Faced with the prospect of losing control of the land forces of the country as well as of the navy, the King dug in his heels. Months before, a Militia Bill, which would have effectively transferred military command from the King to Parliament, had been proposed. It was now pressed upon him again. He would never accept it, he protested. ‘By God! Not for an hour! You have asked that of me which was never asked of any King.’
The House of Commons declined to accept the King’s refusal. They issued the Bill on the authority of Parliament as an Ordinance, providing for the safeguarding of the realm, revoking military appointments previously made by the King, and taking it upon themselves to appoint the Lords Lieutenants of counties who were to be responsible for the recruitment of troops. It was a provocation which the King could not accept, his determination never to lose his right to command his army being just as fixed as his resolve never to lose the right to choose his own advisers. Much to the unconcealed pleasure of extremists on both sides, the battle lines were now drawn: the time for talking and compromise had passed; the struggle was about to begin.
Indeed, it had, in a sense, already begun. In almost every county where beacons were being set and postboys galloped down the roads with urgent messages, there were quarrels and occasional fights; men walked about armed and shouted insults to each other across the streets. Even in the closest families there were deep divisions. In the Verney family, for example, a family described by the King as ‘the model he would propose to gentlemen’, the father, Sir Edmund Verney, Knight-Marshal of the King’s Palace, although prompted in the past by ‘his dislike of Laudian practices’ to vote steadily in the House of Commons in opposition to the King’s wishes, felt in duty bound to stand by his master when called upon to do so. His third son, Edmund, who was to die fighting in Ireland, also sided with the King. But Edmund’s eldest brother, Ralph, Member of Parliament for Aylesbury, threw in his lot with Parliament, much to the family’s distress. ‘I beseech you consider,’ Edmund wrote to him, ‘that majesty is sacred; God sayeth, “Touch not myne anointed.” Although I would willingly lose my right hand that you had gone the other way, yet I will never consent that this dispute shall make a quarrel between us. There be too many to fight with besides ourselves. I pray God grant a sudden and firm peace, that we may safely meet in person as well as affection. Though I am tooth and nail for the King’s cause, and shall endure so to the death, whatever his fortune be; yet, sweet brother, let not this my opinion – for it is guided by my conscience – nor any other report which you can hear of me cause a diffidence of my true love to you.’
Their father confessed that he did ‘not like the Quarrel’ and heartily wished ‘the King would yield and consent to what they desire’. 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.
The Cornish squire Sir Bevil Grenville, grandson of Queen Elizabeth’s admiral, ‘a lover of learning and a genial host’, who had many friends amongst the Parliamentarians and was to die fighting bravely against them, said much the same thing: ‘I cannot contain myself within my doors when the King of England’s standard waves in the field, the cause being such as to make all that die in it little inferior to martyrs…I go with joy and comfort to venture a life in as good a cause and with as good a company as ever Englishman did; and I do take God to witness, if I were to choose a death it would be no other but this.’
For men like Edmund Verney and Bevil Grenville it was not only that the King’s majesty was sacrosanct, there was also the belief that the King was the defender of the true Church; and although religion became of much more importance later in the struggle than it was in the beginning, it was even now of grave concern. Moreover, while it was never primarily a class struggle, there was an undeniable fear amongst many of the King’s supporters that the lower classes would use this opportunity to turn upon their masters, that the predominantly Puritan merchants and shopkeepers of the towns were intent on upsetting the structure of power to their own advantage, that the King’s opponents represented rebellion and chaos as opposed to law and order. Sir Thomas Gardiner, the Recorder of London, told Ralph Verney that he had overheard the most anarchic speeches being made in Oxfordshire, working men announcing, ‘The gentry have been our masters for a long time and now we have a chance to master them.’ ‘Now they know their strength,’ Gardiner added, ‘it shall go hard but they will use it.’
Many of those who sided with Parliament spoke of their cause with a passion equal to that of Sir Bevil Grenville’s protestation of loyalty to the King, proclaiming their readiness to fight for freedom and justice, to die in a just cause, to defeat the machinations of those whom Simonds D’Ewes called ‘the wicked prelates and other like looser and corrupter sort of the clergy of this kingdom who doubtless had a design by the assistance of the Jesuits and the Papists here at home and in foreign parts to have extirpated all the power and purity of religion and to have overwhelmed us in ignorance, superstition and idolatry.’
There were many, of course, who chose not to take sides, who considered local problems more important than national ones, just as there were thousands who were drawn into the conflict on the side that their landlords and masters elected to support, or who accepted orders from one side or the other merely for the sake of a quiet life. Most of these fought without any sense of mission, as was later to be shown by the ease with which Royalist prisoners were induced to come over to Parliament’s side after their capture and Parliamentary captives to join the ranks of the Royalists. Although religion certainly played an important part in determining allegiances, men like Lord Brooke, one of the King’s most obstinate opponents and, in Milton’s opinion, ‘a right noble and pious Lord’, who urged a crusade ‘to shed the blood of the ungodlie’, were not numerous on either side.
It has been estimated that there were about 1,300,000 boys and men in England between the ages of sixteen and fifty in 1642, and that well over a quarter of them were to take an active part in the struggle. And of those who succeeded in remaining observers rather than participants there were few who escaped the war’s consequences. Even so, there were many who were not too sure what all the fuss was about, or, as Sir Arthur Haselrig said, did not really care what government they lived under, ‘so long as they may plough and go to market’. Some did not even know there was a conflict at all. Long after the war had started and the first battles had been fought, a Yorkshire farm labourer, when advised to keep out of the line of fire between the King’s men and Parliament’s, learned for the first time that ‘them two had fallen out’.
There were also those who shilly-shallied, disguising such convictions as they had, like the Earls of Clare and Kingston. The former of these, in the dismissive words of Lucy Hutchinson, whose husband had been appointed Parliamentary Governor of Nottingham, ‘was very often of both parties and never advantag’d either’; while as for the Earl of Kingston, ‘a man of vast estate, and not lesse covetousnesse’, he ‘divided his Sonns betweene both Parties and conceal’d himselfe’. Then there were those, of course, who changed sides as opinions were modified and as the fortunes of war favoured first one side then the other.
The Verneys were far from being the only family broken by the quarrel. When, for instance, a convoy of treasure was being carried to the King’s headquarters through East Anglia, Henry Cromwell, a first cousin of Oliver Cromwell, Member of Parliament for Cambridge, brought out fifty men to protect it on its way, while Valentine Walton, who was married to Oliver Cromwell’s sister, ordered two hundred men to seize it. The resultant fight was witnessed by a crowd of impartial, though fascinated villagers. There were similar disagreements in the family of Stephen Goffe, Rector of the parish of Stanmer in Sussex. One of his sons, a zealous Puritan, decided to join Parliament’s army when the moment came; another became chaplain to the King and a spy in the Royalist cause. John Hutchinson’s family was also divided, his Byron cousins fighting