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English-Speaking Peoples (5): King Charles and the Civil War
History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume 2, Book 5
For 12 successive Fridays starting September 30th, Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn and radio host Hugh Hewitt are discussing Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples in the Hillsdale Dialogues segment of the Hugh Hewitt Show.
Following each discussion, the Churchill Project will offer companion pieces highlighting important episodes and themes in the book covered. Readers will note that our writers focus on aspects of the books which our discussants may not. Such is the depth of Churchill’s History. Every reader may take what they prize most from this vast mine of political wisdom and understanding.
Page references (parentheses) are to Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. 2, The New World (New York: Dodd Mead, 1956).
Changing times
Winston Churchill’s narrative of the English Civil War in his second volume of A History of the English Speaking Peoples details the constitutional debate that gave rise to it. The argument concerned the divine right of kings, the ancient customs of Parliament, the royal prerogative, the birthright of Englishmen, and other fundamental questions.
King James I, who ruled from 1603 to 1625, had “fixed ideas about kingship and the divine right of monarchs to rule” (147). But Churchill notes that political tendencies were changing. In particular, cause “the habit of obedience to a dynasty had died with the last of the Tudors,” the royal house which ruled England for more than a hundred years (147-48). Obedience was anathema to country folk who challenged the old nobility, giving rise to a “powerful class…now eager to take a hand in their management” (148).
In James I’s first Parliament, the House of Commons “drew up an Apology reminding the King that their liberties included free elections, free speech, and freedom from arrest during Parliamentary session” (149). The members feared that his prerogative “may easily and daily grow, while the privileges of the subject are for the most part an everlasting stand.” James discounted their concerns. He “frequently reminded them of his Divine Right to rule and their solemn duty to supply his needs.” He furthermore revived the prerogative rights of taxation of the medieval kings.
Roots of rebellion
But Parliament under James was growing in strength and began to take a larger role in the conduct of affairs. The educated English class displayed extensive interest in the proceedings of government, and “as they thought and moved so did the great mass of the people behind them” (179). This was because English people were adamant Protestants who believed “their survival and their salvation were bound up for ever with the victory of the Reformed Faith” (179).
Religious fervor was one factor advancing political engagement. Churchill noted how the desire for England to promote Protestantism “drove forward the Parliamentary movement.” He quotes Lord Acton, a Member of Parliament in the 19th century: “The progress of the world towards self-government would have been arrested but for the strength afforded by the religious motive in the 17th century” (179).
Both the common folk and the King looked back in English history to find grounds to justify their ideas of government. In the reigns of James and Charles, the Commons focused on “trying to wring from the Crown admissions of ancient custom which would prevent…an autocratic grip” (180). Edward Coke, a Chief Justice of King’s Bench appointed by James in 1613, had an unparalleled knowledge of English Common Law, which he used to support Parliamentary claims. Coke mainly did this by unearthing “an armoury of precedents” in the Common Law.
King Charles versus Parliament
Parliament remained steadfast in its aim to get involved in conflicts on the European mainland. Members believed “their power would grow with the adoption of their policy, which was also their faith” (181).
King Charles I was married to a French Princess, Henrietta Maria. He and his best friend, the Duke of Buckingham (effectively his foreign minister), saw Spain as the prime enemy. Parliament granted supplies for war on Spain, but specified that “the customs duties of tonnage and poundage…should for the first time for many reigns be voted, not for the King’s life, but only for one year” (182). Charles perceived this as an insult to his authority, resenting Parliament’s “increasing claims” (182). The King needed more money for the war, and feared Parliament would impeach Buckingham, which it had already done once.
In his frustration, Charles “resorted to dubious methods of raising money” (183). He demanded a forced loan from established leaders, throwing five of them into prison for defying him. Known as the Five Knights, these five famously appealed their imprisonment. Out of the King’s Bench’s ruling came the 1628 Petition of Right, passed after the King tried forcibly to quarter soldiers. The Petition prevented the people’s property and liberty from being taken away without habeas corpus.
“The difference between bond and free”
After Parliament agreed not to impeach Buckingham, the King summoned the assembly. But it “would not grant money to a King and Minister it distrusted,” and together with the Lords and nobility was “resolute in defence of property, and also of its twin cause at this time, liberty” (183). In response, the King threatened to “use those other means which God hath put into my hands to save that which the follies of other men may otherwise hazard to lose” (184).
Parliament then produced several resolutions, one of which stated “it was the ancient and undoubted right of every freeman to have a full and absolute property in his goods” and that no tax should be levied without “common consent by Act of Parliament” (184).
Churchill explains then that these principles are the foundation of English freedom. Denying “the right of the Executive Government to imprison a man…for reasons of state,” Churchill says, is what “constitutes the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land” (185). He furthermore adds that trial by jury “makes the difference between bond and free.”
“Always in our own power”
Despite these constitutional advancements, many Parliamentarians looked to the future with a sense of foreboding. European monarchies were becoming increasingly autocratic. For example, the States-General in Paris hadn’t been summoned since 1614, while standing armies “stripped alike the nobles and the common people of their means of independent resistance” (186).
When Parliament met for the first time in 1629, it issued an exhaustive resolution: “Whoever collected or helped to collect tonnage and poundage before it was granted, or even paid it, was a public enemy” (189). This was just one of the many issues brought up in that session. Members of Parliament also feared the advancements of “Popery and Arminianism” in England, which they also declared against.
It was obvious that Charles and Parliament were unable to work together, so Charles dissolved Parliament a week later. Such action, he proclaimed was “always in our own power” (191). He then found himself needing to be extremely frugal. Without Parliament, “State action [was] reduced to a minimum”—a main feature of Charles’ Personal Rule (194). Unable to wage war without the support of Parliament, Charles was forced to negotiate peace with France and Spain.
The period of “Personal Rule”
Churchill describes Charles in this time as an “unarmed despot,” because “no standing army enforced his decrees” (194). Yet he doesn’t view Charles’s rule as tyrannical. On the contrary, “he was ruling according to many of the old customs of the realm. It is a travesty to represent this period of Personal Rule as a time of tyranny in any effective sense” (194).
Despite disagreements over the authority of Parliament, the King never veered off into absolutism. Charles, writes Churchill, “was by no means resolved to depart from the ancient laws, as he understood them” (208). But the ultimate conflict still loomed, and “all England looked back to these placid Thirties as an age of ease and tranquility” (194).
Churchill began his History of the English Speaking Peoples in the 1930s, but World War II intervened. He finished his work afterward, with the experience of dictators etched in his mind. Thus he is careful to describe Charles I as less than an absolute dictator.
Tyrants need large militaries—masses of men willing to fight and die for their regimes. They also need the full support of a nation’s economy and resources. These were things Charles did not have. They may have forestalled him, but Churchill gives more credit to the King’s loyalty to tradition. If a statesman abides by the custom of his people, he does so because he believes his work is for the people’s good of the people. Parliament and Charles may have disagreed on how government must serve the people. But they still both sought to govern for the sake of the people as they understood it.
Charles, Monarchy and Liberty
King Charles would end up ruling for well over a decade without a Parliament. The next election brought in new members who were even more adamant about the same issues. The King summoned Parliament for the last time in 1629. Different parties, different religious and political aspirations, proved incapable of reaching common ground.
The political strife devolved into three English civil wars between 1642 and 1651. Charles raised an army, but was unable to prevail. After attempts to negotiate with Scottish Presbyterians and a brief escape, he was delivered to the Parliamentary commissioners, tried and executed on 30 January 1649.
Interregnum
Churchill describes Charles I’s execution as an event marked by “intense though inarticulate emotions. When they saw the severed had ‘there was such a groan by the thousands then present,’ wrote a contemporary diarist, ‘as I never head before and desire I may never hear again.’” (280). England was proclaimed a republic under Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector, but proved unable to survive him. After Cromwell’s death and the brief rule of his son, Parliament was reinstated. The crown was restored to the King’s eldest son, Charles II, in 1660.
Churchill ends Book 5 on the Civil War by describing Charles’s “strange destiny”:
His own kingly interests were mingled at every stage with the larger issues. Some have sought to represent him as the champion of the small or humble man against the rising money-power. This is fanciful. He cannot be claimed as the defender of English liberties, nor wholly of the English Church, but none the less he died for them, and by his death preserved them not only to his son and heir, but to our own day. (281)
The author
Zach Bauder is a Winston Churchill Fellow at Hillsdale College studying Politics and German. He is a junior from Seattle, Washington, and he is the President of the Young Americans for Freedom chapter at Hillsdale. Over the summer, he was a Field Coordinator for Congressional candidate Joe Kent in Washington’s third Congressional district.