Church reform proved more treacherous. Parliamentary leaders agreed that Charles and Laud had introduced intolerable innovations, but where some were satisfied by their removal, others wished that they be replaced by even greater novelties. In December 1640 an orchestrated petitioning campaign called upon Parliament to abolish episcopacy, root and branch. Pym and his supporters were as yet unwilling to propose such a sweeping change, fearing lest it divide the Commons and create a crisis with the Lords. Nevertheless, the equally radical proposal to remove the bishops from the upper house was passed in May, and, when the Lords rejected it, the Commons responded with the Root and Branch Bill.
Pym’s fear that the religious issue might break apart the parliamentary consensus was compounded by his fear of provoking the king to counterattack. Throughout the first six months of the session, Charles had meekly followed Parliament’s lead. But there were ominous signs that the worm would turn. His leading advisers, the queen among them, were searching for military options. The radical attack upon the church allowed the king to portray himself as the conservator of “the pure religion of Queen Elizabeth and King James” without “any connivance of popery or innovation”—a coded repudiation of Laudianism and Arminianism. Week by week, sympathy for the king was growing, and in August Charles determined to conclude a peace treaty with the Scots. This successful negotiation removed the crisis that had brought the Long Parliament into being. When Charles returned to London at the end of November, he was met by cheering crowds and a large body of members of the two houses, who were unaware that he had been behind a failed attempt to arrest the leading conservator and overturn the Scottish settlement.
While the king resolved one crisis in Scotland, another emerged in Ireland. Catholics, stung by the harsh repression of Strafford’s rule and by the threat of plantation and of the direct rule from England planned by the Long Parliament, rose against their Protestant overlords and slaughtered thousands in a bloody rebellion. Though the reality was grim enough, the exaggerated reports that reached London seemed to fulfill the worst fears of a popish plot. Urgently an army had to be raised, but only the king had military authority, and in the present circumstance he could not be trusted with a force that might be used in London rather than Londonderry. In despair over the situation in Ireland and deeply suspicious of the king’s intentions, the leaders of the Long Parliament debated the Grand Remonstrance, a catalog of their grievances against the king.
The Grand Remonstrance (1641) divided the Commons as nothing else had. It passed by only 11 votes, and the move to have it printed failed. Many were appalled that the remonstrance was to be used as propaganda “to tell stories to the people.” For the first time, members of Commons began to coalesce into opposing factions of royalists and parliamentarians.
The passage of the Grand Remonstrance was followed by Pym’s attempt to transfer control of the militia (the appointment of lords, lieutenants, military officers, etc.) from the crown to Parliament. The political situation had reached a state of crisis. In Parliament rumours spread of a royal attack upon the houses, and at court wild talk of an impeachment of the queen was reported. It was Charles who broke the deadlock. On January 4, 1642, he rode to Westminster intending to impeach five members of the Commons and one of the Lords on charges of treason. It was the same device that had already failed in Scotland. But, because the king’s plan was no secret, the members had already fled. Thus, Charles’s dramatic breach of parliamentary privilege badly backfired. He not only failed to obtain his objective but also lost the confidence of many of the moderates left in Parliament. After ensuring the safe departure of his wife and children out of the country, Charles abandoned his capital and headed north.
The initiative had returned to Pym and his allies, who now proceeded to pass much of their stalled legislation, including the exclusion of the bishops from the Lords and the Impressment Bill (1642), which allowed Parliament to raise the army for Ireland. In June a series of proposals for a treaty, the Nineteen Propositions (1642), was presented to the king. The proposals called for parliamentary control over the militia, the choice of royal counselors, and religious reform. Charles rejected them outright, though in his answer he seemed to grant Parliament a coordinate power in government, making the king but one of the three estates. The king, however, had determined to settle the matter by main force. His principal advisers believed that the greatest lords and gentlemen would rally to their king and that Parliament would not have the stomach for rebellion. On August 22, 1642, the king raised his standard bearing the device “Give Caesar His Due.” Civil war and revolution
The war that began in 1642 was a war within three kingdoms and between three kingdoms. There was a civil war in Ireland that pitted the Catholic majority against the Protestant minority, buttressed by English and Scottish armies. This war festered nastily throughout the 1640s and was settled only by a devastating use of force and terror by Oliver Cromwell in 1649–50 and his successors in 1651–54. Whenever they were in the ascendancy, the Catholic Irish were willing to send armies into England to assist Charles I, on condition that he give them religious freedom and effective control of the political institutions of the Irish kingdom. After the Cromwellian conquest, the English set out to destroy the power and wealth of the Catholic elite—at one point even proposing to transport every native Catholic from 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland into the western region comprising the 5 counties of Connaught and County Clare; in the event, they settled for a confiscation of two-fifths of the land and its redistribution to Protestant Englishmen.
England during the Civil Wars.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Scotland also was embroiled in civil war, but, at one time or another, all the groups involved demonstrated a willingness to send armies into England. The Anglo-Scottish wars were fought from 1643 to 1646, resumed from 1648 to 1651, and resulted in an English military occupation and complete political subjugation (the incorporation of Scotland into an enhanced English state) that lasted until the Restoration in 1660.
And then there was the English Civil War that began in 1642, a war that neither king, Parliament, nor the country wanted. It was a war that was as dangerous to win as to lose. The parliamentarians could only maintain the fiction that they were fighting to “preserve the safety of the king,” as the commission of their commander, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, stated. The king’s fiction was that he was opposing a rebellion. Most of the country remained neutral, hoping that differences would be composed and fighting ended.
The first years of war were as halfhearted as these justifications. Parliament held the tactical advantages of controlling the navy and London. While the navy protected the coast from foreign invasion, London provided the funds and manpower for battle. The king held the strategic advantage of knowing that he had to recapture his capital. He relied upon the aristocracy for men and arms. In the first substantial engagement of the war, the Battle of Edgehill (1642), Charles’s cavalry proved superior to Parliament’s, and he followed this first encounter by marching on the capital. At Brentford (1642), on the outskirts of London, the City militia narrowly averted the king’s triumph. For the next two years, however, the war was fought to a desultory standstill.
Almost from the beginning, the members of Parliament were divided over their goals. A war group argued that Charles could not be trusted until he learned the lesson of military defeat. A peace group countered that the longer the war ground on, the less likely Charles would be to compromise. Both of these groups were loose coalitions, and neither of them dominated parliamentary politics. Until his death in 1643, Pym steered a course between them, supporting the Oxford Propositions (1643) for peace as well as creating the administrative machinery to raise and finance armies. The excise, modeled on impositions, and the monthly assessments, modeled on ship money, increased levels of taxation to new heights. The king burdened the communities his forces controlled just as heavily.