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Charles I and the Erosion of Trust, 1625–1628*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Michael B. Young
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Extract

In contrast to their predecessors, who emphasized constitutional conflict and opposition in the parliaments of early Stuart England, revisionists emphasized harmony and cooperation. There was a problem with this new, anti-Whig orthodoxy from the outset, however, and that was the problem of trust. Defying the revisionist model of harmonious relations between Crown and Parliament, the M.P.s of early Stuart England perversely refused to trust James I and Charles I. Revisionists adopted two strategies to deal with this problem of trust. Conrad Russell exemplified the one strategy: he acknowledged the existence of distrust but treated it as a deep mystery requiring ingenious explanations. Surveying the reign of James I, Russell discovered “profound distrust, but it is hard to show how this distrust was implanted.” Perplexed by this enigma, Russell observed, “One of the most crucial, and one of the most difficult, questions of the early Stuart period is why this distrust developed.” For Russell, then, it was not natural for M.P.s to distrust the king. It was, instead, an unnatural attitude that had to be “implanted” or “developed.” In time, of course, Russell solved the mystery of distrust by providing a series of explanations: distrust resulted from the pressures of war, friction between the localities and the center, the functional breakdown of an inadequately financed government, court factionalism, and the growth of Arminianism. In Russell's view, the underlying problems that gave rise to distrust had more to do with circumstances and structures than with people, least of all James I and Charles I. A second strategy for dealing with the problem of trust is best exemplified by Kevin Sharpe: he solves the problem neatly by denying its existence. Steadfastly adhering to the revisionist model of harmony and cooperation, Sharpe claims that M.P.s did in fact behave the way that model predicts they should have. “In the early Stuart period,” writes Sharpe, “compromises between king and parliaments…were common because fundamental beliefs were shared and there was an atmosphere of trust.” Sharpe admits that there was an “erosion of trust” in the latter part of Charles's reign. “But,” he insists, “there is little evidence that it unfolds in the parliaments of early Stuart England.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , Summer 1990 , pp. 217 - 235
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1990

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was read at the Carolinas Symposium on British Studies at James Madison University on October 15, 1988. I am grateful for the useful comments I received there and subsequently from Derek Hirst, Martin Havran, William Palmer, Caroline Hibbard, Linda Levy Peck, Charles Carlton, Robert Zaller, Stanford Lehmberg, and Michael Moore.

References

1 Russell did not have far to look for an answer, however, finding in the Apology of 1604 “the two principal causes of distrust: religion and money.” The Crisis of Parliaments: English History 1509–1660 (London, 1971), pp. 268, 270, 291, 299.Google Scholar

2 These explanations were elaborated in Russell's, landmark book: Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979). On p. 64CrossRefGoogle Scholar Russell expressed his sense of puzzlement again: “What then was all the trouble about? If the Parliaments of the 1620s were not the scene of a power struggle between ‘government’ and ‘opposition’, if they were not polarized by ideological disputes, and if they were full of members who wished to preserve good relations with the court, why did they generate so much ill will?”

3 Sharpe, Kevin, ed., Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (2nd ed.; London, 1985), pp. xiv, xviGoogle Scholar, and “Crown, Parliament and Locality: Government and Communication in Early Stuart England,” English Historical Review 101 (April 1986): 322.Google Scholar

4 Munden, R. C., “James I and ‘the Growth of Mutual Distrust’: King, Commons and Reform, 1603–1604,” in Sharpe, , Faction and Parliament, pp. 43–72.Google Scholar

5 See especially Jansson's, Maija “Introduction” to Proceedings in Parliament 1614 (House of Commons) (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. xiii–xxxvi.Google Scholar

6 Birch, T., ed., The Court and Times of James I, 2 vols. (London, 1849), 2: 451.Google Scholar

7 Journals of the House of Lords, 3: 283.Google Scholar

8 The seminal article on this subject is Elton's, G. R. “A High Road to Civil War?” reprinted in Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1974), 2: 164–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Russell noted the abrupt change of 1625 in his “Introduction” to The Origins of the English Civil War (London, 1973), pp. 16–17Google Scholar. He raised the question again in his Parliaments (p. 420): “This rapid change of political mood has been one of the most striking findings of this book. Correspondingly, one of the biggest unanswered questions has been how far this change is a change from James to Charles, and how far it is a change from peace to war.” The unimportance of the 1620s was reinforced by Fletcher's, AnthonyThe Outbreak of the English Civil War (New York, 1981).Google Scholar

10 Jansson, Maija and Bidwell, William B., eds., Proceedings in the Parliament of 1625 (New Haven, 1987), pp. 391, 393, 394 [hereafter cited as 1625 Proceedings]Google Scholar. See also pp. 401–02, 422, 426, 430, 432.

11 Gardiner, S. R., The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War 1603–1642, 10 vols. (London, 1883–1884), 5: 287–90.Google Scholar

12 Adams, S. L., “Foreign Policy and the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624,” in Faction and Parliament, pp. 139–172Google Scholar; Russell, , Parliaments, pp. 212, 218, 242–47Google Scholar. In 1625, Edward Alford explained, “we are not engaged to give for the recovery of the Palatinate; for when it was in the act of parliament, as it was first penned, it was struck out by the order of the House [as a thing unfit to engage the House] for the recovery of the Palatinate” (1625 Proceedings, p. 407). J. P. Kenyon appropriately described the results produced by Charles and Buckingham as “an insanely over-ambitious war” (The Stuart Constitution 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary, [2nd ed.; London, 1986], p. 89 n. 32Google Scholar).

13 1625 Proceedings, pp. 28–29, 190–93, 492–93, 647–48.

14 See especially the debates on 30 June; 4, 5, 6, 10, and 11 August.

15 Among the questions Buckingham attempted to answer when he addressed both Houses of Parliament on 8 August were “whether this fleet was ever intended to go forth or not” and “where is the enemy?” (1625 Proceedings, pp. 436, 438). Conrad Russell referred to a “deep-rooted and mistaken suspicion that no war was really intended” in 1625 (Parliaments, p. 242).

16 Derek Hirst has written in this regard that “The distrust engendered by the breach of Charles's word was to ruin the new king's relations with his early parliaments.” And when war did materialize, it occurred “in a yawning credibility gap” (Authority and Conflict: England 1603–1658 [Cambridge, Mass., 1986], pp. 136–37Google Scholar).

17 1625 Proceedings, pp. 35, 196–97, 240, 648. In G. A. Harrison's opinion, “Charles largely created, he did not inherit, his major problems and it would need a premeditated exercise in exoneration to absolve him from the charge of producing a religious climate of intense mistrust, before and after his accession” (“Innovation and Precedent: A Procedural Reappraisal of the 1625 Parliament,” English Historical Review 102 [January 1987]: 59Google Scholar).

18 1625 Proceedings, p. 232, 221–22, 44.

19 ibid., pp. 330 n. 3, 359, 379, 381–82.

20 Russell, , Parliaments, p. 204.Google Scholar

21 1625 Proceedings, p. 396.

22 British Library, Harleian MS. 4596, fol. 144, quoted in Gardiner, , History, 5: 277–78.Google Scholar

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24 1625 Proceedings, pp. 190–91.

25 Ibid., p. 240.

26 Ibid., p. 239 n. 11 and p. 160 n. 48.

27 Ibid., p. 260 n. 21 and p. 261.

28 Ibid., p. 156.

29 Ibid., p. 160. Cf. Hill, Christopher, “Parliament and People in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 92 (August 1981): 110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 1625 Proceedings, pp. 429 n. 7, 358, 361, 371, 386, 133.

31 Ibid., pp. 413, 414, 417, 422, 426.

32 Ibid., pp. 155–60.

33 Ibid., pp. 459, 461, 469. Despite Charles's answer to the petition on religion, the Oxford meeting was clouded by continuing allegations of royal favor toward Catholics. As Conrad Russell observed, these instances “called royal good faith in question.” Russell emphasizes that it was simply impossible for Charles to keep his promises because he had made “contradictory” promises to Parliament and to the French (Parliaments, pp. 239–40).

34 1625 Proceedings, p. 438.

35 Peck, Linda Levy, “‘For a King not to be bountiful were a fault’: Perspectives on Court Patronage in Early Stuart England,” Journal of British Studies 25 (January 1986): 51–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cust, Richard, The Forced Loan and English Politics 1626–1628 (Oxford, 1987), p. 317Google Scholar; Sharpe, , “Crown, Parliament and Locality,” p. 337.Google Scholar

36 Lockyer, Roger observed that “Buckingham's critics had also, by definition, been critics of the war policy with which the crown was identified…” (Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham 1592–1628 [London, 1981], p. 331).Google Scholar

37 See especially Buckingham's speech to both Houses of Parliament on 8 August (1625 Proceedings, pp. 160–66, 433–39).

38 Ibid., p. 394. See also Eliot's account of Seymour's speech in ibid., p. 538. Much earlier, in a speech enumerating the kingdom's ills, Sir Robert Phelips had said, “It was not wont to be so when God and we held together; witness that glorious Queen who with less supplies defended herself, consumed Spain, assisted the Low Countries, relieved France, preserved Ireland” (ibid., p. 278).

39 Ibid., p. 397. Phelips began by saying, “This place, Oxford, makes him remember what has been done here in former parliaments….” The editors of the 1625 Proceedings (p. 397 n. 53) judge that this reference is “probably to the ‘mad parliament’ of 1258.” Considering the balance of what Phelips said, the probability seems a near certainty to me. According to Sir John Eliot, Phelips' speech had an electrifying effect on the Commons (ibid., p. 543).

40 Ibid., p. 447. See also p. 463.

41 Ibid., p. 445.

42 Ibid., pp. 448–49.

43 Ibid., p. 462.

44 Ibid., p. 478.

45 Ibid., pp. 474–75, 477–78, 481–82.

46 Public Record Office, State Papers Domestic, 16/22/51 [hereafter cited as SP].

47 SP 16/23/114.

48 Whitelocke's diary, fol. 28v, from the transcript at the Yale Center for Parliamentary History. I am immensely grateful to Maija Jansson and William Bidwell at the Yale Center.

49 Whitelocke's diary, fol. 5v.

50 Rushworth, John, Historical Collections (London, 1659–1701), 1: 224.Google Scholar

51 Ibid., 1: 223

52 Ibid., 1: 225.

53 Whitelocke's diary, fol. 10v. With respect to de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, Eliot had rhetorically asked whether “we do not now suffer under the same case, not differing in a syllable,” to which he himself answered, “we now suffer under the same necessities, the same powers, the like, if not worse” (Whitelocke's diary, fol. 93).

54 Rushworth, , Historical Collections, 1: 355Google Scholar. In 1603 Ben Jonson was questioned by the Privy Council regarding his play Sejanus (Dutton, Richard, Ben Jonson [Cambridge, 1983], pp. 7, 138–40Google Scholar).

55 Rushworth, , Historical Collections, 1: 357.Google Scholar

56 Ibid., 1: 390, 359. The Commons' alarm over “new counsels” and Carleton's comments was expressed in their “Remonstrance.” See The [Old] Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England… (London, 1763), 7: 316.Google Scholar

57 Cust, , Forced Loan, pp. 16–23Google Scholar. See also Cust's, “Charles I, the Privy Council, and the Forced Loan,” Journal of British Studies 24 (April 1985): 211–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58 Johnson, R. C.et al., eds., Commons Debates 1628 (New Haven, 1977), 2: 3, 7, 57–58, 65 [hereafter cited as 1628 Debates].Google Scholar

59 Parliaments, pp. 347–50, 368. In his review of Russell's book, Derek Hirst noted that this way of treating the subject “minimizes the degree of polarization” (The Historical Journal 23 [June 1980]: 460Google Scholar).

60 1628 Debates, 3: 98Google Scholar. Elsewhere Digges similarly said, “That king that is not tied to the laws is a king of slaves” (ibid., 2: 66).

61 Ibid., 2: 297.

62 Ibid., 2: 453.

63 As Richard Cust expressed it, “there were those who drew the logical conclusion: if the King was so directly involved in a challenge to the subjects' liberties then he could no longer be trusted” (Forced Loan, p. 330).

64 1628 Debates, 3: 125.Google Scholar

65 Ibid., p. 125–27.

66 Ibid., p. 188.

67 “The Origins of the Petition of Right Reconsidered,” The Historical Journal 25 (June 1982): 306.Google Scholar

68 1628 Debates, 3: 189Google Scholar. On 2 May, Solicitor Shelton echoed Coke: “Let us consider the last message. It is that we should let the King know whether we will rely on his promise or no. He does not command, but desires. Let us consider when and where that late promise was made. Was it not made in the face of both Houses?” “We have his word; let us trust the King.” “Let us tell him we do rely on his word” (ibid., pp. 210–11).

69 Ibid., p. 211.

70 Ibid., p. 254.

71 Ibid., p. 268.

72 Ibid., p. 270.

73 Ibid., p. 276. Cf. p. 270.

74 See my own “The Origins of the Petition of Right Reconsidered Further,” The Historical Journal 27 (June 1984): 449–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

75 1628 Debates, 3: 372, 389–90.Google Scholar

76 Ibid., p. 452. Some of the most cogent arguments against the saving clause were made by John Pym, Sir Edward Coke, and John Glanville. Glanville and Sir Henry Marten were chosen to present the Commons' long case against the saving clause to the Lords on 23 May (ibid., pp. 494–95, 527, 560–80).

77 Ibid., 4: 52–53.

78 Ibid., pp. 181–82. Choosing to ignore the other ambivalent language which Charles added to the second answer, the Commons were ecstatic. Sir Edward Coke described himself as “half dead for joy” (ibid., p. 185).

79 Guy, , “Origins,” pp. 306–07Google Scholar. Guy further states that “The petition of right was born when Charles reneged on his promise of 4 April” (p. 312).

80 Foster, Elizabeth Read, “Printing the Petition of Right,” Huntington Library Quarterly 38 (November 1974): 81–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

81 Cust, , Forced Loan, p. 332.Google Scholar

82 Carlton, Charles, Charles I: The Personal Monarch (London, 1983), p. 102.Google Scholar

83 Gregg, Pauline, King Charles I (Berkeley, 1981), p. 447.Google Scholar

84 I am grateful to Robert Zaller for emphasizing this point.

85 “‘Abuse of Power and Power Itself’: Adjournments, Forbearances, and the Petition of Right, 1628,” Parliamentary History 7, 1 (1988): 1, 16Google Scholar. Harrison further writes, “Historians who profess to discover an undiminished attachment to sentiments of harmony and concord in such events, exhibit an alarmingly literal approach to their interpretation of historical evidence.” Elsewhere Harrison has written, “A prevailing mistrust of royal intentions characterized parliamentary politics throughout the Early Stuart period” (“Innovation and Precedent,” p. 33). Richard Cust has recently observed that newsletters and news-diaries contained surprisingly overt criticism of Charles (“News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 112 [1986]: 75, 83Google Scholar).

86 Even Conrad Russell was driven by the evidence to acknowledge the “growth of constitutional fears during the 1620s,” “mounting constitutional fears,” and an “atmosphere of constitutional alarm” (Parliaments, pp. 335, 57–58). This is one example of the way in which Russell's characterization of parliamentary politics is sometimes surprisingly traditional compared to his overall viewpoint. This incongruity in Russell's work has been described by Zagorin, Perez, Rebels and Rulers, 1500–1660 (Cambridge, 1982), 2: 134–35 and n. 11.Google Scholar

87 An inestimably important contribution to the reappreciation of constitutional issues is Sommerville's, J. P.Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (London, 1986)Google Scholar. On p. 140, Sommerville writes, “The reality of ideological conflict is a blindingly obvious feature of early Stuart history.”

88 Hirst, , Authority and Conflict, p. 138Google Scholar. On the issue of continuity from the 1620s to the 1640s, see also Sommerville, , Politics and Ideology, p. 235Google Scholar, and Cust, , Forced Loan, pp. 333–37Google Scholar. In his Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642 (New York, 1972)Google Scholar, Lawrence Stone maintains the assumption “that this is more than a mere rebellion against a particular king” (p. 48). After surveying a multitude of alleged contributory “preconditions” and “precipitants,” extending over a century prior to the Civil War, Stone reaches the immediate “triggers,” among which he includes “the bottomless duplicity of King Charles.” Stone further observes, “The proven untrustworthiness of the King inevitably forced Pym and his allies to increase their demands, out of sheer necessity of self-preservation” (p. 138). Without wishing to oversimplify the case, I question the relegation of Charles's “bottomless duplicity” and “proven untrustworthiness” to the status of mere triggers.

89 Russell, Conrad, “The First Army Plot of 1641,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 38 (London, 1988): 101.Google Scholar

90 I cannot in good conscience end this article without acknowledging that, despite my criticism of his work, I personally remain deeply grateful to Professor Russell for his help and encouragement.