Charles I by Christopher Hibbert

Author:Christopher Hibbert
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781250102775
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

9

Cavaliers and Roundheads

1642–7

THAT August day in Nottingham, when the Royal standard was raised in the driving rain, there were scarcely more than a thousand men at the King’s command. Many even of those who had declared their allegiance to him shared the reluctance of Sir Edmund Verney, shortly to be killed fighting for him in Warwickshire. ‘I do not like the Quarrel,’ Sir Edmund wrote, ‘and do heartily wish the King would yield’. But his conscience was concerned ‘in honour and in gratitude’; he had eaten the King’s bread ‘and served him near thirty Years’, and he would not do ‘so base a Thing as to foresake him’ now.

Yet this simple loyalty to the Crown, whether displayed by men like Verney or by those who would always support the King, right or wrong, was not sufficiently widespread or deeply felt to gain Charles more than a few supporters. Others who might have supported him hung back: it was harvest time, for one thing, and for another, the King was still making overtures to Parliament as though he hoped, even now, to reach a compromise. Men were reluctant to jeopardise their future by openly declaring their support of a cause which might at any moment be abandoned or betrayed.

Charles’s behaviour in the months before his arrival in Nottingham had certainly, to say the least, been equivocal. Following the advice of such recent and moderate adherents to his cause as Falkland and Hyde, he had appeared to be willing to accept all the reasonable constitutional reforms which had been introduced, to be concerned to present himself as the upholder of legality and of the Church of England; but at the same time he had shown how ready to be influenced he still was by the firebrands and reactionaries at Court who urged him to crush the rebellion by force, to get help to do this from anyone, foreigners and Catholics included. It was not only his enemies, but also his potential friends who distrusted him. Pym was sure that he would never attract enough support to rise in arms to the provocation that the Nineteen Propositions had given him. In the end it was Parliament itself which allowed him to do so.

For on 6 September its Members declared that all men who did not support it were ‘delinquents’ and that their property was forfeit. This meant that those who would have been happy to stay neutral were virtually obliged to fight in their own defence; it meant, as the Parliamentarian, Sir Simonds D’Ewes, admitted, that ‘not only particular persons of the nobility’ but ‘whole counties’ became ‘desperate’. Men whose fortunes might well have been lost had Parliament won, now undertook to raise troops to fight for the King in whose victory their own salvation might be secured; while gentry whose income from land was declining and whose fortunes depended upon the rich perquisites which only the Court could offer, needed no further persuasion to fight.

If self-interest provided the spur for this early

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