Big History and Middling Men

Civil War: The History of England, Volume III
by Peter Ackroyd
Macmillan, 2014, 502 pages, $34.99

Peter Ackroyd’s no-frills History of England series has the knack of bringing some of the great figures and issues of history down to size. In Volume III, Civil War, he makes the Stuart kings and their opponents seem like Canberra politicians as they muddle through the foundation days of the Westminster system.

The seventeenth century was when it fell into place: Parliament in charge of the country, with a monarch notionally on top giving it extra stability and authority and a safety valve if things became unworkable. In the febrile mid-century ideological climate, full democracy (“levellers”), free speech and religious and press freedom, fledgling political parties, America, even feminism also reared their heads. It took a long time for it all to happen, but the Stuart era in England was a turning point for the world.

The Stuarts famously did not enjoy it. In 1649 Charles I had his head cut off after stirring up the turmoil—as Ackroyd portrays it—by standing up to the politicians. By the end of a turbulent century the system had settled down to one not too different from that applying in Australia today; angry kings could no longer impose their own taxes, rule without law, or have nuisances beheaded or jailed in the Tower of London.

The problem was that the monarchs didn’t like the new world that was opening around them and did all they could to stop it. In most of Europe, royal autocracy won, but for various reasons, including luck, it lost in England.

James I, who came to the throne of England in 1603, had a rocky road ahead. He had been James VI of Scotland since 1567 when he was thirteen months old. His predecessor in England, Elizabeth I, died childless but had been a political genius who knew how to burnish her public image and jolly the chaps in a less ambitious parliament along. James was the son of Mary Queen of Scots, who Elizabeth had had beheaded when he was a baby.

As King of Scots, James had unquestionably been the boss, as he had to be to survive against his brawling barons and pushy Presbyterian leaders, but Britain was harder to manage. The much bigger English system of government had developed over the centuries relatively more limits on royal powers than had Scotland and most other countries (though few by later standards).

To England until then Scotland had been a foreign country and not particularly popular, so James had the handicap of being a broad-accented foreigner. He was plain of features, but well enough intentioned and reasonably capable, the only Stuart with a brain adequate for such a big job. But he offended the English not only with his arrogant, conceited, autocratic ways, but also with a coarseness of manner as well as the likelihood that he was bisexual. The London political establishment regarded his handsome young favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, as a highly undesirable adviser.

James had as little as he could to do with Parliament, but needed its votes of revenue. He kept the pesky Catholics and Puritans of the day at arm’s length and preferred the dominant Anglican church, with its usually accommodating bishops.

His eldest son Henry, who he had trained for the throne, died suddenly in 1616, and when James died in 1625 the throne went to his less prepared second son Charles. Ackroyd presents Charles as a stubborn fool, dutiful and competent as an administrator, but succumbing more than his father to the “divine right of kings” ideology which was gaining strength on the continent.

Charles had worshipped his father and was determined to govern like him, but more forcefully. It was exactly the wrong way to go. Parliament had developed an increasingly high opinion of itself and its place in the realm, but would probably have been happy just to get more respect from the King. Charles gave it very little. He did not call a parliament for eleven years and raised money for his increasing needs by imposing increasingly disliked taxes by royal decree.

Ackroyd says the growth of these taxes was the chief factor that made Charles unpopular in the country, and when he finally had to call a parliament in 1640 to raise more conventional tax the voters elected a majority of stroppy Puritans and critics of the monarchy.

Like his father and many a politician since, Charles had swollen-headed advisers who outsiders regarded as bad influences. Two lost their heads, literally. After his father died Charles kept on the handsome Villiers, who was so controversial that he was assassinated. He appointed the High Anglican control freak William Laud to the post of Archbishop of Canterbury, resulting in rapid strengthening of the opposite, Puritan faction in the Church of England and an exodus to America. A third trouble-prone appointment was of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (kin to our own clan of Wentworths). Wentworth was abrasive enough over a few years to drive both the Puritans and the Irish Catholics into revolt.

With the benefit of four hundred years of hindsight, Ackroyd presents Charles as the main driver of the bloody civil war. Parliament could be arrogant and increasingly was, but was usually amenable to compromise whereas Charles, if a compromise was discussed, usually tried to wriggle out.

Ackroyd specialises, with a deadpan style, in bringing history down to earth. His depiction of Charles and his Stuart sons, Charles II and James II, is the usual one, if put rather frankly. Nevertheless, they have their defenders for standing up to overweening Puritans and mounting social disorder, though the romance of dashing Cavaliers versus boorish Roundheads seems out of fashion today.

Tension mounted through the 1630s and both sides became more stubborn, agitated, angry and convinced that God was on their side; they “sleepwalked”, Ackroyd says, into a decade of clumsy, brutal fighting in the country lanes and thickets that killed perhaps 100,000 people. Both sides fought not so much out of love for their cause as of fear of what would happen to their lives and lands if the other side won.

Ackroyd’s use of the image of sleepwalking to convey the process that led to war has also been used about the drift into the First World War, another calamitous struggle that more common sense at the top might have averted or at least shortened. Charles I does come over here as resembling Kaiser Wilhelm, who in 1914 threw the world off course for a century—so far—with his incompetence and stubborn clinging to an outdated dream of royalty as God’s anointed.

Charles’s republican successor, Oliver Cromwell, comes over as much the better leader. He first appeared in Parliament as an unprepossessing rustic from backwoods Huntingdonshire and at least got to the top by merit. But he had a distorted vision of himself as God’s chosen, was possibly bi-polar, and was damned by history for his savage conquest of Ireland to prevent it becoming a royalist base for Charles II; the Irish nationalist cause ever after had no better friend.

Charles II, when he took the throne in 1660 after Cromwell died, was a breath of fresh air and let things evolve more at their own pace, mainly because he was easy-going—if also slack, devious and a world-class philanderer. He died in 1685 without a legitimate heir. His younger brother came to the throne as James II, who famously returned to kingly aggression and converted to a Catholicism which Ackroyd calls “hysterical”.

A country still frightened of returning to civil war saw James’s Catholicism as implying royal autocracy and compulsory Catholicism for all, as in France and Spain. James denied this, but religion apart, most of his actions, blustering and provocative, indicated that the “divine right of kings” was back, along with likely subservience to the expansive Louis XIV of France, who paid a lot of James’s governing bills. Unlike his father, James escaped from an angry establishment by boat in the “revolution” of 1688 and lived in France to be a nuisance, along with his son and then his grandson, “Bonnie Prince Charlie” of the 1745 invasion fiasco which finally extinguished Stuart hopes of a return to power.

James’s pre-conversion Anglican daughters Mary, with her husband William of Orange, and then Anne, succeeded him on the throne but at last the reigning Stuarts knew their limitations; the way to Westminster was never seriously in trouble again.