Charles I and the Causes of the English Civil War
Richard CUST
University of Birmingham
Charles I has traditionally loomed large in accounts of the causes of the English Civil War.The Whig historians of the nineteenth century,with their preoccupation with character,invariably placed him centre stage.S.R.Gardiner's masterly narrative of early Stuart politics highlighted Charles's weaknesses,both as a person and as a politician,in antagonising the puritan and parliamentary gentry and then sabotaging hopes for a settlement.He was a feeble vacillating figure,dominated by a succession of powerful favourites,and at the same time obstinate,unrealistic and untruthful.He was,according to Gardiner,a politician who had‘no power of stepping out of himself to see how his actions looked to others’,who was unable‘to subordinate that which was only desirable to that which was possible’and who‘lacked an elemental quality of veracity.’[1]From a very different perspective,Conrad Russell,the leading revisionist historian from the 1970s to the 1990s,delivered a comparable verdict.Russell and other revisionists have stressed what they see as the decisive long term causes of instability in the Stuart kingdoms,all of which were well established before Charles came to the throne:firstly the problem of‘multiple kingdoms’(how the task of ruling England was complicated by ruling Ireland and Scotland as well);secondly the religious divisions between what can loosely be termed‘Puritan’ and‘Anglican’visions of the Church of England which was a legacy of the conflicts and confusions of the English Reformation;and thirdly structural problems within the royal financial system which led to breakdown in the face of inflation and the rising costs of war.What brought these problems to a head and escalated them to the point at which they became explosive was the personality of the king.On Russell's account he was a man of poor judgement,excessive ambition and fatal indecision.‘Whatever his virtues’ he was‘unfit to be king’and this lack of fitness was the crucial ingredient in turning divisions and disagreements into the full-blown crisis of Civil War.[2]
With relatively few exceptions—most notably the work of Kevin Sharpe on the Personal Rule and‘private conscience and public duty in the writings of Charles I’[3]—this view of the king has dominated recent historiography.However,in a characteristically trenchant broadside published in the journal Past＆Present in 2005 the Harvard historian,Mark Kishlansky,has argued that the established picture of Charles is both misleading and misconceived.[4]Kishlansky argues that much of the traditional picture of Charles is‘A case of mistaken identity’in which leading contemporaries,as well as historians since have‘misunderstood his intentions,misapprehended his aspirations,misunderstood his motives and misconstrued his character.’Against a traditional picture of a king who was lazy,deceitful,inept and often reclusive,he presents us with a Charles who was flexible and compromising,who strove to keep his promises,who made himself visible and accessible and who went out of his way to accommodate his Scottish subjects at the time of the Covenanter Rebellion in 1638-1639.His conclusions have provoked a lively debate which has been aired in the pages of Past＆Present.Clive Holmes,Julian Goodare and I have written responses,and Kishlansky himself has delivered a riposte which robustly defends his conclusions.[5]Whatever the rights and wrongs of the argument,then,it is clear that the personality and political style of Charles I,and his contribution to the causes of the English Civil War,remain a highly contested and highly charged issue in Britain and North America and,indeed,everywhere else that the English Civil War is studied.
What I want to do in this paper,then,is revisit some of the facets of Charles's political persona that Kishlansky has highlighted and offer my own assessment of his contribution to political breakdown in early Stuart England.
Any attempt to understand Charles has to begin with his difficult childhood.We don't know a great deal about this,and certainly not enough to subject him to the rather crude psychoanalysis attempted by Charles Carleton in his 1983 biography.[6]However,it is at least clear that he grew up very much in the shadow of his elder brother and sister,Henry and Elizabeth,and was more or less starved of affection and attention,even by his own parents.It was not until he became heir to the throne,with Henry's death in 1612,that people began to notice him.What they discovered was a shy and extremely gauche adolescent,with a pronounced stammer which he never got rid of,and a tendency to fits of rage and jealousy,directed particularly towards the glamorous young men who dominated his father's affections.There was an incident in 1616,when in front of the court he turned a water fountain full in the face of George Villiers and soaked him to the skin which is,perhaps,indicative of his early frustrations.[7]Charles as a young man was certainly not the stuff of which 17th century rulers were supposed to be made.Yet by the 1630s he had transformed himself into a dignified,kingly figure,every bit as impressive as his contemporaries Louis XIII and Philip IV of Spain.How had this come about?
In part,it was through a considerable effort of willpower and selfdiscipline.He was acutely conscious of the responsibilities of his office,and although he lacked self-confidence early on,he made himself play to the full what he regarded as the proper role of a king.So,for example,in spite of stammer,he regularly delivered speeches on public occasions,such as the opening of parliament and earned considerable admiration for this,not least because he was so much more direct and to the point that his father had been.More significantly he also exercised a very close direction over the most important aspects of royal government.The extent of this has been much debated and often underestimated by historians who have tended to be taken in by claims that he was dominated by a succession of royal favourites,from Buckingham,Laud and Wentworth,to his own wife,Henrietta Maria.We have to remember that in 17th century—and in early modern monarchies more generally-it was common practice always to blame counsellors rather than the monarch for unpopular decisions.In fact,a close examination of the processes of government at almost any stage in his reign reveals that he was very much in charge,attending to day-to-day business and dominating the decision making process.
This is one point on which Kishlansky provides a salutary corrective to a well-established orthodoxy,although he was not exactly the first to do so since Kevin Sharpe made this point in his study of Charles's government during the Personal Rule.Sharpe describes the king,very aptly,as a‘princely swot’because of his earnest determination to do what was expected of him and his attention to detail.He was not quite in the same league as a Philip II of Spain,who spent upwards of eight hours every day,locked away in his study and munching his way through a huge mound of paperwork.But if one looks at the state papers of the period his marginal annotations show that he read them promptly and thoughtfully and issued clear instructions.[8]
More significantly he also kept close control of the political processes at the heart of government.The all important business of dispensing patronage in the form of senior appointments at court or in the privy council he kept largely to himself,certainly after the death of Buckingham in 1628.The clearest instance of this is the appointment of Bishop Juxon as Lord Treasurer in 1636,after months of speculation and jockeying for position.It has often been thought that this was Laud's doing,and demonstrated a new clerical dominance at court,because Juxon was the first clergyman to fill this office since before the Reformation.But Brian Quintrell has shown convincingly that it was Charles's own work.He settled on Juxon because he liked and trusted him personally,having enjoyed his services as domestic chaplain since 1627 and because his accommodating style could help to heal rifts which had developed amongst his leading councillors.But he bided his time and played his cards so close to his chest that Laud was as surprised as everyone else by the outcome.[9]
He also dominated the decision making processes,setting the agenda for his privy council,laying down the parameters for discussion and making his views sufficiently clear to deter those who might be tempted to challenge his line.If one searches for the origins of the key political decisions taken in the reign—such as the decision to raise a forced loan in 1626,the decision to resummon parliament in 1628 or the decision to impose an English-style prayer book on the Scots in 1637—these can invariably be traced back to the king.Of course,he listened to and worked closely with others.Buckingham exercised a powerful influence on foreign affairs between 1624 and 1628,and Laud was able to take the initiative and implement anti-Calvinist reforms in the church after he became archbishop of Canterbury in 1633.But both were keenly aware that everything they did had to have the king's approval and woe betide them if they tried to advance policies which did not fit with his priorities.[10]
Charles was certainly acting the part of a king,and thanks to the greatest of all English royal portrait painters,Anthony Van Dyck,he was coming to look the part.The transformation in Charles's appearance in paintings once Van Dyck was established in England in 1632 was remarkable.Lack of height,heavy features,a long face and a rather tense demeanour made Charles an unpromising subject for the portrait painter.Van Dyck's predecessor,Daniel Mytens,struggled to convey much in the way of dignity or substance.Yet within a few months of his arrival Van Dyck was producing portraits that depicted the king as the epitome of baroque notions of majesty and kingship.He overcame his physical defects by posing him on horseback,elongating his hands and fingers,ageing him by about five years and giving his face a distant,melancholy expression suggestive of wisdom and maturity.As his subject matter,he adopted the various roles expected of a‘good prince’,showing Charles as the elegant Renaissance courtier,the warrior prince and,in the‘great peece’of 1632,as‘the father of his people’,seated in the middle of his family,gazing calmly at the viewer,the crown,orb and sceptre of state to the side and in the background Whitehall and the parliament house.[11]
In spite of appearances,however,Charles still lacked many of the personal qualities needed in an age when so much depended on a monarch's personal relationships.Whatever their other failings,his predecessors,Elizabeth and James were both extremely shrewd and tactful when it came to the art of man management.Charles was not.Perhaps because of his early upbringing,he was never a particularly confident judge of human character and found it difficult to take detached view of his relationships with his counsellors.As a result,he tended to go overboard in his affection for those he felt were serving him loyally,or form strong dislikes which were very difficult to shake.George Abbott,Charles's first archbishop of Canterbury and John Williams,his first Lord Keeper,both found it almost impossible to function after 1625 because,for reasons which are unclear,the king formed strong personal antipathies against them.As a result,Charles was deprived of very worldly-wise counsel which might have saved him from some serious political mistakes,particularly at the time of the 1625 Parliament.[12]
This trait of character,however,did have its positive aspects.One consequence of his sense of personal loyalty was to limit the extent of faction fighting at his court.The most obvious example of this was over opposition to Buckingham which was building up a head of steam in 1625 and early 1626.This was stopped in its tracks when Charles made it crystal clear during the 1626 parliament that come what may he would never abandon his favourite.Those court politicians who opposed him,like the earls of Arundel and Pembroke,were given the choice of shutting up or getting out.In almost every case they chose to do the former.[13]The recognition that Charles imposed on the court that certain key figures were more or else immovable made for a relatively settled pattern of court politics and avoided the faction feuds which had blighted the second half of his father's reign.During the 1630s no senior English minister was forced out of office by court intrigue and Richard Weston,the earl of Portland,in spite of a strenuous campaign to get rid of him,led by the powerful figure of the queen,was the first lord treasurer to die in office since Robert Cecil.[14]In this respect,Charles's court matched the continuity and sense of permanence achieved under Elizabeth.
However,achieving stability at court was not the same thing as achieving stability within the political nation as a whole.Here Charles's effectiveness was undermined by another important feature of his personality which can perhaps again be traced back to his childhood:his profound lack of confidence in the loyalty of his people.It is not true,as some have asserted that Charles was an invisible and inaccessible monarch.As Kishlansky demonstrates,he went on regular progresses up and down his kingdom and,certainly in the first year of his reign,attended a range of public ceremonies in London which drew large crowds.[15]The point is well made;however,a recital of distances travelled does not tell the whole story.When the royalist commentator Peter Heylyn observed that if the king had deployed‘a little popularity’he would have been better able to rally public support in the 1640s he was making a point about the tone and style of Charles's public appearances as much as their frequency.[16]Here Charles was held back because he was not a natural public‘performer’in the manner of Elizabeth.For a variety of reasons,which seem to have had to do with personal insecurity and a distrust of‘the people’,he did not appear to have felt comfortable in the presence of large crowds.This was not invariably the case.On occasion he could work a crowd with the best of them,as he demonstrated on his return from Madrid in October 1623 and again in his carefully planned entry into London in November 1641—and on both he appeared to have reaped considerable political dividends.[17]But this was not a milieu in which Charles felt comfortable,and as a result he tended to shy away from the sort of crowd-pleasing appearances that Heylyn had in mind and forfeited much of the public goodwill which could be gained from the communication of a monarch's personal charisma.
Charles's anxiety about the loyalty of his people also led him into continually devising ways of testing that loyalty which could be very damaging politically.So,right from the start of his reign,he had a habit of turning grants of taxation into just such tests,telling parliament and his people that if they did not pay up this would show that they did not trust him and could not be relied on to obey him.Of course,most of his subjects did not want to see things in these terms at all;but Charles's repeated insistence that the whole basis of trust was at stake forced them to confront the fact that thy did not see things the same way as their king and led,for example,to the highly damaging and destablising spectacle of the crown imprisoning large numbers of leading gentry and local governors for refusing to pay up to the forced loan of 1626-7.[18]
Charles's lack of confidence in his people's loyalty was also an element in his characteristic unwillingness to try to achieve his ends by bargaining and negotiation.
Again this is an issue on which I part company with Mark Kishlansky.Kishlansky argued that Charles was far more willing to make compromises and do deals with his critics and political opponents than he has generally been given.To illustrate this he made the point that he‘proved malleable’in his dealings with parliament in the late 1620s,allowing the impeachment proceedings against Buckingham to go ahead in 1626 and passing the Petition of Right in 1628.[19]These were significant concessions,but it should also be recognised that they were largely forced on Charles by his need for parliamentary supply to keep fighting the wars of the late 1620s.He was constantly reminded by his councillors—and he was enough of a realist to recognise for himself-that this required him to make concessions to the Commons.Either he had to do deals or else abandon his war policy.It was the way these deals were done—the grudging tone and ungracious style—which gave contemporaries the impression of an unwillingness to compromise.Had Charles acted with more alacrity,and more of an appearance of enthusiasm,in following the advice of his own moderate councillors he could have done much to repair the relationship between crown and parliament.On occasion he was capable of this.His generous acceptance of the Commons' agreement in principle to grant him five subsidies on 4 April 1628 briefly promised to transform the political mood;but the good work was undone by his actions over the following weeks.He threatened the Commons with dissolution,did everything in his power to rally opposition to their requirement that he abandon imprisonment without showing cause,and clumsily attempted to undermine the Petition of Right by warning the Commons against any‘false interpretation’of the concessions he had made and calling in the initial printing so that he could append his first answer which the Commons had objected to as unsatisfactory.During the proceedings he repeatedly tried to dig in his heels and say‘no further’;but each time he was forced to abandon his defensive position because otherwise he would have had to give up supply.In light of this,Kishlansky's argument that it was the king who‘every step of the way…proved flexible and yielding’is questionable.The perception of whether or not someone is willing to compromise in politics is,of course,highly subjective.It is as much a matter of perspective,style and timing,as actual concessions.Charles himself may well have believed that he was being flexible;but this was not a view shared by many of those involved with the 1628 Parliament,and,most tellingly,it was not the view of those who were best placed to understand both sides of the argument,his own moderate councillors.Their experience was of dealing with a monarch who was unpredictable and quick to take offence,who expected parliament to operate on his terms and was prone to suspect them of disloyalty and subversion,and who,when he made concessions,often did so too late to reap the benefits which might have been hoped for.[20]
Concession and compromise was not a mode of political operation which came easily to Charles.His first instinct was generally to try to bludgeon his way through a problem by the use of royal authority.But for a monarch to rely too often and too directly on personal authority could be politically disastrous.As rulers like Henry VIII and Elizabeth appreciated it was much better to appear to act through the agency of others,so that if things went wrong they could carry the blame.Charles never seems to have understood this,and there is an incident late in 1627 which shows just how damaging it could be.
At the time all the discussion was about whether or not the king was going to summon a parliament,and it was generally believed that the main obstacle in the way of this was Buckingham.However,in a carefully staged public interview at court,Charles contrived to let it be known that it was in fact he,and not the duke,who stood in the way of a summons.He seems to have believed that once his views became known,and his royal authority was thrown into the balance against a parliament,his people would accept this and shut up.But it had precisely the opposite effect.Discussion and speculation redoubled because the people were now faced with the appalling prospect that their own king was opposed to something which everyone as supposed to believe was a good thing.[21]Charles was in effect refusing to play the traditional game of allowing his counsellors to shoulder the blame for unpopular policies;and hardly anything could have done more to upset the delicate balance of faith and trust on which political stability rested.
Charles's traits of personality,then,did a good deal to undermine trust,and make it much more difficult for his opponents to negotiate a settlement with him when crises arose.But to get to the heart of the issue of Charles's contribution to the causes of the English Civil War we need to ask why these crises arose in the first place?What caused the series of bitterly divisive conflicts—beginning with the forced loan of 1626-1627,progressing through the collapse of the 1629 Parliament and the clashes over ship money in the 1630s to the outbreak of the Covenanter rebellion in Scotland—which exacerbated political divisions in England to the extent that a Civil War became possible.Here,I would argue,a critical role was played by Charles's political ideology.This has been the subject of considerable debate amongst early Stuart historians in recent years.Was Charles an‘absolutist’ and is‘absolutism’the appropriate label to apply in an English context?What was his attitude to parliament and why did he rule without it for eleven years?And how far was he prepared to respect the restraints placed on the royal prerogative by notions of‘common law’and the‘ancient constitution’?It is on these issues that I disagree most profoundly with Kishlansky,and indeed other‘revisionist’historians,such as Conrad Russell,Glenn Burgess and Kevin Sharpe.[22]
I hope it is not oversimplifying their views too much to say that the revisionists argue that in ideological terms the gap between Charles and his people was relatively narrow.They had shared beliefs over things like the benefit of the rule of law and regular meetings of parliament.What caused the conflicts of the early part of his reign was that,as Sharpe puts it,Charles suffered from energy.Whereas his father had been content to let sleeping dogs lie and above all avoid European war,Charles jumped in with both feet,taking on Spain and France in the 1620s and pursuing a vigorous reforming agenda in the 1630s.This combined with structural problems,like the chronic state of the royal finances,alienated his subjects and led to political clashes both inside and outside parliament.Later on,in the early 1640s the cause of much of the trouble,on Kishlansky's account,can be traced to a desperate parliamentarian leadership who were gambling on a Scottish victory in the Bishops’Wars to restore their political fortunes.[23]My view,is that ideological divisions were much more profound than these approaches allow,and I am much closer to the traditional,Whiggish approach of a historian like Johann Sommerville,who stresses that Charles had very different views from most of his people over issues like the scope of the royal prerogative and the role of parliament.[24]
The problem is that this has been a difficult debate to resolve because evidence of Charles's political views is often limited and ambiguous.Unlike his father he did not write political treatises or expound his views at length in public.So we have to rely instead on more oblique indicators:reports of what he said in private,the text of proclamations and declarations written by others but issued in his name,and the source I want to look at in detail now,the court masques and entertainments of the 1630s.
These masques are a curious phenomenon.There is nothing quite like them in modern drama and efforts to restage them have come unstuck because modern audiences do not understand the conventions.Yet they were vehicles for the talents of many of the outstanding dramatists of the period,including Ben Jonson,William Davenant and James Shirley.(Shakespeare was one of the few leading playwrights who did not produce court masques.)Charles himself was intimately involved with them,collaborating closely with the main producer,the royal architect,Inigo Jones,and lavishing large amounts of time and money on each production.He and the queen also took on the leading roles in the performances of the 1630s,appearing on stage at the climax to personify the heroic virtues which banished the various vices besetting their kingdom.[25]
Masques differed from the stage plays performed at court in several important respects.Firstly,whereas the plays of the period were primarily intended to be listened to,in the masques much greater emphasis was placed on what one saw.Masques were the only stage plays of the period that employed perspective scenery;and Inigo Jones's sets for Charles I were full of visual pyrotechnics and spectacular illusions that were regarded as part of the mystery of divinely ordained kingship.Moreover,they took place inside a specially constructed theatre in which the only‘true’perspective for events on stage was that enjoyed by the king and queen.They sat at the centre of the auditorium with the court arranged around them in order of seniority.This ensured that the audience watched the royal couple as much as the masque and emphasised that monarchy was the ethical and symbolic centre of the whole performance.The perspective theatre also offered many more possibilities for staging and special effects,since it allowed for a series of flats and backdrops to be cranked on to the stage at appropriate moments.Jones in particular was renowned for the lavish and spectacular nature of his special effects,most famously demonstrated in the climax of Salmacida Spolia in 1640,when a huge mechanical cloud was wound down onto the stage bearing the queen and her attendants.This feat of visual pyrotechnics was said to have staggered onlookers,creating precisely the sense of awe and wonder at the majesty of kingship that Jones was striving for.
The basic theme of all the masques was to proclaim the authority of the king and celebrate his achievements through a representation of his role in the ongoing struggle between virtue and vice.Performances generally began with what was known as the anti-masque,in which a world of order and harmony was plunged into chaos by vices and evil influences.The forms taken by these vices are instructive because they illustrate the court's perception of its enemies during the Personal Rule.Often they were fairly abstract,representing forces like greed and selfishness which led people to put their own private interests before the public good.But on occasion they were more immediate and concrete.In The Temple of Love the main threat to the rule of true love was identified as‘the puritan’,who is described as‘a sworn enemy of poetry,music and all ingenious arts,but a great friend of murmuring,libelling and all sorts of discord,attended by his factious followers’;and sure enough at this point there appeared on stage a character dressed all in black,with a stove pipe hat,ranting on about stage plays who the audience must surely have associated with William Prynne,recently prosecuted in Star Chamber for attacking female actors—which by implication included the queen—in his Historiomastix.The anti-masque was followed by a middle section in which the evils were banished by the appearance of all sorts of virtues.This was usually the point at which the king and queen arrived on stage,accompanied by various of their nobles and ladies in waiting.Charles generally appeared,according to Jones's description in Tempe Restored,as‘the prototype to all the kingdoms under his monarchy of religion,justice and all the virtues joined together’.[26]Henrietta Maria was invariably presented as a manifestation of pure,uncorrupted love and beauty.This was often the longest section of the masque,as a chorus discoursed on the two monarchs’capacities for bringing harmony and understanding,whilst they and their attendants danced in front of Jones's backdrops of classical architecture and ordered landscapes.Finally,the masquers on stage descended into the auditorium to join with other members of the court in a dance which emphasised that what was happening on stage was not just an illusion but was in fact an extension of reality,a depiction of the idealised forms of real things in which all those present could participate.
This was in many ways the key to the purpose of the Masques.At their core they provided a representation of the workings of divine right monarchy.This functioned at two levels.For the audience it could show the king and queen as patterns,examples of heroic virtues which the onlookers could try to emulate in their own lives.This was in keeping with James I's advice to his sons in the Basilicon Doron,that‘a king is set on a stage’,as‘one whose smallest actions and gestures all the people gazingly do behold and see therein what life they should lead.’[27]For the royal couple themselves the masque meant even more than this in that it allowed them to act as the little gods that they were constantly being told they resembled.During a production they were endowed with all the semi-divine virtues that divine right rulers were supposed to possess and could go through the motions of applying these to problems they faced in the real world.In keeping with this the theme of the masque was sometimes of direct relevance to contemporary politics.
One of the best examples is a masque called Britannia Triumphans,performed in 1638.[28]Jones's drawings for the stage sets and costumes have survived and they show that it opened with a depiction of London and the River Thames,with a refurbished St Paul's cathedral as the centrepiece.This was a representation of England enjoying peace and plenty after nine years of the Personal Rule.It was followed by the appearance of the anti-masque characters,an odd collection of contemporary and historical bogey-men:lawyers,courtiers and the leaders of popular rebellions against the crown,Jack Straw,John Cade and Robert Kett.Before long these characters had reduced London to what Jones's notes described as a‘horrid hell’;however,the situation was soon rescued by the appearance on Stage of Charles in the guise of Brittanocles,an ancient British king embodying traditional British virtues,who,with the help of a large fleet of ships,restored order and tranquillity.
There was nothing particularly unusual about this masque,and the theme of chaos giving way to order at the arrival of virtue was common to all of them.What makes it particularly interesting is its timing.It was put on in a hurry in February 1638 to coincide with the delivery of some of the judgements in Hampden's ship money case.The production contained some very obvious contemporary allusions,with references to the role of the English navy in clearing the seas of pirates which was Charles's justification for ship money,and the depiction of a modern battleship which was thought to represent the Sovereign of the Seas,the new flagship launched in 1637 with the money collected.On one level,then,the masque was an exercise in propaganda,designed to remind the courtly audience of the reasons for ship money and the policies behind it;however,it was also a symbolic enactment by Charles of the role he hoped to perform in bringing peace and order to England and the seas around it.
This was an optimistic masque,reflecting the hopes of positive reform that the king still entertained in 1638.By the time of the last of his masques,the Salmacida Spolia of 1640,these were rapidly diminishing and the masque reflected an outlook of patient forbearance.[29]As usual the scenes changed rapidly from the anti-masque of chaos and disorder to scenes of order and tranquillity,culminating with the descent on stage of a huge mechanical cloud bearing the queen and her attendants who represented the spheres of cosmic harmony.This was set off by a façade of magnificent classical buildings,again reflecting the harmony of the heavens,and a bridge across which trooped the king's happy people,a symbol of unity and harmony.The whole production is supposed to have staggered onlookers,and it was probably Jones's most spectacular piece of staging;however,the message of the masque was essentially pessimistic.The guise in which Charles appeared was that of Philogenes,a Platonic philosopher king whose countrymen refused to acknowledge the good that he was trying to bring them and whose main attribute was his Stoicism in the face of adversity.Given that this masque was performed as rebellious Scots were gathering to invade England,the link with contemporary politics was,again,apparent.
The reason for this lengthy digression into the court masques is that they provide a very important and informative insight into Charles's ideological make up and political style.In the first place they offer important clues about Charles's thinking in matters of high politics.It is of considerable significance that in none of the masques performed at court is there any suggestion that those outside the court have any positive contribution to make in establishing order and harmony.Parliament never appears in the masque,and when the people are on stage they are either cast as the disobedient and rebellious characters of the anti-masque,or loving,but essentially passive,subjects who look on whilst their king performs all sorts of heroic and creative acts.[30]This situation is not far removed form the clues that we get elsewhere about the king's attitude to parliaments.It was not that he disliked them in principle,but rather that when parliament met he expected it to be docile and submissive in making grants of supply.If they did not behave like this he tended to suspect them of all sorts of disloyal and subversive intentions and to believe that they were dominated by‘popular’forces bent on destroying monarchy.The belief in a conspiracy theory in which‘popular’demagogues,playing up to the people,allied themselves with other groups opposing the crown,like puritans and common lawyers,to try topple royal authority and introduce a democratic form of government in England,was very deep seated in Charles and profoundly shaped his political thinking.Whenever he encountered opposition—over the forced loan,in challenges to his antipuritan religious policies,in resistance to his use of the royal prerogative—he tended to assume that this was the work of‘popular,factious spirits’and reacted accordingly by trying to destroy the ring leaders and remove the opportunities for such damaging dissent.[31]This applied particularly to parliament where he explained the attempt to impeach Buckingham in 1626,the pressure for the Petition of Right in 1628 and the holding down of the Speaker in the Commons at the end of the 1629 session in terms of precisely this type of conspiracy.This more than anything else explains his determination to rule without parliament after 1629,since this would deny the crown's opponents their opportunities to organise.
However,this did not mean that Charles believed that he should rule alone.Even in the masques,where he was invariably presented as the primary virtue,he was always accompanied by subordinate virtues who carried out his bidding and sought to imitate his perfection.It is significant that these roles were performed by members of the nobility who were present at court,peers like the earl of Pembroke and the earl of Holland.This is certainly something which is supported by other evidence,such as the care he took over reforming the Order of the Garter which comprised his leading peers and his quasi-feudal summons of his nobles and their retinues as he prepared to make war on the Scots in 1639.[32]One is tempted to suggest that he had a vision of the political order which matched the seating plan of one of Jones's masquing theatres:himself and the queen at the centre;his peers and councilors arranged in descending order of seniority around him,and the rest of the political nation shut out.
In the second place masques also provide clues as to how Charles thought royal power actually operated.Steeped as he was in the ideology and images of divine right kingship,he often seems to have believed that order in the world of politics was imposed rather in the way it was in the masque,by the king acting out his role as an example to his people and laying down guides and patterns for them to follow.This is perhaps most apparent in the way he set about realizing what was one of his most obsessive concerns during the 1630s,establishing order and hierarchy.
The process began at the top,with his own court where he introduced a series of new regulations and a level of ritual which would not have been out of place at Louis XIV's Versailles.Almost everything the king did,from putting on his royal socks in the morning with the aid of a gentleman usher to being tucked up in bed at night by an esquire of the body was attended with an appropriate ceremony.Objects which came into contact with the royal person were treated with an almost religious reverence,like the royal towel which was carried around the court at the head of a little procession after the king had washed himself.[33]All this was,of course,designed first and foremost to celebrate the king's semi-divine status.But it was also intended to turn the court into a model,a pattern of an ideal society which the people could emulate in their daily lives.
This points to one of the most intriguing contrasts between Charles and his father.Whereas James,influenced by his upbringing in the small and intimate court of Scotland,treated politics as a matter of discussion and faceto-face debate,leading to compromises form which everyone gained something,Charles regarded it much more in terms of right and wrong.[34]He saw the political process as a matter of getting his subjects to conform to a series of ideal patterns in which the king took the lead by providing an image of virtue and a focus of obedience.This did not mean that he did not try to communicate with his people.As Kishlansky has emphasized,in terms of the volume of his royal writings and explanatory declarations Charles far surpassed any of his predecessors on the English throne.However,it did affect the types of communication that he used and their effectiveness in shaping public opinion.
Here impact cannot simply be assessed in terms of quantity;it also had to do with tone,timing and the medium employed.The conduct of politics in England was transformed during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century by developments in pamphleteering,the circulation of news and popular drama.Appeals to a wide,politically informed,public had become the order of the day,and news management and public relations had become essential means of manipulating opinion,for the monarch as much as any other politician.[35]This was where Charles missed out on opportunities to sell himself and win hearts and minds.Several of the declarations he produced—notably his explanation of the reasons for dissolving parliament in 1629,the Large Declaration of 1639 explaining the reasons for war against the Scots and the royalist declarations penned by Edward Hyde in 1642—did have a positive and measurable impact.But alongside these successes there were lots of missed opportunities.He failed to follow up the opening for producing a royal‘gazette’,in effect an official government newspaper,during the 1620s;he decided not to publish the Rhe‘Manifest’in 1627 which could have helped to secure greater acceptance of the war against France;and,of course,he directed funds into subsidising royal masques and Van Dyck's paintings rather than more accessible vehicles for promoting positive images of monarchy.[36]Kishlansky is right to challenge exaggerated notions of Charles's reluctance to communicate.But it remains the case that prior to 1640 he failed to take advantage of many of the opportunities to win hearts and minds which were available to him.[37]Again and again he fell back on the approach embodied in the masque,of presenting idealized images and symbolic acts as a pattern and an example which it was believed could shape responses in the world of political events.
This brings us to a third aspect of the masques,the impression they give of a king who was in danger of losing touch with political reality.One should not push this too far.Charles was not a fool and he was not living in a fantasy world,however it may sometimes had appeared.But there was no doubt that he had a very limited understanding of the hopes and fears of most of his people,and,perhaps even less in the way of sympathy for them.One of the clearest demonstrations of this was his discussions with the papal envoys,Gregory Panzani and George Con,in the mid 1630s about the possibility of uniting the English church with the church of Rome.How seriously he actually pursued these is a matter of some debate and in the end the discussions did not lead to anything.But the fact that he could consider this at all,that he could even contemplate a course of action which would have horrified most of his people more than almost anything else he could have done suggests a king who was profoundly out of touch.[38]
This emerges most disastrously in his policy towards Scotland in the late 1630s.Here again Kishlansky mounts a sustained challenge to the conventional view of Charles and Scotland,arguing that his Scottish policy was careful,gradualist and compromising,and involved a much higher degree of consultation than has normally been supposed.I have to say that my view tends to support the conventional approach of historians like Peter Donald,Maurice Lee,David Stevenson and Conrad Russell that on the contrary,in dealing with the Scottish crisis,Charles revealed all his worst flaws as a politician;he was authoritarian,blinkered and unwilling to negotiate in any meaningful sense and,moreover,that he engaged in a degree of deception which was ultimately counter productive.[39]These aspects were revealed in his correspondence with the marquis of Hamilton,who was sent on a mission to negotiate with the Covenanters in the summer and autumn of 1638,which provides one of the most detailed series of exchanges we have between Charles and a senior minister.Kishlansky,largely passes over this,perhaps because it offers so little support for his surprising conclusion that‘during the succeeding two years[i.e.1638 and 1639]the king exhausted every avenue of compromise.’[40]On the contrary,the picture which emerges again and again is of the Charles who could write to Hamilton,‘I give you leave to flatter them with what hopes you please,so you engage mee not against my grounds…your cheefe end being now to win tyme,that they may not committ publike follies untill I bee ready to suppress them.’[41]
Charles in 1638 was not in a compromising mood,particularly after the signing of the National Covenant in February-March.He interpreted the Covenant as an act of rebellion and from the start appears to have been determined to crush its supporters by force to avenge the humiliations they had subjected him to.However,organising an invasion of Scotland took time and this gave Hamilton an opening to work to bring the Covenanters and the king closer together.During the summer the marquis put together a programme of concessions based on abandoning the new Scottish pray book and other offensive policies,arranging a‘King's Covenant’and agreeing to hold a parliament and General Assembly in Scotland.Charles's attitude appears to have been as cynical as the advice cited above implied;he wanted to keep the Covenanters dangling whilst he prepared for war and built a royalist party in Scotland.However,by the autumn it was apparent that he was not going to be ready to fight in 1638.At this stage he agreed to allow Hamilton to go ahead with his proposals.However the concessions came too late to produce the result the marquis had been hoping for and Charles subverted his own strategy for managing the General Assembly by refusing to allow scope for broad discussions.Hamilton faced a situation which Conrad Russell has pointed out was familiar to the king's moderate councillors,of having to deal with a monarch who was willing to take his advice on‘means’,but not open to being persuaded to change his‘ends’.So whilst Charles might be induced to talk about compromise and make limited concessions,he would not follow through to the point at which reconciliation became achievable.[42]There is little evidence here of the flexible,accommodating and trustworthy monarch portrayed by Kishlansky.
Indeed,with hindsight,one can see each stage of the escalation of the conflict as originating in an intervention by Charles which reflected,in one way or another,the flaws in his political make up.His initial insistence that the Scots be made to use an English style prayer book seems to have been based on his feelings of insecurity about the loyalty of his people and his fear of‘popularity’and Puritanism.He was convinced,as he put it,that because the Scottish presbyterians were opposed to the hierarchy of bishops in the church they‘are in their hearts against monarchy’.The disastrous proclamation of February 1638 in which he declared that he alone,and not his bishops or councillors,was responsible for the decision to enforce the prayer book,seems to have based on his view that once his personal views were made clear he would be instantly obeyed.It was this which led directly to the signing of the National Covenant in Scotland,largely because it forced opponents of the prayer book to face the fact that they were opposing the king rather than his ministers and they therefore needed all the support and unity that they could command.And his characteristic refusal to engage in meaningful negotiation and allow Hamilton to make early concessions which might have averted a war led to the Covenanters seizing the initiative and attracting much more widespread support than might otherwise have been the case.
It was the failure of his Scottish policy which necessitated the summoning of the Short Parliament,brought to an end the Personal Rule and set in train the events which led to the outbreak of the Civil War.This provides a classic example of a political test that the king failed and he did so because of a blinkered view of politics,which made it very hard for him to understand anyone's point of view but his own,and a lack of judgement about when to apply pressure and when to make concessions.Unlike his father,who rarely made the mistake of confusing divine right ideals with political reality,Charles seemed to have felt that he was entitled to impose on his subjects his own vision of what was right and proper.Kishlansky's insistence that to read Charles in this way is‘a case of mistaken identity’has provided early Stuart historians with a bracing wake-call,reminding them of the need to banish sloppy thinking or the rehashing of traditional conclusions.But,after doing my best to respond to this,I have to say that I am still inclined to see a great deal of value and force in the traditional verdict on Charles.In the final analysis I find it hard to disagree with Conrad Russell's verdict that a‘civil war without him[is]almost impossible to imagine’.[43]
【注释】
[1]The author can be contacted at r.p.cust＠bham.ac.uk S.R.Gardiner,The History of England 1603-1642,10 vols.(1883-4),Ⅴ.434;Ⅵ.328;S.R.Gardiner,The History of the Great Civil War 1642-1649,4 vols.(1893-1905),Ⅳ.328.
[2]C.S.R.Russell,The Causes of the English Civil War(Oxford,1990),207, 212-213.
[3]K.Sharpe,The Personal Rule of Charles I(New Haven and London,1992), partic.198-205;K.Sharpe,‘Private conscience and public duty in the writings of Charles I’,Historical Journal,40(1997),643-65.
[4]M.Kishlansky,‘Charles I:a case of mistaken identity’,Past＆Present,189(2005),41-80.
[5]C.Holmes,J.Goodare,R.P.Cust and M.Kishlansky,‘Debate.Charles I: a case of mistaken identity’,Past and Present,205(2009),175-237.
[6]C.Carlton,Charles I:The Personal Monarch(London,1983).
[7]R.Lockyer,Buckingham(Harlow,1981),33-34.
[8]Sharpe,Personal Rule,198-208.
[9]B.Quintrell,‘The Church Triumphant?The Emergence of a Spiritual Lord Treasurer,1635-1636’,in J.F.Merritt(ed.),The Political World of Thomas Wentworth,Earl of Strafford 1621-1641(Cambridge,1996),81-108.
[10]On Charles relationship with Buckingham over foreign policy,see T.E.Cogswell,‘Foreign policy and parliament:the case of La Rochelle 1625-1626’,English Historical Review,99(1984),241-67;T.E.Cogswell,‘Prelude to Re:the Anglo-French struggle over La Rochelle,1624-1627’,History 71(1986),1-21.For his relationship with Laud in church matters,see K.Fincham＆P.G.Lake,‘The ecclesiastical policies of James I and Charles I’,in K.Fincham(ed.),The Early Stuart Church(Basingstoke,1993),23-50;K.Fincham,‘William Laud and the exercise of Caroline ecclesiastical patronage’,Journal of Ecclesiastical History,51(2000),69-93;K.Fincham,‘The restoration of altars in the 1630s’,Historical Journal,44(2001),919-40.
[11]For the influence of Van Dyck on Charles's appearance,see R.Strong,Charles I on Horseback(London,1972).O.Millar,Van Dyck in England(London,1982),46-7,50-52;Sharpe,The Personal Rule,183-188.
[12]R.P.Cust,Charles I:A Political Life(Harlow,2005),44-49.
[13]C.S.R.Russell,Parliaments and English Politics,1621-1629(Oxford,1979),260-322,326-327.
[14]K.Sharpe,‘The image of virtue:the court and household of Charles I,1625- 1642’,in D.Starkey(ed.),The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War(Harlow,1987),254-257.
[15]Kishlansky,‘A case of mistaken identity’,60-69.
[16]Cited in R.M.Smuts,‘Public ceremony and royal charisma:the English royal entry in London,1485-1642’,in A.L.Beier,David Cannadine and James M.Rosenheim(eds.),The First Modern Society(Cambridge,1989),90.
[17]Cust,Charles I,165-167,31-32,313-314.
[18]R.P.Cust,The Forced Loan and English Politics,1626-1628(Oxford,1987).
[19]Kishlansky,‘A case of mistaken identity’,54-56.
[20]R.P.Cust,‘Charles I,the privy council and the Parliament of 1628’,Transactions of the Royal Historical Society,6th series,2(1992),25-50.
[21]This episode is described in Court and Times of Charles I,2 vols.,(ed.)T Birch(1848),Ⅰ.305.
[22]For this debate,see J.P.Sommerville,Politics and Ideology in England 1603-1640(London,1986);G.Burgess‘The Divine Right of kings reconsidered’,English Historical Review,107(1992),837-861;C.S.R.Russell,‘Divine Rights in the seventeenth century’,in J.S.Morrill,P.Slack＆D.Woolf(eds.),Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth Century England(Oxford,1993),101-120;K.Sharpe,Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England(London,1989).
[23]M.Kishlansky,‘Charles I and the Short Parliament’,in J.McElligott and D.L.Smith(eds.),Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars(Cambridge,2007),16-42.
[24]See the essays in R.P.Cust and A.L.Hughes(eds.),Conflict in early Stuart England(Harlow,1989).
[25]For the nature and structure of court masques,see S.Orgel,The Illusion of Power(Berkeley,CA,1975);R.Strong,Splendour at Court(London,1973);S.Orgel and R.Strong,Inigo Jones and the Theatre of the Stuart Court,2 vols.(London and Berkeley,CA,1973);R.M.Smuts,Court Culture and the Origins of the Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England(Philadelphia,PA,1987).
[26]Cited in Strong,Charles I on Horseback,89-94.
[27]J.P.Sommerville,King James VI and I:Political Writings(Cambridge, 1994),49.
[28]For the full text of Britannia Triumphans,as well as all Jones's surviving drawings,see Orgel and Strong,Inigo Jones and the Theatre of the Stuart Court,Ⅱ.660-703.
[29]M.Butler,‘Politics and the masque:Salamcida Spolia’,in T.Healey＆J.Sawday(eds.),Literature and the English Civil War(Cambridge,1990),59-74.
[30]M.Butler,‘Reform or reverence?The politics of the Caroline masque’,in J.R.Mulryne＆M.Shewring(eds.),Theatre and Government Under the Early Stuarts(Cambridge,1993),144-151.
[31]R.P.Cust,‘Charles I and Popularity’,in T.E.Cogswell,R.P.Cust＆P.G.Lake(eds.),Politics,Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain:Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell(Cambridge,2002),235-258.
[32]R.P.Cust,Charles I and the Aristocracy,1625-1642(Cambridge,2013),chp.2.iv,4.ii.
[33]Sharpe,‘The image of virtue’,242-248.
[34]On James’political style,see J.Wormald,‘James VI and I:Two kings or one?’,History,68(1983),187-209.
[35]For the most recent discussion of this theme,see the essays in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus(eds.),The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England(Manchester,2007).
[36]T.E.Cogswell,‘The politics of propaganda:Charles I and the people in the 1620s’,Journal of British Studies,29(1990),187-216.
[37]Sharpe provides a valuable discussion of Charles's writings in‘The King's Writ: royal authors and royal authority in early modern England’,in K.Sharpe and P.G.Lake(eds.),Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England(Basingstoke,1994),117-138.
[38]The best account of this episode is in A.Milton,Catholic and Reformed(Cambridge,1995),353-373.
[39]P.Donald,An Uncounselled King.Charles I and the Scottish Troubles,1637-1641(Cambridge,1990);M.Lee,The Road to revolution:Scotland under Charles I,1625-1637(Chicago,Ill.,1985);D.Stevenson,The Scottish Revolution 1637-1644(Newton Abbot,1973);C.S.R.Russell,The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637-1642(Oxford,1991),55-60.
[40]Kishlansky,‘A case of mistaken identity’,78.
[41]National Archives of Scotland,GD 406/1/10848.I am grateful to Dr Sarah Poynting for supplying me with a transcript of this letter from her forthcoming edition of The Writings of Charles I.
[42]For my own efforts to make sense of these 1638 negotiations,see Cust,Charles I,230-243.
[43]Russell,Causes of the English Civil War,211.