness to ‘search out that … mystical doctrine, which is found in this example, by those only of that faction’. They would render Scripture suitable ‘not to the text, yet to the purpose; though not to the doctrine in hand, yet to the cause in hand; to that great design which at this time shakes the whole Kingdome; unto which Scripture itself, must be forced to contribute, and to afford (at least) some colourable assistance’.99 Preached at a time when Westminster ‘did mark and denominate for Popishly affected, all that did not concur with themselves, in their unreasonable demands, and Propositions’, it served to ensure ‘a new Babel in making at home: themselves did create and denominate a daughter of Babylon, whom they destined also to be destroyed; and this Sermon (as a special piece) was sent about the Country’s to awaken men’s spirits to the execution’. In sum, ‘the Scriptures of God are most extremely perverted, abused, and misapplied by them; whatever particular Comminations and cursings are threatened therein against any particular Nation, they use to 97  Symmons, Scripture vindicated, pp. 2, 4, 13, 20. He sought to excuse like practices on the royalist side as unfortunate instances of payback, adding ‘I am sure, our men have not so learned Christ from their teachers’ (20–21). 98  Symmons, Scripture vindicated, p. 22. 99  Symmons, Scripture vindicated, pp. 27, 36, 38, 47.

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apply, as if they had been spoken from Heaven … against the Kings party: & whatever judgment they read of (in God’s word) against any particular King, for any particular or grand sin; they will most unjustly, and most undutifully apply it against the Lords Anointed their own Sovereign’. From misreading came misbehaviour. From a failure to properly distinguish the particular from the general, the abstract from the concrete, all manner of horror could be unleashed. Rebellion was truly like witchcraft in its effects on Marshall, for it ‘conjured him out of himself, and transformed him into another man’, one who had let slip the sound practices of his scholarship and made himself a preacher of strife and cruelty.100 It was no puritan but that sound royalist William Chillingworth who proclaimed ‘the Bible, the Bible only I say, is the religion of Protestants’.101 But like the common law, the scriptures needed to be open to view and protected from those who would ‘wrest’ them to their own ends, a ‘popish’ tendency like that promoting ‘implicit faith’, ‘arbitrary’ rulings or ‘infallible’ readings, all detected in the ranks of Westminster’s supporters. Rightly secured, ‘religion and law were the two columns that supported the commonwealth’.102 But either could be chipped away, even undermined. Royalist political writing, even at its most extended, was ‘conservative’ in that it eschewed any intention of setting out an alternative platform for political change (legal, constitutional or religious), even as royalist peace terms proclaimed an ambition for restitution rather than reform. But ‘conservative’ too in determining upon a strict, not an expansive, interpretation, an expressed preference for the literal not the exemplary, the concrete not the abstract application.103 These were not accidental. They were the choices which played best to a defensive cause, pitched towards certainty or safety over either hope or fear, indeed one which made so much play of the idea of ‘protection’. Royalist political writers were presenting a political ‘philosophy’ only accidently, if at all. But they  Symmons, Scripture vindicated, pp. 54–55, 84, 87.   Quoted in Patrick Collinson, The birthpangs of Protestant England (London, 1988), p. 95. 102  C.  W. Brooks, Law, politics and society in early modern England (Cambridge, 2009), p. 211. 103  ‘Conservative’ need to be used with caution, of course, and does not preclude a readiness to amend constitutional or ecclesiastical arrangements, so long as these were undertaken in line with existing legal forms and norms, by all appropriate participants. That their opponents also pressed the idea of conservation or preservation, against innovation, might allow some points of contact, even a merging of streams. 100 101

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were careful and creative in their efforts to regulate right thinking, and thereby right acting, within an old-established political order, where reason had shaped the common law, and revelation had delivered inspired texts, both of them accessible at different levels by ready apprehension and the resources of deep learning, distilled over the course of time. What the law upheld was the Church of England, an institutional form compatible with civil order, but it was also the Church in England, the bearer into a particular location of a universal inheritance, ‘Catholic’ in the truest sense of a shared Christian understanding of ‘precepts’ drawn from Scripture and honed in usage, ‘submission’ to God-ordained power among them. Political thinking, even political choice, bore down upon each subject, if often within the narrow limits permitted by competing, coercive regimes. It might prove especially sharp for those who might be required to venture their bodies in military service, in token of active obedience. For royalists, that obligation was primary and primal, undertaken for the good of one’s self, and of the ‘community’ formed and sustained by means of political power, a means not only of recognizing the God-given power of life and death accorded to the ruler, but participating in the exercise of his power, one of preservation, protection, punishment and pardon. ‘Religion’ gave moral heft (it ‘bound’ conscience) to the particular political or ‘civil’ obligation which fell upon a Christian within the particular kingdom or commonwealth in which they had been placed by God, not only with its own sovereign but its own laws. And the teachings of ‘religion’ might direct a Christian aright even when the truth claims of a particular ‘Communion’ or ‘Profession’ were otherwise dubious, as Protestant royalists could attest from the good service of recusants within their ranks. Herein Royalism stood not in opposition to its rivals, but athwart them. If Irish confederate Catholics faced a particular dilemma in that they must make space, however attenuated, for the ‘King’s religion’ in Ireland, they shared with Scottish Covenanters or English Parliamentarians an inescapable need to find in shared faith the bond of national unity and the propulsive force enabling national renovation.104 Royalists might share such aspirations in all three kingdoms. But as they might counter their opponents’ claims to the defence of subjects’ liberties with the argument that 104  Indeed, the case could be made that the challenges of overcoming deep-seated ethnic divisions rendered confederates even more obliged to turn to Catholicism as an essential bond of unity. Valuable here is David Finnegan, ‘Irish political Catholicism from the 1530s to 1660’ in Oliver P. Rafferty ed., Irish Catholic identities (Manchester, 2013), pp. 77–91.

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‘liberty could only be preserved where sovereignty was untrammelled’,105 so they would insist that the civil and social benefits of religious unity would be negated if religious teaching itself proved so corrupted as to directly defy God’s commanded obedience. In that sense, Royalism was moving less towards crafting a language of liberty than a grammar of obedience. Right reading was no cool exercise. To wrongly or mistakenly interpret Scripture or the law was not only an error, but a pathway back towards the pre- or non-political condition, with very concrete terrors: subjects’ goods taken from them, their bodies restrained, their lives and their families imperilled. Pressed to its limits, political obedience could be the epitome of Christian living, of faith and repentance. ‘To resign our lives’ rather than succumb to the temptation to resist, even in one’s own defence, was ‘an infallible sign of hearty repentance, and a most certain argument of our serious turning from all sin. For here is not only sorrow for offences past, which is the door and entrance into Christianity, but the perfection of it also, amendment of life, which is true repentance’.106

105  Edward Vallance, ‘Political thought’ in Braddick ed., Oxford handbook, pp.  430–466 (quoted p. 435) for an important evaluation of political thought in terms of competing ideas of liberty. 106  Digges, Unlawfulnesse, p. 123.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion

On 27 April 1646, Charles I rode out of Oxford and, within days, into the camp of the Scottish Covenanting army. On 15 May, the records of the Oxford’s parliamentary assembly were committed to the flames, and by 20 June, articles for the surrender of the city had been signed.1 Leonard Lichfield issued Charles’s ‘last utterance’ from the Oxford press, dated 10 June, lamenting ‘the sad sufferings of His People in His three Kingdoms’ and any ‘Continuance of an Unnatural War in any of these Kingdoms’, and staking out his desire for peace, confirmed by an appended order ‘to quit … Towns, Castles and Forts, and to disband all the Forces’ of key English garrisons.2 Matters were more ragged elsewhere. Montrose stood down his troops in July and set sail from Scotland in September, though the remnants of MacColla’s forces, declining surrender, would be harried, and sometimes butchered, into the following year. Some among the small Welsh garrisons once berated by Archbishop Williams would also hold out until 1647. In late August 1646, Ormond had entered the confederate capital and the centre of his family power, Kilkenny, through triumphal arches ‘adorned with inscriptions setting forth his own actions, and the trophies of his ancestors’, and to hear the hope expressed that a ‘well-­reduced, firm, settled Peace’ would be ‘established by’ the ‘Royal 1 2

 Falconer Madan, Oxford books (3 vols, Oxford, 1895–1931), ii, 418.  His Majesties letter to both houses of parliament, dated at New-Castle… (Oxford, 1646).

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hand’ across the kingdoms, as ‘is here with us begun’. Within days he had fled, dodging capture, as the peace crumbled, clericalist elements seized power amongst the confederates, and the Kilkenny arches faced ‘hasty demolition’.3 The next summer, a still-formidably defensible Dublin was handed to the control of the Westminster parliament, Ormond too sailing off, to England, then soon to France. The Royalism presented in the preceding chapters had not departed, but it had diffused. Between the summer of 1646 and the winter of 1648–1649, it infused into regional uprisings erupting across England and Wales, into the calculations and contrivances of anxious Covenanters and confederates, wary of the drift of events in England and the zeal within their own ranks. With the departure from Oxford, a comparative silence had fallen over the royal voice, a lull not only to the official address through proclamations (their wartime proliferation providing a staple for the Oxford press) but also a quelling of printed speeches and declarations, so vital to royal representation across the war years. If whisperings were heard again from 1647, and more especially 1648,4 the resounding shout came almost at the moment of the king’s demise with the publishing sensation that was Eikon Basilike: the portraiture of his sacred majesty in his solitudes and sufferings.5 The present book has no scope to examine Royalism across the three kingdoms in the post-Oxford years. Instead, it will offer a final word on the experience and lessons of those years to King Charles, or at least to Eikon Basilike, his last avatar. Eikon Basilike has been carefully positioned in its time, from drafting to publication, its evolving authorship examined, teasing out the royal role and the contributions of clerical editors and redactors, its arguments assessed.6 It is a resolutely Anglocentric text. Ireland only appears in chapter twelve, only to disappear thereafter. It is not even noticed that ‘that unfortunate Earl’, Strafford, in the complicity of whose death the king’s 3  Alan J. Fletcher, ‘Select document: Ormond’s civic entry into Kilkenny, 29/31 August 1646’, Irish historical studies 35 (2006–2007), 365–379, quoted 368, 375, 378. 4  Kevin Sharpe, Image wars: promoting kings and commonwealths in England 1603–1660 (New Haven, 2010), pp. 289, 291, 293, 302. 5  Eikon Basilike: the portraiture of his sacred majesty in his solitudes and sufferings… ([London,] 1648/1649): I have cited from the first, 1648/1649, edition throughout, though adding chapter numbers for ease of reference to the multiple other editions. 6  See especially Robert Wilcher, ‘What was the king’s book for? The evolution of Eikon Basilike’, Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991), 218–228.

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conscience received perhaps its decisive blow, had been, and was condemned for his actions as, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. If it was Covenanting Scots ‘who first began my Troubles’,7 they only entered the narrative with their re-entry into England in 1644. This is hardly surprising, given the predilections of the king, perhaps even more of his clerical accomplices, but it is telling in its consequences. For one thing, the text’s genuine, if ‘muted’ constitutionalism has been contrasted with a ‘sustained’, ‘vociferous’ defence of the current church establishment in England,8 even more especially of its bishops and landed base than of its ‘well-composed Liturgy’.9 There was a fit here with a wider strategy of working to keep the king honest to his episcopalian professions.10 And as a book which set forth the king as a Christian struggling to find a pathway through perils, keeping heed of his conscience, and bequeathing a ‘pattern and example’ to readers faced with similar dilemmas,11 so it urged that not only conscience but the king’s ‘judgement’ constrained him to defend the bishops and the liberties and properties of the English church, even as his ‘Reason’ bridled at being bound to ‘a general and implicit consent’, a ‘blind obedience’ to whatever demands his English enemies would impose upon him.12 ‘Those with Me’ could rest secure that, implicitly like their king himself, they had ‘for their Justification the Word of God, and the Laws of the Land, together with their own Oaths; all requiring obedience to My just Commands’ and no resistance in arms.13 But the text was edged towards publication in weeks when the current monarch was making sustained concessions towards Presbyterianism in England, whilst his heir continued to entertain overtures from a more robustly covenanted Scottish regime than the one which had done a deal  Eikon Basilike, p. 197 (chapter XXII).  Jeffrey Collins, ‘Eikon Basilike in context: the intellectual history of a martyrdom’ in Paul D.  Halliday, Eleanor Hubbard & Scott Sowerby eds, Revolutionising politics: culture and conflict in England 1620–1660 (Manchester, 2021), pp. 95–120 quoted p. 105. 9  Eikon Basilike, p. 139 (chapter XVI, which addresses the challenge to the Prayer Book from the Directory of Worship). 10  Anthony Milton, ‘Sacrilege and compromise: Anglican divines and the king’s conscience, 1642–1649’ in Michael J. Braddick & David L. Smith eds, The experience of revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 135–152. 11  Andrew Lacey, ‘Texts to be read: Charles I and the Eikon Basilike’, Prose Studies 29 (2007), 4–18 (quoted at 5). 12  Eikon Basilike, pp. 59, 76–77 (chapters IX, XI). 13  Eikon Basilike, p. 175 (chapter XIX). 7 8

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with the elder Charles in late 1647, and Ormond was back in Ireland labouring once more towards a settlement which would facilitate the service of an Irish Catholic army in England.14 On these latter fronts, what little that the text says, and what it does not, is worthy of note. Eikon Basilike has been seen as ‘tacitly blessing the prospect of a second Ormond peace’.15 It was tacit indeed, but telling. The ‘sea of blood’ which had inundated Ireland with the 1641 Rising would ‘drown any man in eternal both infamy and misery’ who might have been the author of such an ‘effusion’, but switching metaphors from flood to fire, ‘the preposterous rigour, and unreasonable severity’ of some in England ‘had kindled and blew up into those horrid flames, the sparks of discontent’ in Ireland. The urge to use ‘all extremities’ upon ‘the whole community of that Nation; Resolving to destroy Root and Branch, men, women, and children’ with ‘un-Evangelical Zeal’ was set against ‘moderate remedies’, ‘exemplary Justice’ in tandem with ‘tenders of mercy … protection’.16 Here were echoes of the language of the Uxbridge debates, of royalist determination that even towards those who had broken ‘the Laws of God and Man, their Faith, their Allegiance, the Bonds of Charity, Rules of Humanity, and Humane Society’, it would ‘be more agreeable to our Christian profession, to endeavour the binding up of those Wounds, which interests, passions, and animosity have made’.17 Where the king’s opponents were cast as fundamentally at odds with received moral norms of Christianity and of civility, a space was opened for the king as protector, a duty which, like, the corresponding duty of service, transcended the limits of religion as well as nation. The king defended the employment of Catholic support, with implicit reference to England, but obvious pertinence towards Ireland. Surely it was ‘strange that so wise men, as they would be esteemed, should not conceive, that differences of persuasion in matters of Religion may easily fall out, where there is the sameness of duty, Allegiance, and subjection. The first they owe as men, and Christians to God; the second, they owe to Me in Common, as their KING; different professions in point of Religion cannot (any more than in Civil Trades) take away the community of relations either to Parents, or to Princes …’.18 14  Sean Kelsey, ‘The king’s book: Eikon Basilike and the English Revolution of 1649’ in Nicholas Tyacke ed., The English Revolution c.159–1720 (Manchester, 2007), pp. 150–168. 15  Kelsey, ‘The king’s book’, p. 160. 16  Eikon Basilike, pp. 99–103 (chapter XII). 17  Rushworth, Historical collections, v, 910, 917, 914. 18  Eikon Basilike, p. 129 (chapter XV).

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Towards Scotland, or at least Presbyterian Scotland, the Charles of Eikon Basilike has been seen as unrelenting, and indeed there are hard words for the pursuit of ‘Reformations by the Sword’ or the impulse to treat episcopacy as a ‘grand evil Spirit’ to be exorcised, though of ‘universal prescription of time and practice’ from Apostolic times ‘till this last Century’. But even here, it was possible to carve out a space for Scottish redemption. That old warhorse, the Act of Pacification, trotted out again; the king would not look behind it to ‘former passages’ nor ‘repent’ of his concessions in Scotland ‘for the public good’. If it was ‘passion … self-­ seeking, more than true Zeal’ which propelled a ‘foreign State or Church to prescribe’ to the ‘English Church’, the very foreignness could be a safeguard for Scotland as well as England. What Charles had permitted with regard to religion in Scotland (which might not wrongly be thought a ‘failing and sin’), ‘I may not think so absolutely necessary for all places, and at all times’, but it was not thereby repudiated.19 Eikon Basilike was certainly backing away from any conflation of the kingdoms, above all in religion, which even the ‘moderate’ supporters of the Engagement had pressed in qualified terms, but neither Scots nor Covenanters as such were any more beyond hope than Catholics or Irish. As ‘My best Subjects of Scotland never deserted Me, so I cannot think that the most are gone so far … as to make Me to despair of their return’. The Solemn League and Covenant, applied in England as well as Scotland, of course, was one of those ‘after-Contracts’ which could not ‘absolve or slacken those moral and eternal bonds of duty which lie upon all My Subjects’ consciences both to God and Me’. But many who took the Covenant were ‘yet firm’ in belief it could ‘never blot out those former gravings, and characters, which by just and lawful Oaths were made upon their Souls’. So ‘good men’ might be able to keep ‘their Covenant in honest and lawful ways’; their intention may indeed have been ‘to preserve Religion in purity, and the Kingdoms in peace’, and so to ‘other than such ends and means they cannot think themselves engaged’. The very wording of the Covenant, the ‘latitude of some general Clauses may (perhaps) serve somewhat to relieve them’, keeping them within the ‘bounds of a good Conscience, which are certain and fixed, either in God’s Laws, as to

 Eikon Basilike, pp. 100–102, 110, 162–163 (chapters XIII, XIV, XVII).

19

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the general; or the Laws of the State and Kingdom, as to the particular regulation and exercise of men’s duties’.20 This book has argued that Royalism succeeded best not when it sought to dam up currents of national and confessional aspiration, but to re-direct them along channels cut deep by allegiance to the Crown and banked by law.21 Even a reformed body politic could find curative powers for its remaining, or newly contracted, ills in the recuperative resources of such a primal allegiance, especially in face of increasing threats of disorder, tumult, mutiny or schism. A Covenant-driven Scottish revolution had shown itself possessed of a powerful dynamic, manifest in a capacity for institutional innovation and for reshaping and revitalizing a ‘national political community’. But it mandated an understanding of ‘the public’ which would render outcast, as no true countrymen, those who failed in their support of the cause of the Covenant. If ‘rehabilitation’ of the wayward was not only possible but pursued, tests of loyalty could become stringent, ‘parameters within which legitimate political action could take place’ more tightly drawn, especially with the divisive effects of the Engagement.22 Challenges facing confederates or parliamentarians were not the same, but not dissimilar either, whether in terms of dynamism or division. The bond of monarch and subject, of protection and service, offered a different premise for political order, an alternative interpretive principle for defining, and for defending, a political community. Nation and confession were not rejected, far from it, but relativized. They could give form and impetus to loyal compulsions. For Royalists, there were many paths back to unity and peace. A reunited English parliament, a ‘free’ parliament in Ireland, even a Montrose-sponsored Glasgow parliament could be mooted as means to enact and seal a settlement, perhaps of the kind which Eikon Basilike claimed to hope had been intended in the England of 1642, of the 20  Eikon Basilike, pp. 108, 112–115 (chapters XIII–XV). Much of this discussion of the Solemn League and Covenant implies an English context and application, though the implications extended more widely. 21  There was, of course, a potentially greater challenge to meet in Ireland than in the other two kingdoms, given centuries-long divisions between English king’s ‘Irish enemies’ and loyal (English) subjects, but the confederate agenda not only prioritized a sinking of such ‘national’ distinctions in a common Catholicism, but also a common allegiance to the Stuart monarchy. 22  Stewart, Rethinking, pp. 218–222, 225–226, 239–241, 253–255, though my interpretation departs at points from Stewart’s essential account of these developments.

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‘restoration’ of ‘good laws’, the removal of ‘evil customs preterlegal, and abuses personal’, the repair of injuries to ‘Common-weal’, and the concession of ‘what tended to My Subjects’ good’ without diminishing the king’s capacity ‘to preserve My People’. But subjects could find their way back by other means. A king whose prayer was that ‘all violent and sacrilegious Confederations’ be broken ‘in sunder’ was represented also as one who expressed pity that even the arch-rebel Sir John Hotham, on the brink of defection from his fellow parliamentary apostates, had fallen ‘into the hands of their Justice, and not my Mercy, who could as willingly have forgiven him’.23 Like divine mercy, royal pardon was a matter of grace, which liberated the rebel and sinner to a life under law. There was a congruence of thought between those warnings of over-confidence, religious or political, that littered royalist writings, and an emphasis on the merciful sovereign, divine or human, who valued true faith, repentance and good works more than wholly consistent right-thinking. Of course, there was a flip-side to all Royalist pronouncements. Civil conflicts might nudge participants towards language with which to present themselves as the force for peace and healing in the nation, but wartime needs also gave impetus to tendencies to reduce complex divisions into ‘binary’ allegiances, with all the accompanying stereotyping and denigration of enemies, for Royalists as readily as their rivals.24 As condemnation could sometimes give way to pragmatic accommodation of former foes, so at times neither the capacity nor the will existed to restrain actions which defied a cultivated image of mercy and justice,25 and here again Royalists could be to the fore, in all three kingdoms. Charles’s final round of concessions, in England at least, were regarded by him as temporary yieldings to be exploited in the present to give him space to stage a comeback, perhaps with Irish aid, and to be recovered in time.26 In this last, it was compatible with a Royalism that could pare back to the primary stock of allegiance, but so as to encourage regrowth into the fulness of royal 23  ‘For I think clemency a debt, which we ought to pay to those that crave it, when we have cause to believe they would not after abuse it.’ Eikon Basilike, pp. 50–51, 79–80, 121 (chapters VIII, XI, XIV). 24  De Groot, Royalist identities. 25  Roy, ‘Royalist reputations’, p. 100. 26  Cust, Charles I, pp. 442–445; Milton, England’s second reformation, p. 213; Adamson, ‘Frightened junto’, pp. 49–51.

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power, in the ecclesiastical as the civil state. Lambasting over-confidence, even infallibility, in the interpretation of law and Scripture was to the opposite end from that of empowering the results of free readings, above all in terms of the splintering that might ensue. To promise, even promote, free debate, was premised on a final submission to a consensus of authority, whether that of supposedly ‘established’ or ‘settled’ law, or a purportedly ‘universal’ handling of Scripture with, in extremity, the final safeguard of an unconstrained royal conscience free to veto, for the public good.27 Legalism was constrictive as well as constructive. ‘Settled’ law is the defence of settled interests, of property and power relations. The king’s speech from the scaffold pressed his desire for ‘Liberty and Freedom’ for ‘the people’, but that this ‘consists in having of Government; those Laws, by which their Life and their Goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in Government.’28 Eikon Basilike was an English book. The king’s voice which spoke there said little directly to Irish, or Scots, not much to Catholic recusants, and not much that was encouraging or even conciliatory to Presbyterians. But between the words and the silences, there was enough to show that even an English royalism, and an Episcopalian Protestant one at that, could find spaces for other routeways to reconnect sovereign and subject. Eikon Basilike jarred with the pattern of concession in matters religious which the king was laying down in England in the last months of his life but, those torn up, it bequeathed to English readers (including ‘English’ readers in Ireland, if only the Protestants among them) a picture of Charles I which could, and would, stimulate emotional, conscientious and reasoned attachment to ‘Church and King’ for future generations. It was also a book which, like so much other Royalist writing, set forth public happiness as that of being ‘subject to the known Laws’, laws ‘in which is wrapped up the public Interest, and the good of the Community’, and to the 27  Charles’s readiness to press the ‘regulating rightly’ of the church, according to Scripture, to be attained by ‘freely debating’ within a national synod ‘freely called’ extended through to his final speech. If perhaps undergird by an assumption that ‘when every Opinion is freely and clearly heard’, the truth of Scripture, as Charles understood it, would prevail, he had also already indicated that any such agreed clerical resolutions would only take effect with the consent of both houses of (a free) parliament and of himself, thus retaining his ‘negative voice’: Milton, England’s second reformation, pp.  202–203; King Charles his speech made upon the scaffold… (London, 1649), p. 6. 28  King Charles his speech, p. 6.

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‘preservation’ of which, alongside ‘established Religion’, Charles pledged himself a martyr. ‘The Laws will, by God’s blessing, revive, with the love and loyalty of my Subjects’, so long as the king ‘bury them not by my Consent’ to the demands of injustice and violence. And the word which the world read as passed to his heir was ‘that the most of all sides, who have done amiss, have done so, not out of malice, but mis-information, or mis-apprehension of things’. They could be ‘loyal and faithful’ once bent to ‘repentance’ and ‘reparations’.29 And on both those counts, however he may have lived, in death King Charles was a Royalist.

 Eikon Basilike, pp. 203, 228, 239, 444 [recte 244] (chapters XXIII, XXVI, XXVII).

29

Index1

A Aberdeen, 33, 44, 48, 51 Aboyne, James Gordon, viscount, 35 Act of Pacification, 38, 39, 44, 81, 115 Antrim, Randal MacDonnell, earl (later marquess) of, 35, 45, 70–72, 70n44 Argyll, Archibald Campbell, earl (later marquess) of, 44n51, 46, 48 Ayrshire, 50 B Barry, colonel Jack, 72 Bolton, Sir Richard, 64 Book of Common Prayer, 17, 23, 76 Bramhall, John, bishop of Derry, 7, 8, 87n9, 88, 88n12, 100, 102 Bridge, William, 93, 94 Burnet, Gilbert, 34, 35, 35n15, 40n35

C Calvin’s case, 26–28, 27n108 Capel, Arthur, Baron Capel, 23, 23n91 Catholics, English, 14 Catholics, Irish, see Confederate Catholics of Ireland Cessation, Irish, 9 Charles I, v, vii, 1, 5, 10, 17, 29, 71n47, 111, 118 Charles II, 2n4 Chester, 18 Chillingworth, William, 89n14, 108 Clanricarde, Ulick Burke, earl (later marquess) of, 72n54 Cleveland, John, 31, 32, 59 Clubmen, 21, 25 Coke, Sir Edward, 27n111, 28n115 Confederate Catholics of Ireland, 4, 5n13, 8, 31, 71, 114 Connacht, 72n54, 74

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Armstrong, Royalism and the Three Stuart Kingdoms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42099-3

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INDEX

Cornwall, 16n62, 24 Cross Petition, 40, 40n35, 43n46, 52 Cumbernauld Bond, 43 D Darcy, Patrick, 64 Denbighshire, 18 Devon, 24 Digby, George, Baron Digby (later earl of Bristol), 70, 72, 73 Digges, Dudley, 82, 88–92, 89n14, 95n42, 96, 101, 105 Directory of Worship, 56n93, 113n9 Drummond of Hawthornden, Sir William, 41, 51 Dublin, 2, 4, 6n19, 9, 12, 14, 25, 62–65, 76, 112 E Eikon Basilike, 112, 113n8, 114–116, 114n14, 118 Engagement, between Covenanters and Charles I, 115 Episcopacy, 17, 39, 55, 79, 115 F Fairfax, Sir Thomas, v Falkland, Lucius Cary, viscount, 89n14 Ferne, Henry, 90, 93, 94, 96, 104, 105 Filmer, Sir Robert, 88, 88n10 Flintshire, 18 G Glamorgan, 22, 70, 74 Glamorgan, Edward Somerset, earl of (later marquess of Worcester), 21, 45, 71, 74

Glasgow, 49, 50, 116 Grant, James, of Freuchie, 46, 46n56 H Hamilton, James, duke of, 33, 33n6 Henrietta Marie, Queen, 7 Hobbes, Thomas, 88, 88n10, 90 Holland, Henry Rich, earl of, 69 Hotham, Sir John, 117 Howell, James, 12 Huntly, George Gordon, marquess of, 34, 43n46, 49n74 Hyde, Sir Edward (later earl of Clarendon), vii, 7, 17, 66, 68, 69 I Ireland, (Privy) Council of, 45n52, 70 K Kilcumin Band, 58 Kilkenny, 11, 64, 71, 111, 112, 112n3 L Lanark, William Hamilton, earl of, 33 Leslie, Henry, bishop of Down and Connor, 93 Lichfield, Leonard, 8, 9, 20, 111 Lichfield (Staffordshire), 20 M MacColla, Alastair (Alexander Macdonald), 32, 48n71, 50, 56, 111 MacDonald, Sir Donald, of Sleat, 32, 45

 INDEX 

Mackenzie, Sir George, 58 Marshall, Stephen, 105–108 Maurice, Prince, 44, 44n48, 44n51 Maxwell, John, archbishop of Tuam, 88, 91–94, 92n27, 97 Mercurius Aulicus, 11, 19, 32 Middleton, Sir Thomas, 23 Monmouthshire, 19 Montrose, James Graham, marquess of, vi, viii, 32, 33, 35, 36, 41, 43, 43n46, 44, 44n48, 44n51, 45n52, 46–51, 47n65, 49n74, 49n75, 54, 55, 55n92, 56n93, 58, 59, 69, 81n90, 82, 111 Moray, 46 M’Quorn, John (minister), 54 Mure, Sir John, 54 Muskerry, Donough MacCarthy, viscount (later earl of Clancarty), 75 N Napier, Archibald, Lord, 41, 54, 55n92, 57, 58 National Covenant (1638), vi, 40, 42, 43, 49, 52, 53, 55 Newcastle, William Cavendish, earl (later duke) of, 10, 78 Nicholas, Sir Edward, 68n35 Nithsdale, Robert Maxwell, earl of, 35 Northumberland, Algernon Percy, earl of, 66–68 O Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, 28 O’Neill, Daniel, 71 Ormond, James Butler, marquess (later duke) of, 2n5, 20n80, 31,

123

58n99, 62–64, 70–76, 82, 88, 111, 112, 114 Oxford, viii, 1, 9, 11, 14, 16, 28, 31, 36–38, 40n34, 43, 55, 59, 61, 62, 64, 66, 69, 71, 73, 76–78, 85–88, 88n11, 98, 111, 112 Oxford, Treaty of, 66, 67, 76 P Parliament, English (Oxford), 36 Parliament, English (Westminster), vii, 1, 36 Parliament, Irish, 64, 76 Parliament, Scottish, 35 Pembrokeshire, 24 Perth, 47 Plymouth, 24 Porter, Endymion, 45 Presbyterianism, Presbyterians, 3, 6, 42, 55–58, 56n93, 57n97, 79, 88, 113, 118 Protestation (1641), 26, 105 Q Quarles, Francis, 85, 87, 105 R Radnorshire, 19 S Solemn League and Covenant (1643), 1, 5, 25, 32, 36, 37, 42, 54, 55n92, 64, 115, 116n20 Spalding, John, 44n51, 48, 49, 51, 57

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INDEX

Spelman, Sir John, 27n113, 86, 90, 96, 104 Spottiswood, Sir Robert, 45, 45n52, 49n75, 58n102 Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, earl of, 14, 76, 112 Symmons, Edward, 105–107 T Taaffe, Theobald, viscount Taaffe (later earl of Carlingford), 72, 72n49, 74 U Ussher, James, archbishop of Armagh, 88, 88n11 Uxbridge, Treaty of, 76

V Vow and Covenant (1643), 24 W Wales, 2n3, 15–20, 22, 23, 25, 38, 78, 112 Walker, Sir Edward, 22, 45n52 Waller’s plot, 67 Wilde, George, 61, 61n1 Williams, Griffith, bishop of Ossory, 11, 13, 88, 98, 99, 101 Williams, John, archbishop of York, 20, 20n80, 31, 111 Worcestershire, 21, 23n91 Wrexham, 18 Y York, 18, 34, 87n9