Charles I dismissed Parliament in 1626 because it was rather keen on the idea of impeaching the Duke of Buckingham for his incompetence in the handling of foreign policy not to mention his influence over Charles I. The king, on the other hand, wished to preserve his favourite so dissolved Parliament and its radically minded members. Unfortunately Buckingham had dragged Charles into a war against both the Spanish and the French which was a costly exercise and which Charles could not afford – hence the need to call Parliament to raise the cash.
Charles dealt with his problem by raising Forced Loans. Essentially wealthy folk were required to dip into their pockets and “lend” the king money. It was generally accepted that loan was an euphemism for taxation. The king could not have managed this himself. He used the administrative system that had been in place since before the Norman Conquest i.e. the county administrative system based on sheriffs and justices of the peace. During the first year of the loan in excess of £250,000 was raised. It is perhaps unnecessary to say that the loan and the commissioners who raised the money were not terribly popular.
Seventy-six gentlemen across the country refused to pay and were carted off to their local jails as an example to the rest of their peers. Sir John Corbet, a moderate sort of Puritan who represented Great Yarmouth in Parliament, took exception to the forced loans and was rather vocal in his objections. He also refused to pay the £20.00 that his rateable value suggested that he could afford. This may have caused some familiar difficulty as his cousin Sir Andrew Corbet of Moreton Corbet was the commissioner in Shropshire collecting the taxes on behalf of the Earl of Northampton who was President of the Council for the Welsh Marches.
Sir John found himself in prison without any charges being drawn up against him. This was strategic in that the king wanted some examples of what would happen if you weren’t loyal to the Crown but he was also bothered by the idea that if one of the gentlemen ended up in a courtroom that the judge might side with the accused. Thus the gentlemen sat in their cells at the king’s convenience.
Five of the imprisoned men – the five knights of the title brought a writ of habeas corpus. One of them was Sir John Corbet. Essentially, habeas corpus is the writ which requires someone under arrest to be brought before a judge to demonstrate that their arrest is legal. Magna Carta was used as the precedent amongst other things during the trial to prove that the five knights detention was illegal. The case did not go in the knights’ favour although the judges were sympathetic and refused to rule conclusively saying that the law required further clarification but that they could do no more because both James I and Elizabeth I were prone to arresting people without charges being drawn. (Interestingly they were also prone to chopping off various bits of their prisoners’ anatomies but History does not record them as tyrants whilst Charles did none of the above and got labelled a tyrant – just a thought.)
Corbet was released at the beginning of January 1628 but died three weeks later from small pox contracted whilst in prison. As for Sir Andrew, he would vote for the Petition of Rights when Parliament sat in 1628 and he would eventually lose faith in the Crown. In died in 1637.
On August 22nd1642 King Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham Castle. Whilst times had been increasingly discordant this act effectively marked the start of the First English Civil War which lasted until 1646.
Meanwhile in Colchester the house of ‘Mad Madge’ Cavendish’s parents’ was sacked by Puritans on the 22nd August 1642. Mad Madge had not yet acquired that name nor had she yet entered the service of Queen Henrietta Maria or married the royalist Duke of Newcastle. She was still the youngest of eight children sired by Sir John Lucas. Madge’s father was a prominent royalist in the area. The relationship between him and the citizens of Colchester had deteriorated over the years. It probably didn’t help that East Anglia had strong Puritan sympathies and Lucas was suspected of being a Papist. This event was not a one off though. The Stour valley had become increasingly restless during 1642. Unemployment was high. Rumours became wilder and anti-popery became more rife. The Countess of Rivers, for instance, found herself under siege by the people of Melford. Melford Hall was partially destroyed as a consequence. Parliament did not condone the harassment of the widowed countess – though how they may have felt when she spent her wealth on supporting the Crown is another matter entirely. She would eventually find herself in a debtor’s prison as a consequence of her loyalty.
St John the Evangelist in Leeds is a seventeenth century church built between 1632-34. To put that in context this is during the later part of the twelve years when Charles I ruled without Parliament. In 1638 John Hampden was sent to trial for refusing to pay ship tax (traditionally paid in coastal communities but not by the whole country) and John Lilburne was flogged for selling un-licensed Puritan books. Between the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 and the onset of the English Civil War there were an increasing number of strands of protestant belief. Many of these branches of Puritanism did not want to be part of the Church of England because they saw it as too ritualistic and too hierarchical. In 1639 Charles I went to war with his Scottish subjects in the so-called Bishops War about the prescriptive content of the prayer book. During this period of increasing religious turbulence, just prior to the English Civil War, very few new churches were built in England. During the Commonwealth period new churches harked back to the past – the Crown and to superstitious times. To build a new church would have been an act of defiance against Parliament. Prior to the Commonwealth Period there were new chapels built during the reign of Charles I, notably by Inigo Jones in 1627 – the Queen’s Chapel at St James. However, the queen in question was Henrietta Maria who was, of course, a Catholic. Consequentially if you had enough money for a new-fangled architect designed place of worship you ran the risk of being associated with European ideas, the Court, Laudianism and at worst Catholicism. In 1636 a new chapel was built in Somerset House – it was a Catholic Chapel.
Parliament believed that Harrison was a Royalist and there is a tale that when the king was in Leeds as a prisoner that Harrison took him a lidded tankard of ale, except rather than ale the contents of the pot were gold coins – whether this was to support the king during his captivity or facilitate his escape is a matter for speculation. The moment is commemorated in the Harrison Memorial Window but this was not created until the nineteenth century. And it would have to be said that Harrison didn’t get on with all of Leeds’ inhabitants. There were a number of scurrilous songs about him – we know about this because there was a court case with Harrison taking twenty-two people to court for libel.
The problem for Harrison was that he lived in difficult times and despite his generosity he was insufficiently Puritan for some tastes. In time he found himself being fined by Parliament – which must have been somewhat irritating given that he had loaned them money in 1642. As a result of his ultimate loyalty to Charles I and also as a result of his religious faith which although not described as Laudian was not as austere as Puritan taste demanded much of his wealth was confiscated and his is, described by an article from the Yorkshire Evening Post (29 Oct 2005), as spending his final years in comparative poverty.
Staunton Harold in Leicestershire, just a stone’s throw from Ashby de la Zouche. It’s seventeenth century church reflects the principles of Laudianism.
Bess of Hardwick disowned her eldest son Henry but he had still inherited Chatsworth despite the fact that Bess entailed what she could to William and his heirs. Due to his debts Henry sold Chatsworth to his brother William.
In 1605 thanks to the auspices of his niece Arbella Stuart he became a baronet. In 1618 with the aid of £10,000 paid to James I he became an earl. In addition to his land holdings in Derbyshire he was also investing in foreign trade – the East India Company, the Muscovy Company, the Bermuda Company and also in the settlements in Virginia.
By the time he was in his twenties young William was a polished courtier (pictured left). He also had a reputation of brawling, drinking and womanising. He also spent money as though it was water. This Cavendish was behaving as though he was a member of the aristocracy.
Which brings us to the English Civil War. Christian Bruce was a friend of Henrietta Maria. The Cavendishs were Royalists. In 1642 the 3rd Earl presented himself in York with his younger brother Charles who joined with Prince Rupert and his cavalry, took part in the Battle of Edgehill and ultimately became the Royalist commander for Derbyshire and Lincolnshire prior to his death at the Battle of Gainsborough. Meanwhile the earl, no doubt on his mother’s advice, took himself off to Europe until 1645 when he compounded for his Royalist sympathies – paid a fine of £5000 and returned to live in England at Leicester Abbey where his mother had her residence (it had been purchased by the first earl in 1613) and from there he went to Latimer Place in Buckinghamshire until the Restoration when he returned to Chatsworth.
Born in 1641, yet another William became the fourth earl upon his father’s death in 1684. There had been an older brother but he died in his infancy. The third earl had preserved the Cavendish estates largely by keeping his head down and letting his cousin (William Earl, Marquis and the Duke of Newcastle) of and younger brother get on with Royalist soldiering. The fourth earl was described by Bishop Burnet as being of “nice honour in everything except the paying of his tradesmen.” Like his father he had been sent on the Grand Tour and like his Uncle William (Newcastle) he fancied himself as a bit of a poet. It is easy to see how this particular Cavendish fitted into the court of King Charles II who was also known for his late payments. Like his monarch Cavendish also had a reputation for womanising. He had several children by a mistress called Mrs Heneage. Apparently Charles II had told Nell Gwynn not to have anything to do with him – re-arrange the words pot, kettle and black into a sentence of your choice. It could be that Charles took against William Cavendish because he publicly snubbed the Duke of York (James) at Newmarket on account of his catholicism. Aside from seduction the fourth earl also seems to have spent a lot of time picking fights and duelling.
Initially Brereton tried to take hold of Chester for Parliament but was unable to capture it. Instead having taken Nantwich for the Parliamentarian cause in 1642 he made that his headquarters. From there he ranged along the Welsh marches on Parliament’s behalf and down through Cheshire to Stafford. He came with Sir John Gell of Hopton in Derbyshire to the siege of Lichfield and was concerned at the later siege of Tutbury that his colleague was far too lenient on the Royalist defenders. Across the region Brereton was only defeated once at the Battle of Middlewich on December 26 1643 but he swiftly recovered from this as he had to return with Sir Thomas Fairfax to Nantwich when Sir George Booth managed to get himself besieged by Lord Byron and Cheshire was more or less completely in the hands of the Royalists not that this stopped Brereton from establishing an impressive network of spies loyal to Parliament.
In January 1644 Sir Thomas Fairfax crossed the Pennines with men from the Eastern Association Army. On the 25th January his men were met by a Royalist army headed by Byron who was defeated. The place where the two armies collided was Necton but the disaster for the royalists has become known in history as the Battle of Nantwich. It meant that the king could not hold the NorthWest. Even worse Royalist artillery and senior commanders were captured along with the baggage train. None of this did any harm to Sir Thomas Fairfax’s reputation nor to Brereton who had command of the Parliamentarian vanguard.
From there Brereton became involved in the siege of Chester – at Nantwich Byron had been outside the town whilst at Chester he was inside the walls. In September 1645 Bristol in the command of Prince Rupert surrendered. The only remaining safe harbour to land troops loyal to the king was Chester. Lord Byron had withdrawn there following his defeat at Nantwich and Brereton had followed him. Byron held the river crossing and in so doing was denying the Parliamentarians a way into North Wales which was Royalist.
Let us return today to the Royalist summer of victories in 1643. It was really only in the east of the country that events did not go all Charles I’s way. On 20 July 1643, Lord Willoughby captured Gainsborough in Lincolnshire for Parliament. This meant that the Earl of Newcastle could not now communicate so easily with the royalists at Newark and he could not simply march south expanding royalist territory. The Committee of Safety scratched their various heads and then sent Oliver Cromwell and Sir John Meldrum from the Eastern Association Army to back up Lord Willoughby as he was being threatened by the Royalist military commander – Colonel Charles Cavendish – who was the nephew of the Earl of Newcastle.
1644 was a year where no one gained the upper hand and the casualties of war grew. The arrival of the Scots in the Civil War ultimately tipped the balance of power in Parliament’s favour but as a result of amateur approaches to warfare the Second Battle of Newbury failed to end matters once and for all. This had the knock on effect of ensuring the rise of the New Model Army and Cromwell’s Ironsides.
Meanwhile two of the Parliamentarian generals were at loggerheads with one another. Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex felt that Edward Montagu, Earl of Manchester (pictured above) was getting the better part of the deal from Parliament. Montagu, married to a cousin of George Villiers in the first instance married for a second time to Ann Rich, the daughter of the Earl of Warwick – the Parliamentarian Lord Admiral. He turned from Court towards a more Puritan way of thinking and did not support the king in the Bishop’s War. He was also the peer who supported John Pym at the opening of the Long Parliament and was the one member of the House of Lords who Charles I wanted to arrest at the same time as the five members of the House of Commons. In 1642 he was on his third wife (another member of the Rich family) and had become the Earl of Manchester upon his father’s death. Manchester had been at the Battle of Edgehill but his was one of the regiments that had fled the battlefield. After that he was eventually appointed to the command of the Eastern Association Army – regiments covering Hertfordshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex and Cambridge. By the end of 1643 East Anglia was very firmly in Parliamentarian hands and Manchester’s men had broken out into Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. This should be contrasted with Essex and the Western Association Army performance. It is perhaps not surprising that Parliament effectively allowed Manchester to by pass Essex and to liaise with the Scots and with the Fairfaxs.
Fairfax opposed Goring on the right wing: Goring 1 – Fairfax O. Goring and his men got side tracked by the baggage wagons. Crowell was on the left wing facing Lord John Byron (pictured right): Ironsides 1 – Royalists 0. Prince Rupert turned the fleeing royalists round and sent them back into battle. Rupert and his men were evenly matched with the Ironsides. Essentially they hacked one another to a standstill at which point the Scottish cavalry charged in on the Royalist flank and scattered them.
Gloucester is one of the key locations for Parliamentarian and Royalist confrontation. It is the victory that Parliament desperately needed in 1643 and it is perhaps also written about by historians as much as it is on account of the fact that there’s so much primary source material to support the story. The Earl of Stamford arrived in Gloucester in about November 1642 and left a regiment there for its defence.
Robert Devereux was the son of the Queen Elizabeth’s favourite – the dashing one that managed to get himself executed for treason in 1601. Grandpapa on his mother’s side was Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster. Obviously having been attainted for treason the entire Devereux family, including young Robert who was ten at the time of his father’s misdeeds, were tainted as being of bad blood and all property returned to the Crown.
the grand tour. Whilst he was securing a gentleman’s education Frances Howard took up with the king’s favourite Robert Carr and married him instead having divorced Robert for impotency in 1613 (and I should imagine that no 20 year-old wants that particular label)- France’s marriage would end in murder, a visit to the Tower and a Jacobean scandal that historians are still writing about but that’s beside the point. The marriage ended amidst much hilarity and popular balladry. Robert insisted that even if he was impotent so far as Frances was concerned he was more than capable with other ladies of his acquaintance. To add insult to injury, Frances who had been carrying on with Robert Carr, was declared to be a maiden – the mirth this enjoindered can only be imagined.
There are three earls of Essex during the Tudor/Stuart period – the title was not used after the third earl’s death in 1646 until the Restoration. The First Earl of Essex was Walter Devereux – he is associated with Tudor rule in Ireland and is more famously Lettice Knollys’ husband. Lettice was the daughter of Catherine Carey – making her the grand-daughter of Mary Boleyn. Historians speculate whether Catherine was the daughter of Henry VIII – Lettice certainly looked rather a lot like her cousin Queen Elizabeth I. In fact Lettice managed to get into rather a lot of trouble with her cousin after the first earl of Essex’s death when she secretly married Elizabeth’s long time squeeze, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.
The second Earl of Essex was Robert Devereux. He was Walter and Lettice’s fifth child and after Robert Dudley’s death became a favourite with the aging Elizabeth I. Like his father he was associated with Ireland. His campaign was not a rip-roaring success from Elizabeth’s point of view. Handsome but petulant the earl rebelled in 1600 having already sailed pretty close to the wind when he returned from Ireland and burst in on Elizabeth having been expressly forbidden from crossing the Irish Sea and winning no friends when he saw the queen without all her finery. He was executed for treason on 25th February 1601 – leaving a young son, also called Robert, who would eventually become the third earl.