By the Sword Sundered

By Harvey Beach

Such a blasphemous bastardisation of a word, Commonwealth. Common meaning of, or to, everyone regardless of place or estate and wealth meaning relating to weal wholeness, prosperity, health and success. The Puritans calling the theological tyranny of all aspects of England after the regicide the Commonwealth is almost the closest to the ultimate debasement of English common parlance I can imagine. But not quite. I consider marginally worse their use of Protectorate. You dont protect rabbits by putting the most vicious and nasty weasel you can possibly breed down the warren-holes.
It was bad enough the war between forty-two and forty-six lacerated England corporate in all aspects to a perilous degree. Even the most hideous wounds, if clean, can scab and scar over and the body become hale, if scarred, again. Sometimes surprisingly quickly. Take my word of honour as an ex-Officer for it. During my time soldiering I saw scores of such miraculous cases. But although that war wounded England grievous, it was the toxin of Puritanism so thoroughly rubbed into the gaping injuries during the wounding that turned England corporally and spiritually septic for over a decade thereafter. I pen these words with relief that the Commonwealth and Protectorate are now dead. Puritans are now selling up their property and leaving the country as despised and ostracised scum by the boat-load, with the generality spitting at their backs as they leave. The Americas are welcome to those that are commissioning the voyage boats and Im glad the Shipwrights are profiting from their emergency fabrication. I hope the foundling Colonies have some use for the manure, for the meadows of England dont.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Mar 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491898932

Harvey Beach

In a world where everyone has gone to war, not choosing sides is not an option. Lord Simon Montcalm goes to war in 1066 not just because he must be true to his oath to his overlord Duke William of Normandy upon threat of destitution or death for refusal, but because there is great profit to be had. Huge lands and properties in England - the richest kingdom in Christendom. But great profit means great risk in the gaining it and the forces of England are terrible. Being the only male of his noble line, with no male heir himself, Lord Montcalm must win through the politics of his own side and the hazard of bloody battle to earn the promised glory for his name and riches for his family - or die, leaving not just him dead but his whole noble line extinct.

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PART ONE

Chapter One

I’m writing this memoir because I have been wheedled and pestered into it by my wife. The war is not a source of fond recollection and I’ve been trying to avoid reminiscence since the Hellish havoc abated. I am also not, by nature, a thoughtful man of philosophical bent. But as I have taken the time over the evenings, since I felt the first winter breezes of my life come, to think about it. I’ve come to realise my wife is, as usual, right. Firstly, my grandsons and granddaughters deserve to know how it is they came to live in the order of country they now do. Secondly they need to learn why such convulsions rent asunder and then poisoned England for a decade and a half. Most importantly though, above all other considerations, they must be made aware of why such a tragedy should never, ever be allowed to happen again lest God damn all Englishmen out of principle.

It seems a little ironic I was an Adjutant in the army that finally overthrew the King’s power at Naseby. Not that I was thinking about that when I was stood in that boggy hollow ringed by the King’s cavalry, among two hundred men to protect two thousand terrified camp followers from the enemy swords and pistols with only a musket and sword myself. No, on that battlefield, when King Charles’s last real hope of winning the savagery that had convulsed England for years was brutally throttled, I was not involved in any kind of philosophical rumination. I was trying to stop Prince Rupert’s men chopping me and my men to pieces and then butchering the camp followers, like they had so many helpless civilians before. But ironic it is.

The irony I was upon the part of Parliament comes from the fact my family, the Raymonds, did so well out of Charles and before him, his father James. James, the runt-king of Scotland, when he became King of England also, had an alarming habit of spending money he didn’t have. He kept a lavish Court, he indulged his ‘favourites’ (the man was a sodomite even though no-one dared mention it) scandalously and was as lazy a ruler as the leeches of the Court could have hoped to defraud and embezzle. He also thought Divine Right meant money would be gently showered upon him from the Heavens just because he was spending it and got a bit aggrieved when it wasn’t. Being Chancellor was the poisoned chalice of his Ministries. With every bout of unnecessary expense and every shilling of accumulated debt, the Chancellor was having to go begging cap in hand to usurers and then exercise his imagination as to how he could conjure a stream of revenue to pay off the usury. As a result, King James was always at the brink of financial disaster.

In order to try to manage this state of affairs, his Chancellors used several measures. One of them was selling monopolies. That is how we Raymonds prospered.

Monopolies are great things if you happen to own them. You have the sole right to make and sell a type of commodity in a town or County and you can fine anyone who makes their own. Our family started in the merchantry when my father Jeremiah, who had no appetite for the hard drudgery of husbandry, sold his inheritance of the family lands (causing a huge rift with his brother). He reinvested the capital released in a monopoly for the manufacture and sale of soap in Berkhampstead and the surrounding Parishes. By frugal living and reinvesting the profits of his monopoly, within three years he’d also acquired the same in Amersham and Princes Risborough. Within eight years we were a well secured family.

We employed others to do the work of making the soap and selling it, all on wages. We had sellers to take the product to market, including around the smaller markets when the big towns were not trading. He also made acquaintance with a half dozen pedlars. He gave them each a stock of soap to add to their wares and they toured, almost itinerant, around the outlying hamlets and villages. They generated no real profit but they kept the availability of our product and the fact of our monopoly in people’s minds. The locals visited also knew the pedlars were keeping a sharp eye out for people breaking the monopoly by making their own soap so we could send men to levy the fines from them as well.

Well, that was not an end to it. In ‘thirty-four, with Charles now upon the throne and Parliament five years dissolved, having made a fair mint from soap, Father diversified into piss. Literally. The King, as desperate for gold as ever his father had been, was selling monopolies in saltpetre. Father bought the saltpetre monopolies for the three towns we had the soap monopolies over and also for Chesham and Marlow.

Saltpetre is a great trade if you don’t have to do the work. Saltpetre had been known about for centuries, of course. It was discovered as crystals that grew on tidal rocks around the coast. When scraped off and powdered, it was highly prized. It served two purposes. It was the active, majority constituent of gunpowder, after all. But guns, even heavy big bombards and cannon, were few and far between, for centuries before my time and powder manufacture was a minority usage of the commodity. The main use for it was by Cooks. Unlike common salts, saltpetre not only was a better curing agent of meat, but ‘petre-cured meat retained the bright, rich red colour of the uncured meat. Barring the occasional demand for gunpowder, seldom and relatively little, this expensive commodity was used by the Cooks in the kitchens and pantries of the very wealthiest nobility and aristocracy.

But times change. Archery and hand weapons remained the order of the day for centuries, like the wars between England and France and that between the Houses of Lancaster and York. But the world does move on and as metallurgy and Founding artisanship evolved better methods and techniques, crossbows, bows and arrows were rapidly displaced by ever-better types of guns. Not just in the armies and navies, but for personal protection, hunting and sporting activities. By my time, the gun had displaced all other missile weapons. And with the rise of the gun, so the demand for gunpowder expanded in equal exponential proportion. And so the demand for saltpetre.

But saltpetre production had taken an unusual twist by my time as well. You see, another source of saltpetre was discovered by an alchemist who reasoned that as urine was yellow but did not smell (or taste—yuck) of sulphur, ergo it must contain gold. So he started to dehydrate it to extract the gold. But he must have left it too long and allowed the pan to go over-dry. Instead of finding gold dust he discovered—for a brief moment—the residue contained a lot of something very different.

When his experiment was repeated to find out what caused the explosion—by people rather more careful than the sloppy alchemist—they found an unusual residue. When tested, they realised this was saltpetre.

Instead of waiting for rocks, sea-spray and the sun’s heat drying it to encrust rocks over months, you could make far more in days just by evaporating human piss. The saltpetre industry was revolutionised overnight, despite the inherent danger of the manufacturing process. This product, highly valuable to the best Butchers and Cooks but absolutely essential to the gunpowder industry, could be mass produced.

Saltpetremen sprang up in every town and paid households to fill demijohns with their urine for them. They would collect the bottles on rounds of the town’s households, handing over an empty one for a full one and a halfpenny per full demijohn for their trouble, to take back to the Mill. Then the dangerous process of extracting the highly valuable mineral would take place.

Obviously, no-one wants to eat meat cured from another person’s piss. Unless they’re literally dying of famine. After the alchemist’s discovery, saltpetre collected from the sea shore’s rocks became the sole province of those using it for culinary purposes. Saltpetre ceased to be the reserve of the Cooks and pantry-maids of very few ultra-wealthy families. Less rich households began to be able to afford it as the supply wasn’t reduced by the amount used in powder manufacture as we piss-boilers supplied that industry now. Brine saltpetre was still costly, but you didn’t have to be Royalty or of the higher aristocracy to afford it. Even prosperous merchants found it within the range of their purse—in moderation. Quality Butchers even stocked saltpetre-cured bacon instead of making it upon receiving a special request by the time I was old enough to recognise it.

Obviously, the revenues of such a lucrative (though revolting) trade attracted the eye of the King. He passed a law monopolising the urine saltpetre trade and sold the rights to manufacture saltpetre to those that could afford them. It is noteworthy as symptomatic of the man he didn’t monopolise the brine-stock saltpetre, though. Far be it from him to indirectly tax the luxury that he and all his courtiers and sycophants enjoyed.

The monopoly law on urine saltpetre went far beyond just the right of the individual to manufacture it. Under the saltpetre monopoly laws, in the town, the bye-law would state that all human piss was the property of the saltpetreman. Every day, our men would take their carts out, pick up the full bottles from each household doorstep and leave empty ones for the family to fill. When a family’s latrine, if they had one, or cesspit, was full, our men would go and dig it out, skimming off the urine after they had done it and dispose of the waste in the river. Failure to comply with the collection got you a fine. So could breaking a bottle. The saltpetreman’s retainers could break into a man’s house to empty their latrine or go into their property to dig out their cess pits. You could even fine them if you judged from the the size of the household they weren’t filling the bottles up quickly enough—or you suspected watering down of the bottles because the demijohns weren’t yellow enough. And monopolymen didn’t even have to pay the households to fill their bottles any more.

Dehydrating piss and pounding powder in mortars were very dangerous occupations, so the Mill was never anywhere near other habitation. As well as overheating the dessicated drying pan to ignite the ‘petre, pounding the ‘petre with sulphur and charcoal in huge stone pestles and mortars risked throwing sparks which could cause an explosion just as easily as leaving a pan. Despite everything, though, the risks were worth it. Every gun in the whole of Europe needed gunpowder—naval cannon to noblemen’s fowling toys—so it could command very high prices. Phenomenally high by the time I entered Father’s businesses, as we exported to Europe vast quantities to the European powers still up to their necks in the hideous mutual religiously-inflamed genocide that had raged across the German states and been preyed upon by Sweden since sixteen eighteen.

We had been at pains to recruit good men and retained them on very good wages. Skilled and sensible men with no tendency to slap-dash work or fits of inattention, to do the collections, drying work and grinding and pounding of powder. You had to be careful what calibre of manhood you recruited and even if you got them such men were laborious and expensive to train. But the investment, once you had a good Miller or Pounder, paid off handsomely. All we Raymonds had to do was negotiate the bulk sales for the powder, for such a substance was traded generally in bulk to large customers like the Navy or merchants selling overseas. We kept a close eye on the money and an even closer one upon our employees… . until they’d worked long enough for us to gain our confidence.

Our monopolies were protected by law from competition and our raw material for the saltpetre obtained for free. Ironically, when Father expanded from soap he discovered the owners of the saltpetre Mills in the first five towns hadn’t got the capital to buy the monopoly of their own town. They’d been foolish and spent all their income as it had come in, leaving them with no fund of capital. Once we’d bought the monopolies out from under them and had the Chancellor’s Writ in our hands, they had assets they couldn’t use. Father bought the Mills and all the equipment cheaply and, having thrown over men he deemed untrustworthy (or drunkards or accident-prone) and replaced them, we started generating huge revenues. Father’s investment was repaid within two years and then we were in raw profit except for the wages of our men, the upkeep of the equipment, fuel, employment of charcoal-burners and raw sulphur. I learnt the trade diligently, every aspect of it, even the noisome and dangerous aspects as my Father demanded. After all, he sternly told me, if you don’t know how something’s done right, you can’t spot when someone in your employ is doing it wrong. Either through negligence or as part of a plot to defraud you.

My father returned the family to gentle estate by buying a house and a thousand acres he called ‘Merryvale’ and tenanting men upon it to work the land for him. He even thought about (but, thank God, never did) buying a title. Yes, we made a fortune from Royal profligacy. Ironically with a cake of soap in one hand and a bottle of piss in the other.

When Charles Stuart ascended to the throne on March the twenty-seventh, sixteen twenty-five, the Kingdom his father had left him was fairly settled on the surface but underlying it lay a real pulse of strong religious feeling. As a single-minded merchant myself, I did little more than carry out mechanical Protestantism in public when necessary but carried on my venal way otherwise. I wasn’t blind, however, to the power and influence the faiths had with those who, and they were the great majority, kept them truly central to their way of life. The vast majority practised devotion sincerely, not by rote, lived as they professed and were quick to defend their way and upheld fiercely their right, as all Englishmen at the time believed, to a freedom of conscience and observance of their faith as they and those of like mind saw fit.

King James had been a sound tactician as far as religious affairs went. He left matters ecclesiastical basically alone. From the English throne he maintained a free conscience Protestant supremacy, the Church Of England was basically what people called ‘Godly’ and there was little Catholicism, all practised behind closed doors. Few people, apart from extremists like the soldier-for-hire Guy Fawkes’ paymasters, looked for first guidance to Rome and invested their loyalty there. England, under James, was kept this way and as a result stability was maintained.

This was an important state of affairs, as the massive war on the Continent at the time was a religious one at it’s core. It was triggered by the Holy Roman Emperor (a Habsburg, of course) having three Imperial officials thrown out of the windows of Hradcany Castle (although even after fifty feet they weren’t harmed), later rather vaingloriously called The Defenestration Of Prague. They had been sent to the Imperial Diet because the Catholic Habsburgs wanted to reimpose their creed upon the now newly Protestant German states and had tried to use the Assembly to do so, with said results. Realising neither persuasion nor legislation were options, the Imperium decided they’d reimpose their creed and authority in the German states by force of arms. They formed a Catholic League of powers of sympathetic persuasion and attacked. All the German Protestant states raised arms in mutual defence against this naked aggression and all the spawn of the deepest depths of Hell broke loose. There’d therefore been seven years of the most savage religious mutual genocide carried out upon the Continent already before Charles’s coronation.

There were a lot of people in England damnably scared of this Continental tragedy spilling across the Channel as a result. But under King James, both of his Kingdoms had been kept out of it. Furthermore, the Two Kingdoms were kept unified by the Crown only. Protestantism in England, apart from the usual extremist grumbles every now and again, went on uninterrupted—and unchallenged. The occasional Jesuit turning up under a disguise on a trade ship to carry out covert evangelism got short shrift and usually ended up dead after a long period on the rack. Similarly, observances in the northern Kingdom went on stolidly Presbyterian under the auspices of the Kirk. Another reason was the King James Bible.

When James took the English throne, the English, knowing him not to be a Popist, were willing to be impressed. But he was also well aware they had already whetted their knives for his back if he failed to do so. Now, the Protestants (or ‘Godly’ as they called themselves), ranging from indolent, tolerant Church of England lazy observers (like me) to right up to the evangelical Puritan zealot faction, had a particular loathing for the Latin Bible.

There’d been a strong faction, heavily persecuted (the Amersham Martyrs being the most obvious example, with generations burnt at the stake on the hill-top) for an English language Bible for a couple of centuries or more. The religious establishment’s power base was founded upon their monopoly in interpreting the Latin without fear of contradiction. The Church’s resistance to a common parlance translation had always been upheld by the monarchy up until King James. The interconnection between the power of the Monarchy and Church since Henry the Eighth had been taken for granted. But James was a shrewder politician than that. He saw no danger in undermining the priests shown up as corrupt because the commoners realised the man saying it says so in the Bible to gain advantage was, in fact, lying. In fact it would probably go down very well with the common populace and if the Church’s reputation suffered, it would improve his. King James realised the belief of previous monarchs that any loss of Church authority equalled a loss of their own was misguided.

So when he commissioned an Authorised Bible to be written in the Common English, everyone bar the established Church rejoiced. At last what all the ‘Godly’ called the ‘Tongue Of The Beast’ was to be driven from every Church Of England pulpit in the land under orders of the King himself. James managed to get more political capital and credit out of one publication in sixteen hundred and four than every pamphleteer in Europe had in the previous century combined. It took a great many poor decisions to wipe out the credit he got from that one action and many were willing to forgive him almost anything because of it. And it wasn’t even an original work, to boot. Sodomite runt he may have been, but by God, what a shrewd political animal.

Charles could have maintained this state of affairs. He could have been sensitive to the strength of potential religious tension in his Kingdoms—and recognised their essential differences. But he was neither sensitive nor sensible. And the rot set in with his wife and his Archbishop.

Archbishop Laud was very much against the core creed of those that called themselves the ‘Godly’. The term requires some little explaining to those of you who now associate it with the depredations of Hopkins and the vileness of Puritanism. The ‘Godly’, for who the Puritans were only a small, extreme sect when Charles took the throne, were believers in ‘Predestination’. They were firmly of the belief that you lived your life and God would decide whether or not you’d be one of the ‘saved’ when the time came. It was predestined whether or not you would be and no effort on the individual’s part would make a blind bit of difference to whether or not the Divine Hand would raise you unto Rapture Eternal. A convenient religion to those who want to think Do as you like regardless, you’ve still got as much chance of being saved as if you hadn’t cuckolded your brother and stolen those dozen sheep, in my opinion. However, Archbishop Laud, and to be fair to the man, King Charles, didn’t believe this. They firmly believed it was only by a careful, moral and scrupulous life, wherein you did your fallible best to act in a virtuous fashion, you could earn consideration for a place in the Choir Celestial.

Of course, Catholicism was the antithesis of Predestination and very much of the ‘moral life by your own hand’ philosophy. However, in Catholic practice, whether or not you were living a ‘right’ life (in other words obeying the laws and teachings of the Gospels) could only be judged by the Priesthood, because they were the only ones that could read the Scriptures. Therefore you had to do what the Priest said because if you didn’t you’d go to Hell; no matter what his demands. Confession and repentance for absolution was only the most obvious embodiment of the exercise of this power that took many other forms. Hence the practices, all of them, of the Roman Church were the things most likely to infuriate the ‘Godly’. That was why, at the deepest level, the vast majority of Charles’s subjects and Catholicism, both in theory and practice, were mutually antipathetic and trying to mix salt and sugar would only induce vomit. But Charles just never appreciated this.

Therefore, Charles made the like-minded Laud Archbishop and he began to reinstitute ritual and formality into the Churches. The changes imposed upon the Church Of England were appalling to the ‘Godly’ who looked on with horror when he brought in honouring the Eucharist, stained glass windows, crucifixes and so on. They even accused him of trying to hierarchy the Church and separate the congregation from God when he insisted on altar rails to stop choir boys sneaking under the table to sleep out the service and dogs from stealing the Harvest offerings. The extremists considered all of this iconism and screamed about graven images. Even crosses. Iconoclasm, which had existed in paltry fashion in James’s reign practised only by attention-seeking fools, increased exponentially across the country under Charles.

The idea that the Commandment regarding not making graven images was virtually a direct order to vandalise wasn’t particularly a new one. Stained glass windows that portrayed God or Jesus had been prone to having rocks thrown through them from time immemorial. But the idea became more and more extreme. Jesus on the cross, then just the cross, then, in the more extreme sects any form of religious symbolism at all. Especially chalices or paintings of religious scenes. The Puritans believed that only an empty plain room where the congregation sat on plain benches to listen to the Word as propagated by the Minister was appropriate, but this was an extreme view of a general philosophy. But throughout the ‘thirties there was an upsurge in all sorts of holy vandalism carried out in petty packets around England as the ‘Godly’ tried to stop this rise in what they thought of as Popist encroachment. Even market crosses were smashed.

And because the King had appointed Laud, he was held responsible for this perceived rise of ‘Popism’. But Laud’s efforts were nothing like as serious as what his Queen got up to.

Queen Henrietta wasn’t just a Catholic. Nor was she just trying to reinstate Catholicism, in practice if not theory, by the tradesman’s door. She was a very modern Catholic, with a zeal for bringing to the English the elaborate, ornate and splendid vision of High Church she had grown up with in the Court of her father, King Henry IV of France. Whether they wanted it or not—it was for their own good, after all, and she was Queen and the subjects would do what they were damned well told. After all, they did in France and she assumed the common English would be of the same bovine nature as her father’s peasants over the Channel. She, above all others, was to turn religion into a powder-keg for her husband.

She got off to a flying start by bringing a band of Jesuits with her to the Court. They were quick to see the popinjays of the pampered Court were ripe for conversion by offering to replace the austere, self-restraining indigenous form of worship with the rich, magisterial and materially sumptuous High Church Christianity. The aristocrats, eager to follow a faith as opulent as the secular lifestyles they followed, lapped it up and converted in their droves. England had to swallow the bile of the King’s Court—everyone he was surrounded by—donning the mantle of Rome.

She then compounded the problem with her lovely new Chapel. She prevailed upon the Puritan but celebrated architect Indigo Jones to build it for her. Money overcame his professed religious scruples (if you want to find out if a man’s a hypocrite just rattle a few unites under his nose) and between the foundation stone being laid in September sixteen thirty-two and it’s consecration in December sixteen thirty-five it took shape. Suitably austere outside, inside it was a ‘Godly’ man’s worse nightmare. An altar of seven oval panels with a Doric column screen, reliquaries of both silver and gold, glittering chalices, embroidered stoles, paintings, statues and even a chapel garden. It was as if it had been designed to make a Puritan vomit. All lovingly designed and built by a ‘Puritan’.

Charles had married Henrietta as much out of love as alliance but following his heart as opposed to his head was later to cost him the latter. Literally.

Nevertheless, it’s hard for me to believe, in retrospect, how little civil unrest and dissatisfaction this, as the majority of Englishmen saw it, Popist resurgence actually caused. Especially as I lived through the prolonged explosion when the match finally ignited the powder. To ‘Godly’ eyes, the King had surrounded himself with a Court of Roman converts, shared his marriage bed with a Jesuit whore and turned a deaf ear and blind eye to the opinion of those that existed outside of his tiny little pond. Yet still, the extremist Puritan grip had not significantly tightened. There was much muttering but, breaking stained glass windows and burning paintings aside, there was no action. But I should have known better, as a saltpetreman. To get the best detonation you need the finest powder (in my Mills, a whole day and a night of elbow grease in the pounding mortars) and between the mortar of Laud and the pestle of Henrietta, Charles was grinding a most fine blend. He had to avoid playing with fire at all costs.

He didn’t. He struck his flinty rule against the steel of Parliament instead—and sparks tend to fly.

Charles had inherited all of his father’s habits of profligate spending but all of his debts as well. His finances were in a shoddy state to begin with and he needed taxes to pay the bills (and usury on the loans). So that meant levying them by his own writ or Parliament.

The two Houses of Parliament had always served two different purposes. The House of Lords had always advised the King in all matters when his Council Of Ministers were clueless or had run out of ideas—an unfortunately frequent state of affairs since Charles, like his father before him, made Ministers out of cronies, not competents. But the Lords were all highly powerful owners of vast lands and assets and their small numbers could band into cartels to propagate their vested interests. If he sensed he was being husbanded like rhubarb or mushrooms (kept in the dark and heaped with bull’s shit) he needed a yard-stick to measure them against.

The House of the Commoners was the King’s canary, like a Cornish tin or Northumbrian coal miner’s. He could summon it at will and pose questions for all Members elected to it to represent the best interests of the common people to come up with a communal opinion. If there was any sharp practise being attempted by the Lords, the Commons could put the Monarch right as to what toxic vested interest was trying to lead him by the nose. They were the ones that had to live with his decision and they were elected from Commoners of substance from all over his Kingdom with no Lordly allegiance. They owed status to popular respect, not patronage or inheritance of birthright. Or at least, that was the theory.

King James, new to the English Court and knowing his Lords would try to take advantage of his ignorance of the detailed affairs of his new Kingdom used the Commons extensively. The Lords resented the amount of advice and wisdom he obtained from them. King James, in return, was active in encouraging commerce and mercantilism in his new Kingdom. He not only turned a blind eye to private adventurers taking ships to pirate Catholic Spaniard shipping. Behind closed doors he positively encouraged the practice, although coming down hard on those who made the error of preying upon, say, Protestant Dutch vessels. He strongly sponsored and supported the founding of new commercial colonies like the sugar plantations in the Caribbean islands and the first English and Scottish Colony on the American mainland outside of the far north was named after him: Jamestown. The colonies began a rapid expansion in numbers and size under his reign with the Navy frequently intervening to protect their marine life-lines to the Mother Country. As a result, the Commons generally thought well of him and he had a good relationship with those classes represented therein. Unfortunately, his son was not so clever.

It was in the House of Commons, the bastion of the richest of the merchant classes and mercantiles, that access lay to the country’s real wealth and Charles knew it. The most successful merchants and mercantiles were immensely rich and mutually dependant strata of society. Charles thought the Commons could be the instrument to bend the wealth and power of his England to his will.

The House of Commons thought the diametrically opposite. They’d already served (most of them) through King James’s rule of patronage, pomposity and profligacy. It was only James’s very active support of commercial interests and encouragement of trade and mercantilism that had offset this. Now the son was not just following his suit in the former but being idle regarding the latter, he was augmenting it with monumental stupidity and incompetence. The wealthy landowners, merchants and mercantiles saw the ‘lower’ House as the instrument to break the King’s arrogance, make him slim his Court, divest himself of his cronies and start running the country properly. Oh, and whip in his Archbishop and wife while the man was at it.

The Lords did not have power to command payment of revenues from the common subjects—only their King. Unless they volunteered them through vote of Parliament Commons themselves. But to accept he had try to wheedle such a ‘volunteering’ of gold from his ‘common’ subjects was against Charles’s firmly held belief he was King of England by Divine Right and, ergo, all it’s wealth was his to do with as he wished. So he tried to raise money using only his own decree.

The taxation to raise funding for the Navy, ‘Ship Money’, was the acid test of the King’s power to levy money without the Commons. It was reintroduced as a tax upon land in all the counties, where previously it had been only the seaboard counties that had paid it. The landowners of the land-locked counties thus fought it with all the energy of the entitled threatened with being deprived of some of their revenues. After all, the quickest way to turn the idle rich into the energetic rich is to threaten to take away any of their unearned riches.

Challenged by Buckinghamshire landowner John Hampden in sixteen thirty-seven, the legal wrangles hit first the Barons of the Exchequer and then spilled over onto the King’s Bench. Although the judges marginally agreed the taxation was in principle legal, Hampden won his individual case on a technicality, thus rendering it impossible for this lawful tax to yield any actual revenue.

This should not have been a killer blow to the King, even if he had alienated a lot of the land-owning Lords and knew any calling of Commoners would hate his guts on first principle. He could just get by without Parliament at this point. But then he made the worst decision so far. One his father would have had him flogged rigid for even suggesting. I do not jest. Canny old James must have been spinning in his grave when his son did it.

He tried to impose his father’s Authorised Bible upon Scotland.

Why, only the vanity of man and religious dogma can tell. His father, who’d commissioned the blasted thing, hadn’t sought political chaos and military violence by trying to impose the Church of England upon the Kirk, after all. James knew forcing an alien philosophy down the Scots’ throats would require an army—if not more—and a wholesale massacre of the entire Kirk also. He’d also have to replace half the nobility and aristocracy (they were members of the Kirk after all) and re-order the whole affairs of the Scottish Kingdom. It was not a sane course of action—but Charles tried it.

The butchery upon the Continent in the name of Catholicism and Protestantism that had started long before his coronation and been carried on non-stop throughout his entire reign should have forewarned the moron Charles what powers he was toying with. Then again, James had been a politician first and religious second. Charles was hardly any sort of politician at all. He was also firmly of the opinion that as he’d been made King by Divine Right, anything he chose to do, no matter how bloody stupid, must therefore be the correct course of action. Like ramming English Protestant Church dogma (tainted with Laud and Henrietta’s Popism) down Scotch Presbyterian throats.

The Scots’ reaction was as predictable as it was prompt. The Assembly met without being summoned by Charles and issued a Covenant of formal protest. This Assembly of Covenanters undertook to end episcopacy and raised an army. After all, the King’s power over the Church and what they preached came with his power to appoint the Bishops and episcopacy being rejected was a clear snub to his authority. ‘Down With The Bishops’ was tantamount to ‘Down With The King’.

King Charles could either back down and admit his mistake, which his pride also couldn’t stand, or raise an army himself and fight. But armies, especially levied ones of half-hearted men, need lots of money to pay so they fight. The Court and the Lords couldn’t (or more likely wouldn’t) stump up the blunt, so with no reserve of gold or spare source of revenue he finally bit the leather strap and called a House of Commons to obtain it. Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, his greatest (possibly only) statesman, managed the election of the assembly. The House of Commons sat in April sixteen forty to debate whether or not to tax Commoners’ funds for this pointless and stupid war of Charles’s own manufacture.

It only sat for three weeks—long enough for Charles to realise the day he could order Parliament around without concessions had well and truly gone and that anti-Monarchy sentiment was fast rising throughout the wealthy Common classes. It wasn’t just that the money was an issue. It was the fact this King, with a Jesuit witch for a wife and a Court full of newly-converted Popists, who had thrust a icon-loving Archbishop upon them, was willing to impose religious observance by force upon his subjects in his other Kingdom that seriously caused merry Hell among all strata of the English. Common Prayer at pike-point for the Scots. What next for the English? Confession or the gallows?

The war with the Scots failed catastrophically for want of shillings to pay the troops and the Scots occupied five Northern counties. They started charging eight hundred and fifty pounds indemnity per day for the occupation. Although further military aggression was ended by a Treaty signed in Ripon, the Scottish wouldn’t leave the hostage territories until agreement over settlement of the indemnity by a second treaty was signed.

Charles had no means to pay for this either. There was also a nasty clause (the canny Scots knew where the unites were in England) in the Treaty of Ripon that stated the sum to evacuate the hostage territories had to come from revenue promised by law of the Commons of Parliament—not any promise or pledge by the King or Lords. The Scots knew their word was no good in matters of money, but if the Commons of Parliament voted the money, gold would actually be forthcoming. So a Parliament was finally called upon the third of November to deal with this further, and even deeper, crisis.

When the King called this Parliament, the moneyed powers that chose the Members of the Commons were ready for him. They knew he was in straits. They saw a chance to pull his teeth, exact measures for reform of Court, Church and State and generally make the arrogant and vain man realise they would not tolerate any more of the habits of lazy, inefficient profligacy and self-indulgence that Charles seemed to have inherited from his father. But it was this Parliament, weighted with Puritanism, that provided the catalyst to calamity.

Why was it rank with Puritans? Because of people like me. I supported returning a Puritan to Parliament myself. Though I didn’t know the bastard was one at the time, but even if I had I wouldn’t have cared. I didn’t know then, of course, how bloody dangerous they were. No-one did, all thought they were just nasty cranks. I was a typical lazy rich man. Why labour yourself if there’s someone eager and energetic to do the hard work? The Long Parliament, as it became known, therefore had in it a heavy bias of men who wanted what we wanted… . but, unknown to us, wanted to propel us to an extreme we could never have dreamt of.

Not that calamity was inevitable at this point. In fact, I was confident a rational outcome was just a matter of time. The thought of armed conflict never even crossed my mind. Initially, the men of real talent and ability in both Houses were many. Lords Brooke, Mandeville, Saye, and Warwick were all excellent. In the Commons there was also Hampden, William Strode, Denzil Holles, Arthur Hesilrige and Harry Vane. Leading them throughout was a man, however, head and shoulders above them all. John Pym. A widower utterly devoted to his vocation, a man whose first principles were peace, tolerance, justice and freedom of the spirit. A less likely warmonger you’d never find if you scoured the whole populated Earth. I had every faith that they would make demands of the King regarding taxes, reform of the State and Courtly restraint. They would also get him to see sense and rein in Archbishop Laud’s adherents and his wife’s pro-Popist activities to cool the evermore heated religious sensibilities. Then we could buy the Scots out of the north and peaceful business would continue as normal. But with a radical swathe of Members in the assembled Commons and Charles’s intransigence, pride and arrogance, even Pym found disaster unavoidable.

Possibly this Parliament’s first action, though, was their worst for it set Charles utterly against this assembly from the outset and poisoned the waters of negotiation. They made the hideous mistake of thinking that it was Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, that was the stumbling block to negotiations with the King. His skill and wisdom was empowering Charles and they believed they needed to get rid of him to bring Charles around. He was felt to be the chief ‘Evil Counsellor’ keeping the King from seeing sense. They failed to realise that instead his was the chief voice, if not the only one, that could persuade Charles to put aside his pride and treat with Parliament in profitable fashion. He was the facilitator of negotiation, not an obstruction, but even Pym didn’t see it.

The impeachment and trial of Strafford caused all sorts of fantastical essays and arguments to explode among the ‘lofted and learned’. All that achieved, though, was to generate great heat without shedding any light on the situation. Comparisons at the time between King Charles’s rule of Scotland being akin to Philip the Second of Spain’s alien rule over Holland did nothing but muddy the waters yet further. But in all the noise and confusion, the trial blundered badly and rapidly lawyers’ frets propelled it downhill into farce and it failed.

This failure to remove and topple the Earl of Strafford by impeachment and trial (appointments to the Courts were also still under Royal control, at this point), led to the Commons passing a Bill of Attainder—finding him guilty, essentially, of treason without trial by his peers, as is his universal English right under Magna Carta. God, they were accusing King Charles of being a despot whilst passing laws like that. Charles, wanting to keep the peace, regretfully assented the Bill and Stafford was executed at noon on May twelfth, sixteen forty-one.

The moment Stafford’s head thudded upon the scaffold boards disaster had begun. Charles had been both deprived of the only significant moderating influence upon him and had his most able political hand cut away. He now saw Parliament as nothing except an implacable enemy to be overcome. The intercession of the Lords—even the Courtiers now—couldn’t make any impression upon him. His mind was setting hard in a mould of fell shape. Why give anything to those that are only interested in taking, and will only demand a yard if you give an inch and a furlong if you then give them the yard? The chances of establishing any goodwill or rapprochement between Charles and Parliament’s assembled Commoners had been thoroughly undermined. Remedying the situation would have required Parliament having a man of sufficient tact and touch to bend things back onto a profitable course—but they didn’t have one. Even Pym.

After the disaster of Strafford’s execution, I read the details of the rest unfolding with gathering annoyance (at the stupidity) and fear (at the potential consequences). Parliament compounded the mistake instead of ameliorating it. Under threat themselves, Charles’s Court fled the country. Archbishop Laud, disdaining flight, was imprisoned and eventually executed. Charles’s rage built in direct proportion with these mistakes. I could just imagine his blood slowly reaching boiling point. In December Ship Money was formally declared illegal and eventually all non-Parliamentary taxes were deemed to be so. A ‘Triennial Act’ and a later Bill made it law that Parliament (well, the Commons) could only be dissolved with it’s own consent. In July ‘forty-one the King’s Prerogative Courts were abolished, gathering all legal power into the Houses of Parliament. But by the autumn it seemed that Parliament—religious affairs aside, a knot no side had strong enough nails to pick at—had achieved it’s ambitions and clearer and calmer waters were available to be sailed thereon.

Enter the Puritans. Whilst England’s and Scotland’s lawful Assemblies and Ministers had ignored matters regarding their colonists with all this nonsense going on, matters in Ireland reached explosion. It detonated in October ‘forty-one. The fearful slaughter commenced as the native Irish turned rabidly upon English and Scottish settlers. For a long time, these people had been arriving in Ireland with large purses and taking over huge estates from the Irish natives. Large areas, always the most fertile and prosperous, of course, became colonies. The native Irish’s rage had been building for decades and with the home countries preoccupied with the domestic stupidities, it burst out.

To crush this required an army to be raised.

The raising of armies and appointing of Ministers were the two last, and key, Sovereign powers. Pym didn’t trust the King with an army but wasn’t adverse to the King appointing a General Officer of their choice to raise one and take it to do the dirty work. But he hummed and hawed over it too long and the Puritan faction seized the initiative. They had seen this as a chance to emasculate the King totally, once and for all, and in practice, if not theory, disestablish the last powers of the King and appropriate them for themselves. They wanted to reduce him to a puppet of Parliament, through which their zealot’s agenda could be enacted into the governance of the Kingdoms.

On the eighth of November Parliament voted to request the King to appoint only Ministers of it’s own approval. In practice, if not theory, they were appropriating the power of Ministerial appointment. Then a Puritan back-bencher I’d never heard of before called Oliver Cromwell made the suggestion that Parliament should take control over all the standing armed forces. A fortnight later, a Puritan-inspired piece of hideous stupidity called the Grand Remonstrance was presented to Parliament. This device was the worst indictment of the King they could imagine and it’s assent by the Lords placed any reconciliation between King and Parliament beyond hope. Another law, the Militia Bill, basically a formalisation of Cromwell’s earlier thoughts to take command of the armed forces, was entered for consideration by the House of Commons.

The laws were being passed and the King was not, by this point, even caring. I think by then he’d long since reconciled himself to war. He was just buying time to make contingency plans. Charles’s son, with the Crown jewels, had already been sent to Henrietta’s father’s Court in France and Parliament itself had now split. Half the Members of the Houses of Lords and Commons both had sided with the Puritans on a wave of power-drunkenness as they smelt the riches they could make from basically running the country for their personal profit. The other half saw catastrophe coming, realising that only by opposing these zealots and their pet fools could they hope to prevent war and began to make arrangements to mind their own business but be ready to fight to defend their own if reason failed.

It did.

The final blow was when a small group of Puritans, for no apparent reasons bar religious hatred and personal spite, started an attempt to impeach Queen Henrietta. More than flesh could stand, Charles brought three hundred of the Royal Lifeguard to Westminster to arrest them—but they had fled, of course. But it was the last straw.

Both sides feigned negotiations—Charles even making some concessions regarding Church and State arrangements and even a different establishment of military command was discussed—but Pym and Charles knew them for the delaying tactics they were. Henrietta leaving for France was the dead give-away, as it was clear Charles no longer thought there was safety in England for her. When the Militia Bill was passed in March of ‘forty-two, that was an end to it. Parliament had declared sovereignty for itself and disestablished the last power of the Monarch. The moderates in both Houses of Parliament had, by now, left them in disgust and returned to their shires, many now determined, having seen the animal within the Houses, to side with the King in the inevitable upcoming strife. The Puritans now had unfettered control and passed the Nineteen Propositions (again, demands) that essentially would have ended Royal power totally barring assenting Bills passed by Parliament. An end to monarchy except in ornament and pomp. Rule By Parliamentary Approval. Decree To Parliamentary Dictation. Charles The Puppet King.

There’d been no point even drafting the ridiculous document, let alone ‘debating’ it. The King wasn’t even around London for the ‘Propositions’ to be presented to him, nor any representative of his.

On the twenty-second of August in the Year Of Our Lord—’Anno Domini’ in the ‘Tongue Of The Beast’—sixteen forty-two, the King, long ago left London, unfurled the Royal Standard at Nottingham and England was formally at war with itself. If Parliament wanted the King’s crown, they’d have to take it as a battlefield trophy. Thousands rallied to the Royal Standard and Satan howled with laughter.

Chapter Two

Puritans and their lap-dogs had control of Parliament, but