King Charles I and the Protestant Cause

King Charles I
              and the Protestant Cause                    *

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          nglish history in the seventeenth century is dominated by
           the civil war between King Charles I and his Parliament.
           The principal historian of this epoch, the late Samuel Raw-
  son Gardiner, called this violent interlude the 'Puritan Revolu-
  tion'. Gardiner's monumental work is now fifty years old and, in
  the passage of two generations, has been attacked both in general
  and in detail, although hitherto nothing comparable has appeared
  to replace or supersede it. The modern tendency is to devote more
 attention to the social and economic background of the war and
 to turn away from its religious aspects. We seek for its causes today
 in the economic changes, in the position of the gentry and in the
 financial and trading interests of the wealthy Puritan city men.
 Fifty years of research has produced interesting results and added
 much to our general knowledge of English society and life at the
 time of the war. But Gardiner had two advantages over most of
 those who have come after him and over many of his critics. He
 had been brought up in one of the more austere dissenting sects
 so that he had a deep understanding of the Puritan outlook. And
 he approached English history from a wide knowledge of European
 history. These two factors enabled him to appreciate the strength
and fervour of English Protestant - and more especially of English
Puritan - opinion, and to gauge the extent to which it was out-
raged by the foreign policy as well as the home policy of Charles I.
    Since his time English historians, deeply concerned with the
rich and fascinating details of the politics, economics, social life,
literature and philosophy of a vital and enthralling period of
English national history, have paid less attention to Continental
politics or their effect on England. As a result our knowledge of
the internal structure of the country has been enriched, but the
* Lecture delivered to the Huguenot Society of London, 1954.

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HISTORY     AND   HOPE

generally accepted picture of the Civil War as something which
 was very much the private and insular concern of the English is,
I submit, very misleading. Many people in the British Isles during
 the civil wars themselves and almost all European politicians
saw the Great Rebellion as an integral part of the Continental
wars of religion.
    It is my intention to examine the truth of this belief. The
religious policy of King Charles within the British Isles was a
policy of uniformity. Archbishop Laud's attempt to break up the
Walloon and Dutch communities which had settled in England
 in the time of Queen Elizabeth fitted into this general pattern. But
this home policy was associated with a persistently pro-Catholic,
pro-Spanish policy abroad, a foreign policy which intensified the
bitterness and distrust felt towards the King not only by those
who can properly speaking be called Puritans but by the majority
of his Protestant subjects. This was, I think, a major reason,
possibly the principal reason, why a conflict which might have
been confined to parliamentary argument became in the end an
open war.
    About the year I630, when King Charles I was beginning his
personal rule, religious wars had been raging for upwards of eighty
years in Europe. The Habsburg dynasty had constituted them-
selves the champions of Catholicism. They controlled Spain, the
Netherlands, Austria and all of Hungary that was not in Turkish
hands; they were also, as Emperors, overlords of Germany. Both
their dynastic power and their crusade for Rome had suffered
serious checks in the sixteenth century with the revolt of the
Netherlands     and the establishment    of either Lutheranism     or
Calvinism as the official religion of at least three important Ger-
man states - Saxony, Brandenburg        and the Palatinate; various
privileges had also been extracted by the Protestants of Bohemia.
    Between 1620 and 1630, however, the Habsburg dynasty, in
the most spectacular way, retrieved some of these disasters. The
Spanish (southern) Netherlands reopened hostilities on the Pro-"
testant Dutch of the northern Netherlands         and, among other
successes, re-took the important key fortress of Breda. A Protestant
revolt in Bohemia precipitated a war in Germany in which the
Habsburg forces were almost universally successful. Protestantism

KING   CHARLES      I AND THE     PROTESTANT       CAUSE

  was stamped out in Bohemia and in the so-called Upper Palatinate,
  a Protestant region on the Danube which was handed over to
  Catholic Bavaria; the imperial forces swept northwards as far as
  the Baltic, and in 1629 the Edict of Restitution restored to the
  Church the secularized lands in all the reconquered regions.
     King Charles thus began his reign, had his first quarrels with
  his Parliaments    and embarked on his absolute rule against a
  background of unparalleled disasters for the Protestant Cause in
  Europe. His own interventions in the European war had been
  singularly unfortunate, and I need not recapitulate here the dismal
  tale of the English expeditions to Cadiz and to the relief of La
 Rochelle. It is enough to say that by 1630, when the King decided
 for financial reasons to avoid further European wars, he had
 already caused grave anxiety among many of his subjects by the
 inefficiency with which he had allowed military and naval opera-
 tions to be conducted.
     The King's principal anxiety when he embarked on a period of
 non-parliamentary     government was to secure for himself adequate
 funds for the necessary expenses of Court and State. The peace
 treaty with Spain in 1630 was of paramount importance in securing
 him some measure of financial independence. The Spaniards were
 anxious to find some safer way of transporting money to pay their
 troops into the Spanish Netherlands as the sea-routes were in-
 creasingly dangerous owing to the growing power of the Dutch.
 By the treaty of 1630 King Charles agreed to receive Spanish silver
 in the mint and to transport the minted money to the Spanish
Netherlands in English vessels which, being neutral, were immune
from Dutch attack. In return he was to have a percentage of each
cargo of silver.! This plan was, naturally enough, not widely
published, but it was well known to the City and to all those who
had any dealings with the Dutch. The Dutch complained bitterly
of it, asserting that it did them more harm than an open declara-
tion of war would have done. Undoubtedly informed Protestant
opinion in England was profoundly disturbed by the existence of
this scheme by which the King's independence of Parliament was
underpinned by Spanish silver. (It is hardly too much to say that
there is a close parallel here with the situation which arose under
Charles II when he received subsidies from Louis XIV.)

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HISTORY     AND   HOPE

    The Puritan-Protestant        tradition of English foreign policy
 evolved in the time of Queen Elizabeth had satisfied at once the
 expansionist ambitions of the English and their religious fervour
 and had imprinted in their minds the idea that Spain was the
 natural enemy. The rightful place of England in foreign affairs
 was, they believed, among the supporters of the Protestant Cause.
    The general dislike of Charles's policy was further sharpened
 by the existence of an attractive and sentimental figurehead for
 the Puritan point of view in the person of the King's own sister,
 Elizabeth,    Queen of Bohemia. This princess had married
Frederick V, Elector Palatine, who, in r619, had accepted the
Crown of Bohemia from the insurgent Protestants of that country.
The revolt in Bohemia seemed to many English Protestants to be
very like the Dutch revolt of the previous century; the similarities
- which were in truth not many - were underlined for them by the
fact that the Elector Palatine was the grandson of William the
Silent while the Catholic ruler against whom the revolt was directed
was the godson of Philip II. English volunteers poured out to the
assistance of the Protestant Queen of Bohemia and her husband
but there was no effective official intervention made. The rising
was crushingly defeated and Elizabeth Stuart with her husband
had to take refuge in the Netherlands.           For strategic reasons
Spanish forces occupied the Rhenish Palatinate while the Danu-
bian Palatinate was handed over to the Duke of Bavaria. The exiled
 and dispossessed Elector Palatine died in r632 and his widow,
 with her large family, seemed thereafter to the Puritans to be the
living witnesses of the wrongs inflicted by the pro-Catholic, pro-
 Spanish policy of King Charles. When, in 1636, for purely prac-
tical reasons the name of the exiled Queen of Bohemia was
dropped from the Prayer for the Royal Family, Puritans regarded
this as a deliberate insult ;" in fact, her name had only been omitted
because, with the birth of the King's children, she had ceased to
be heir presumptive to the throne.
   The spectacular advance of Catholicism in the Empire set in
motion a new flood of Protestant refugees, chiefly from Bohemia
and the Palatinate. No official encouragement and very little help
was given to these unfortunates if they came to England. We find
individual Puritans offering help and protection to some - the

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KING   CHARLES      I AND THE PROTESTANT           CAUSE

 Providence Company gave one of them a chaplain's post in their
 new colony" - but there never seems to have been any question of
 permitting them to form communities in England. Evidently these
 refugee ministers were not unfamiliar figures in London for we
 have a case of an English out-of-work parson pretending to be a
 Palatinate refugee in order to raise alms from the charitable. But
 in general the official discouragement that they received contrasts
 unfavourably with the treatment of Protestant refugees in the
 previous century.
    To the honour of the Church of England clergy it must be said
 that many of them did what they could to help the victims of the
 Counter-Reformation.      The religious views of Archbishop Laud
 were shared only by a minority of the Anglican clergy, although his
 policy dominated all official action. I need not here enlarge on
 his unceasing efforts to destroy the French-speaking      Protestant
 church established at Canterbury, or the Dutch at Austin Friars,
or on the attack made by Bishop Wren in accordance with the same
 Laudian policy on the community at Norwich. Archbishop Laud
in his strenuous effort to unite and purify the Anglican church and
to suppress all kinds of dissent from it, whether native or foreign,
 was particularly hostile to the influence of the Netherlands. He
 not only disliked the communities already established in England
but he complained to the Prince of Orange that English theological
students, ordained in the Calvinist Netherlands,        were coming
back to England and, with the help of Puritan patrons, infiltrating
the Church.
    It is, however, fair to admit that although the Archbishop sus-
pected and disliked the Calvinism of the Dutch, he was not alto-
gether happy about the King's foreign policy. He, with his
colleague in temporal affairs, Lord Wentworth, wanted the King
to pursue a policy of neutrality in Europe because they felt that
peace was essential to the security of the King's government.
They were neither of them enthusiastic about the strongly pro-
Spanish appearance of the King's policy. Both of them, and the
Archbishop especially, would have liked to see the King counter-
balance it by adopting, in home policy, an attitude of approximate-
ly equal severity to all who stood outside the fold of the Church of
England - to Roman Catholics as much as to Protestant non-

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HISTORY     AND   HOPE

 conformists. The King, however, under the influence of the
 Roman Catholic Queen and in direct opposition to Laud's advice,
 continued to treat English Roman Catholics with far greater
 leniency than English Puritans. The persecution of the foreign
 Protestant communities was thus in sharp contrast to the wide
 privileges allowed to Roman Catholic ambassadors or official
 visitors who freely brought in priests (often English priests) and
opened their chapels to all who liked to come. While Laud harried
 the pastor of Canterbury, the Franciscans had re-established them-
 selves in England, Catholic priests were openly proselytizing in
 London and Mary Ward, the founder of a new order of nuns, the
 Englische Fraulein, found it possible to return to Yorkshire with a
 small band of Sisters. The King's leniency to Roman Catholics
 thus made Archbishop Laud's policy of uniformity appear to be
exclusively anti-Protestant.
    The King again went against the Archbishop's politic advice in
trying to force religious conformity on the Scots without adequate-
ly preparing the ground. In July 1637 he imposed a new Scottish
prayer book, drawn up by Scottish bishops in conformity with
the English model; this provoked resistance which very soon
assumed the proportions of a national rising. Scotland, especially
south-eastern    Scotland, had connections with the Protestant
Netherlands     which were both commercially and intellectually
even closer than those of the English. The principal legal adviser
to the rebellious party in Scotland, Sir Thomas Hope, was the
son of a Dutch mother. It is not surprising therefore that the Scots
revolt followed in outline much the same course as the Nether-
lands revolt against Philip II seventy years earlier. The nobles
became the leaders of the revolt in much the way that the N ether-
lands nobles had done, and, as in the Netherlands, the earlier part
of the struggle was conducted in resolutely legal terms; formal
protests and supplications to the Crown preceded the famous
National Covenant of February 1638 which became the manifesto
of the rebellious party.
   Since Charles had no intention of yielding to the Scots rebels
he had no choice but to make war on them. To do so the more
effectively he entered into negotiations with his friends in the
Spanish Netherlands to supply him with arms and to release any

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KING    CHARLES     I AND THE    PROTESTANT       CAUSE

 of his English subjects who were serving as volunteers in their
 armies. The Scots, with their Dutch connections, naturally bought
 equipment from the northern Protestant Netherlands.
   Soldiers of fortune from the British Isles, who were serving
 abroad; returned home to take part in the struggle. Naturally all
of those who joined the Scots were from the Protestant armies in
 Europe - chiefly the Swedish and Dutch forces. Of those who
joined the King, a very high proportion were Roman Catholics,
 English, Scots or Irish, who had been employed in the Spanish
forces. In this way the European conflict seemed in a manner to
 be simply transferring itself to British soil.
   The first war against the Scots was a fiasco and ended in what
was virtually an armistice, while both sides prepared for a second
and graver trial of arms. In the summer and autumn of 1639, how-
 ever, some startling developments took place in King Charles's
relations with Spain. The capture of Breisach by their enemies
had cut off the overland route by which the Spaniards sent troops
to the southern Netherlands. King Charles therefore agreed to
allow troops as well as money to be carried in English ships. The
Dutch, disregarding English neutrality under this final provoca-
tion, stopped some of these troopships in the Channel. Charles
therefore agreed to let the Spaniards shorten this dangerous jour-
ney by marching across England. During the course of the summer
of 1639 about five thousand Spanish soldiers landed at Plymouth,
marched across the country and were re-embarked at Dover. 4 The
presence of Spanish troops actually on English soil, when the King
was already at war with some of his Protestant subjects, gave rise
to the rumour that Charles intended to crush all his critics with
armed Spanish help. This unhappy impression was strengthened
by the famous Battle of the Downs. A Spanish fleet, carrying large
forces, had taken refuge in English waters where the Dutch under
Martin Tromp blockaded them. Charles made arrangements for
billeting the Spanish mariners and troops in Deal and Dover
should they be driven inshore by storms or other disasters; he also
supplied the ships with additional gunpowder from his arsenals.
The Dutch refused to leave and, after some weeks, decided to dis-
regard English neutrality, attacked and almost wholly destroyed
the Spanish fleet. The scene was watched with enthusiasm from

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HISTORY      AND    HOPE

 the shore by many of the inhabitants and the pastor of Canterbury
 composed       a hymn of thanksgiving        to celebrate the occasion.'
 Protestant     opinion in England welcomed the destruction of the
 Spanish armament and refused, in this instance, to be outraged
 by the shocking violation of English territorial            waters by the
 Dutch.
     The King, on the other hand, was indignant with the Dutch
 and at one moment it was even suggested at Court that proceed-
 ings should be taken against the commander of the English fleet
 for not having intervened to prevent the battle - which meant, of
 course, for not having intervened on the Spanish side. This folly
 was fortunately      dropped, but the King, in the teeth of public
 opinion,     continued    to increase his Spanish commitments.          He
 needed money to ensure his victory over the Scots rebels in the
 second war for which he was preparing throughout              the winter of
 1639-40. Negotiations        were opened with Spain by which he was
 to provide thirty-five ships of his navy to convoy Spanish trans-
 ports through the Channel. Something also appears to have been
 said about the possibility of offering bases to the Spaniards in
 southern Ireland."
     These negotiations were cut short by the action of the Dutch
 who made it clear that they would declare war if the treaty were
 concluded.     King Charles saw that he could not risk a Dutch war
and the agreement with Spain was called off. But it had done
 irretrievable    harm to his position at home.
     In the summer of 1640 the King made his second and wholly
 unsuccessful     war on the Scots. Defeated, he was compelled to call
Parliament      which reversed his religious policy, impeached Laud
 and forced the King to agree to the execution of Wentworth. Fur-
thermore, it compelled him to pass legislation which progressively
 weakened the constitutional         position of the Crown - to abolish
the prerogative       courts and to consent to triennial Parliaments.
This political revolution, grave as it was, might still have run its
course without an appeal to arms, had it not been for the King's
foreign policy and the doubts it had engendered.
    In October 164 I revolt broke out in Ireland. It was a revolt of
the native Roman Catholic Irish population              against Protestant
English and Scottish settlers. Armies had to be raised to put down

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KING     CHARLES        I AND THE       PROTESTANT          CAUSE

 this revolt. That at once brought up the vital question: who was
 to control the armed forces, the King or Parliament? In view of
 the King's past record in foreign policy it was essential that Par-
 liament should control the armed forces. A king who had been in
 close alliance with the principal Roman Catholic power - Spain -
a king who had been suspected of wishing to land a Spanish army
in England, a king who had certainly taken Spanish money and
Spanish arms to help him against his own people, and who had
even considered the possibility of giving the Spaniards bases in
his dominions could not possibly be trusted with the task of putting
down a Roman Catholic rebellion in Ireland. The Irish rebels
themselves claimed that they were the King's friends and had
risen to help him against his Puritan Parliament. The actual extent
of Charles's connivance in the rebellion will always be doubtful,
but, in view of his earlier policy, it is not surprising that many
intelligent Puritans believed him to be involved in it, and saw the
rising as an integral part of Spanish-Roman Catholic strategy in
Europe.
    Parliament insisted therefore in curtailing the King's authority
over the armed forces to be raised for Ireland. The King would
not accept this new infringement of his rights. In the spring and
summer of 1642 both parties began to organize troops in accord-
ance with their own conception of their rights and thus automatic-
ally produced a state of civil war in England.

                                     NOTES

  1 The particulars    and effects of this treaty are fully discussed in Feavear-
year, The Pound Sterling, Oxford, 1931, pp. 82 ff.
  2 Prynne,  News from Ipswich.
  3 A. P. Newton,     The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans, Yale,
1914, pp. 120-1.
  4 Calendar  of State Papers, Domestic Series, June 1639, passim.
  5 ibid. 1639--40,   pp. 33, 35, 45; Cross, History of the Walloon Church,
PP·97-8.
  6 Calendar  of State Papers, Venetian, 1670-2, pp. 44-5; Scottish Register
House, Breadalbane MSS., letter of 2 June 1640.

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