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... that one was in the offing accounts for much of the belief that November 1640 was the beginning of a 'golden age'. It was notoriously difficult to make such settlements stick, as the cases of 1216, 1261, and 1397 showed very clearly, but the failure in 1641 to conclude one at all was highly unusual, and cries out for explanation. It is a failure which underlines the fact that the English Civil War was not the result of an outburst of anger in the localities, but of a failure of the political process at the centre.
It is hard to find much sign of impending war in the counties before May or June 1642, but at Westminster an acceptable settlement, meaning one which would have left both Charles and Pym's junto confident that they would be alive and at liberty in twelve months' time, had become remote by March 1641, and became a total impossibility between 3 and 12 May 1641. This did not mean that civil war became inevitable at that date: dissolution or prorogation, or a division leaving one side with such overwhelming force that the other could not fight, remained practical possibilities for some time. Yet from the Army Plot and the death of Strafford onwards, what existed at Westminster was something Hobbes would have had no difficulty in recognizing as a state of war: a time wherein the will to contend by force if need be was sufficiently known. Charles's share in this failure of the political process is well known, but the share of the group Edward Nicholas called Pym's junto is not as widely known as it ought to be. During the Bishops' Wars, some of the group responsible for the Petition of the Twelve Peers had colluded with the Scots to a point well the wrong side of treason. This fact was known to Charles, who chillingly assured Windebank in September 1640 that 'it shall not be forgotten', and in January 1642 he remembered it.
Those who commit treason, as Sir John Harrington could have reminded them, cannot afford to fall, and indeed, cannot afford partial success. The junto knew too much about the fate of the Lords Appellant to need reminding of this. This bound them the more closely to those for whom they had committed treason, and who alone could protect them from its consequences: the Scottish army. It was only if the English settlement was part of the British settlement demanded by the Scottish peace treaty, and therefore protected by Scottish guarantees, that they could have any confidence in its durability. This meant that for the first six months of the Long Parliament, they were bound hand and foot to their Scottish allies. They could not risk taking the getting a permanent grant.
By August 1641 Strode, 'whose boldness of speech had made many think him wise', was saying in public that such a grant would be deferred until the King agreed to abolish bishops, and by October the junto were saying it would be deferred until Charles agreed to Parliamentary choice of the great officers, as he had just done in Scotland. What needs explaining is not why the junto used this opportunity for a pursuit of power which was increasingly becoming a matter of life and death. We need rather to explain why members like Hyde, Strangeways, and Kirton, who had no sympathy with the junto's objectives, made no recorded attempt to stop them getting away with it. Here, the financial irresponsibility characteristic of the Commons since 1593 and longer was vital. Charles, in his speech of 16 February 1641, compared them to people who had taken a watch to pieces, and mildly expressed the hope that they were going to succeed in putting it together again. They were not: taking it apart had been much more exciting.
We need, then, to explain why Royalist members, who were not in any sense revolutionaries, had a view of their function which did not include officiously striving to make the King solvent. The last time Edward Nicholas looked forward to the end of the Parliament was on the morning of 1 November 1641. By the afternoon of that day, the news of the Irish Rebellion had reached London, and Charles could no longer dissolve the Parliament without sacrificing one of his three kingdoms, or without branding himself for ever as the ally of the papists. The Irish Rebellion, as it were, caged the King and the Parliament together, and so eliminated the possibility that they could avoid fighting by separation. It then becomes necessary, in order to explain the English Civil War, to explain the Irish Rebellion, and it seems that the explanations of the Irish Rebellion, as much as those of the Bishops' Wars, reach deep into the history of the other kingdoms. With kingdoms, as with people, two is company and three a crowd, and any move to closer relations between two makes a gooseberry of the third.
When the Petition of the Twelve Peers asked for 'the better uniting of both your realms' against the enemies of the reformed religion, the ominous 'both' was not lost on the Irish rebels, who picked it up in their propaganda. There were three points where the Irish were especially sensitive to the results of Anglo-Scottish rapprochement. One was whether the British Isles would remain safe for papists. John Barry, a future rebel leader, reported in some indignation that the Parliament had cashiered all the Popish officers in the King's army, 'and among the rest myself.
The second, closely related, point was that they were deeply worried by the tendency, encouraged by the trial of Strafford, for the English Parliament to claim authority over Ireland. This was a trend in which the Scots, to whom Charles had given good reason to fear Irish papists, were full and willing participants. Our next question is how, being unable to achieve a settlement or dissolution, the Parliament, and then the political nation, split into two approximately equal parties. It is important to say that explaining the division into parties is not the same thing as explaining the Civil War, and indeed is not even necessarily the biggest part of explaining the Civil War.
The parties of 1642 had been divided on many of the issues on which they then disagreed for a very long time, during which they never fought each other, nor ever seemed likely to do so. Charles's failings as a ruler are an important, and indeed a necessary, part of the story. If Charles's sister Elizabeth had succeeded James, the Civil War as we know it would have been impossibility. English Civil War was a result of long-term causes. If a Civil War had happened under Elizabeth of Bohemia, at least the sides would have been reversed. If Charles, instead of Bedford, had died of the smallpox in May 1641, it is hard to imagine anything worse than confused regency resulting.
Charles's frequent habit of saying he would rather die than do what necessity required of him was one which, at the last, made it necessary to take him at his word, to which it should be said that he proved true. His allergy to the hotter forms of Calvinism often made it impossible for him to understand what he was dealing with, and so led him to political calculations based on false premises. However, if Charles's failings had been the whole of the story, we would be explaining a deposition and not a Civil War No amount of listing Charles's failings will easily explain why he found a party to fight for him. The problem of multiple kingdoms was always a likely cause of instability from 1603 onwards. The temptation to press for greater harmonization was always there, and was always likely to produce serious troubles. In 1603 England encountered what Britain is to encounter in 1992, the shock of subjection to a supra-national authority.
That shock was the less, but also the less adequately dealt with, because the English always tried to pretend it was not there, and wished to treat both James and Charles as if they were only kings of a single nation-state called England. Since this was patently not the case, and the kings could not help knowing it, the English were always likely to misread royal actions, and in particular to press their kings to do things which, in British terms, they could not do. When, as in 1637, a British king fell victim to a similar misapprehension, and attempted to govern all Britain as king of England, he found this was something he could not do. Great events do not necessarily have great causes, thought it is natural for historians to seek them. Until recently early seventeenth-century parliamentary history has suffered from the straight jacket of the tradition, with its overriding but anachronistic concepts of government' and 'opposition'. Now it is plain there was no high road to civil war.
There was not bound to be a struggle between king and parliament in order that the balanced constitution of the eighteenth century could be its outcome. Nor, it has been established, can the war be explained in terms of social revolution: the ultimate split was quite clearly a split within the governing class. A new interpretation based on the notions of 'court' and 'country' is also unsatisfactory. Most of those involved in the story told here did not think of themselves as belonging exclusively to either entity.
Bibliography: G. R. Elton. English National Self-consciousness and the Parliament in the Sixteenth Century. Herausgegeben von Otto Dann, Munich, (1986) H. G.
Koenigsberger, Dominium Regale or Dominium Political et Regale: Monarchies and Parliaments in Early Modern Europe. London, (1975) Conrad Russell. The British Problem and the English Civil War. History, 72 / 276, (1987) Elizabeth Read Foster. Proceedings in Parliament 1610. New Haven, Conn. , (1966) H.
Elliott, Revolt of the Catalans. Cambridge, (1963) Bennett, Martyn. The Civil Wars Experienced: Britain and Ireland, 1638 - 1661. Routledge, (2000) Houston, Philip. A Treatise of Monarchy.
Themes, Bristol, (2000) Elliot-Wright, Philipp J. C. English Civil War. Brass, (1997)
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