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A King in Search of Soldiers: Charles I in 1642*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Joyce L. Malcolm
Joyce L. Malcolm
Affiliation:
Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge
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Extract

In his celebrated work England under the Stuarts George Macaulay Trevelyan dismissed in a single sentence the question of the position adopted by the bulk of the English rural population during the Civil War: ‘The tenant-farmer was in no position to avow any political or religious faith but that of his landlord.’ Given this assumption it was logical that Trevelyan and his successors should concern themselves with the problems and opinions of landlords and other, more independent, men and leave the doings of the peasantry to students of agrarian and social history. And so they have, never seriously questioning the proposition that the aristocracy's sympathy for the Crown would be reflected in the attitudes and behaviour of their tenants. Indeed, the king himself had felt confident of the peasants' support, and an assortment of facts and myths have been marshalled post facto to persuade us that his confidence was justified. For example, since peasants were assumed to have been rather simple-minded and very conservative men, it was deduced that they ought to have sided with their monarch. The Great Chain of Being, the accepted basis of heavenly and earthly society, placed kings between man and the angels, surely a height bound to inspire awe in a plain man of the soil. According to some historians, Charles I had been a veritable champion of the poor with his vigorous campaign to enforce the poor laws and his commissions for the prevention of enclosure. His humbler subjects must have been grateful for such paternalism. In any case, as Trevelyan pointed out, the stark reality of their dependent position would have forced tenants to adhere to the party chosen by their landlords, and most landlords who committed themselves to a party joined the king's.

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Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 251 - 273
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

1 Trevelyan, George Macaulay, England under the Stuarts, 21st edn (London, 1965), p. 218.Google Scholar

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4 Hill, Christopher (ed.), The English Revolution, 1640 (London, 1940)Google Scholar and The century of revolution (Edinburgh, 1961); Manning, Brian, The English People and the English Revolution (London, 1976)Google Scholar. Manning comes closest to a real treatment of the role of the peasantry but backs off from a rigorous analysis. In his article ‘The peasantry and the English Revolution’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, II (1975), he describes the attacks of the king and other landlords on customary rights and concludes that for this reason royalist landlords were not supported by their tenants during the Civil War. Yet he does not go on to prove this. Again, in The English people and the English Revolution he reiterates these facts and then, on page 184, leaps to the conclusion that not only did the peasantry refuse to support the king and the royalist nobility but that their defection ‘probably explains the defeat of the royalists in the civil war’. After this almost off-hand comment he drops the subject, presumably because his argument is that the ‘middle sort’, from whom he carefully excludes tenants, were the determining factor in the revolution.

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12 Among catholic officers who played an early and prominent role in the royal army were Sir Arthur Aston, Charles Gerard, John Belasyse, Lord Robert Dillon, Lord Theobald Taafe, Thomas Tyldesley, and Sir John Beaumont (Young, Peter, Edgehitt 1642: the campaign and the battle [Kineton, 1967], p. 54)Google Scholar. The suggestion that a special dispensation was given English catholics to subscribe to the oaths of allegiance and supremacy is a serious charge and, if true, was done in the utmost secrecy. Further evidence is frustratingly lacking.

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19 Eliot Warburton sets the attendance at 80,000–100,000 (Warburton, Eliot, Memoirs of Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers; including their private correspondence, 3 vols. [London, 1849], I, 276–7)Google Scholar. This is probably high, as Edward Lord Howard in his report to the House of Lords placed it at 40,000 (Lords journal, v, 107).

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27 ‘An abstract of severall letters…,’ p. 5.

28 ‘An extract of a letter from Yorke…,’ p. 1.

29 Ibid.

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44 Ibid.

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47 Clarendon wrote that when the king raised his standard at Nottingham not one regiment of foot had yet been levied (Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, II, 288, note 1). According to Warburton, when the standard was raised the whole royalist force present including attendants was not 1,000 men (Warburton, , Memoirs of Prince Rupert, 1, 321)Google Scholar. Charles did not even have the full 1,375 horse promised him in May by a group of 39 lords at York.

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58 ‘A private letter, from an eminent cavalier…to his highly honoured friend in London; freely relating the present state of His Majesties forces’ (London, 10 September 1642), Thomason Tracts E. 116 (32), p. 3.

59 Dragoons were mounted soldiers more lightly armed than the regular cavalry. See ‘A continvation of our weekly intelligence from His Majesties Army…’ (London, 16 September 1642), Thomason Tracts E. 116, p. 4.

60 ‘A private letter, from an eminent cavalier…’, p. 6.

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79 Oliver, George, The history of the city of Exeter (London, 1861), p. 112.Google Scholar

80 Bossy, John, ‘The character of Elizabethan Catholicism’, Past and Present, XXI (04 1962), pp. 41–2Google Scholar; James, Mervyn, Family, lineage, and civil society: a study of society, politics, and mentality in the Durham region, 1500–1640 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 143–4Google Scholar; Mousley, J. E., ‘The fortunes of some gentry families in Elizabethan Sussex’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XI (1958–1959). 478–9.Google Scholar

81 For a more extensive analysis see Malcolm, , ‘The English people and the Crown's cause’, chapter 6.Google Scholar

82 Besides the four Welsh regiments which reached Charles in the months after the battle of Edgehill still others were quickly mustered. In February 1643 Hertford formed a Welsh army of 1,500 foot and 500 horse and in July of that year drew another 4,000 foot and 800 horse from South Wales (Phillips, , Memoirs of the Civil War in Wales and the Marches, pp. 131–4Google Scholar; Rees, , Studies in Welsh History, p. 66Google Scholar; Clarendon, , History of the Rebellion, 11, 482–4).Google Scholar

83 Roy, , ‘The royalist army in the first Civil War’, p. 174.Google Scholar

84 Further evidence for this and a discussion of the king's Irish troops is contained in a forthcoming article of mine which will appear in Irish Historical Studies.