At York the King was able to hold court in reasonable style thanks to the generosity of Edward Somerset, the unpractical Welsh Roman Catholic Marquess of Worcester, and his son, Lord Herbert, who presented him with £22,000 of their family’s fortune, soon to be followed by a further £100,000. Yet although he could offer some of the pleasures that might have been enjoyed at Whitehall, few guests were entertained at his table. The royal musicians were sent for, but they declined to come, explaining that their salaries had not been paid and the expenses of the journey were consequently beyond them. Several noblemen whom the King hoped would join him also declined to do so, among them the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Essex, and the Earl of Holland, Groom of the Stole and First Lord of the Bedchamber. Others, like the Earl of Leicester, complaining of unpaid expenses and debts, made it clear that they might have supported the King more readily had he settled them. As it was, several of the few Privy Councillors who joined him at York did so with evident reluctance, while a quarter of those of their colleagues who had been in office in 1640 chose to side with Parliament. Nor was the King able to win over Lord Fairfax, who had represented the county of York in the Long Parliament and was sent as one of a committee of five to represent Parliament’s interests in York, to report upon the King’s actions and to see what could be done to frustrate his recruitment of troops. Lord Fairfax’s son, Thomas Fairfax, who had been born on the family’s estate at Denton in Yorkshire thirty years before, made it known that he was as ready to defend the rights of Parliament as was his father.
Thomas Fairfax was an attractive man, reticent and reserved, though ruthless when he felt he had to be, slim and so dark in complexion he was known as ‘Black Tom’. His expression was generally mournful in repose, though in battle he became ‘so highly transported’, in Bulstrode Whitelocke’s words, that he ‘seemed more like a man distracted and furious than of his ordinary mildness and so far different temper’. He was ‘of as meek and humble a carriage as ever I saw in great employments,’ Whitelock added, ‘and but of few words in discourse or council; yet when his judgement and reason were satisfied he was unalterable…I have observed him at councils of war that he hath said little, but hath ordered things expressly contrary to the judgement of all his council.’
‘A lover of learning,’ so John Aubrey said, he had matriculated at St John’s College, Cambridge at the age of fourteen and had later brought out a volume of poems and translations entitled The Employment of my Solitude; but he had decided early upon a military life and he was not yet eighteen when present at the siege of Bois-le-Duc. On his return to England in 1632 he had announced his intention of joining the Swedish army in Germany. As a young officer he was remarkable for his courage; as a commander he was renowned for the forcefulness rather than the subtlety of his occasionally imprudent attacks and for the discipline he imposed upon his troops, who held him in high regard.
Several Yorkshire noblemen, including Lord Savile, Treasurer of the Household, decided to throw in their lot with the King, but many gentlemen who had left Westminster for Yorkshire repaired to their country estates rather than to York; and when on 12 May Charles formally called upon the gentry of the county to attend him in arms, several of the most influential, Sir Philip Stapleton, Member for Boroughbridge, and Sir Hugh Cholmley, Member for Scarborough, among them, strongly objected to his doing so. They also protested when the King rode to Heyworth Moor to attend a demonstration of loyalty which had been organized by Lord Savile. Hundreds of anti-Royalists appeared from the surrounding villages to spoil the occasion and to present their own petitions to the King. Savile tried to prevent them approaching his Majesty but Thomas Fairfax evaded him and managed to get close enough to push a petition onto the King’s saddle. Charles ignored it and, in riding on, almost knocked Fairfax to the ground.
For his behaviour this day Savile was declared by Parliament to be a public enemy no longer of their number. Alarmed by this verdict, he withdrew to his house, Howley Hall, where he tried to come to an accommodation with those whom he had offended through the mediation of relatives of his in London. On 5 April the King, deserted by Savile, was presented with a petition from the Yorkshire nobility and gentry, asking him to come to terms with Parliament.
In London, Parliament now reigned supreme. There were occasional demonstrations in favour of the King whose supporters, encouraged by several of the richer merchants, wore red ribbons in their hats as a token of their allegiance and one day gathered in sufficient numbers to chase a mob out of St Paul’s where they were trying to pull down the organ. Another day a drunken Royalist, brandishing a dagger, forced a pious citizen to kneel down by Cheapside Cross and say a prayer for the Pope. But for the most part Londoners seemed perfectly content to follow Parliament’s lead, to turn out on parade in Finsbury Fields, to lend plate and money at 8 per cent, and to obey the injunctions of the various emergency committees set up by the supporters of John Pym, including a Committee of Defence comprising five peers, the Earls of Essex, Northumberland, Pembroke and Holland and Viscount Saye and Sele, and ten Members of the House of Commons, John Hampden, Denzil Holles and Pym himself prominent amongst them. To lend the weight of incontestable legal authority to his own injunctions and proclamations, Charles ordered the Lord Keeper, Lord Littleton, to send the Great Seal to York and to follow it himself. Parliament retaliated by declaring that no orders or proclamations other than those issued in its own name were valid. This provocative declaration was followed in a few days by the Nineteen Propositions which required Parliamentary control not only of the army, but of the Church, the royal children, the law and of all officers of state. They were, in effect, tantamount to a demand that the King must surrender all executive power. Outraged, he immediately rejected them, condemning their authors as raisers of sedition and enemies to ‘my sovereign power’, as would-be destroyers of ‘rights and properties, of all distinctions of families and merit’, persuading many waverers that Parliament had, indeed, presented him with an ultimatum that could be accepted only with dishonour.
He continued to protest that he intended no violence against Parliament, that all would be settled peaceably. But it could no longer be doubted that he had resolved upon war. The Lords Lieutenant of counties throughout England were ordered to read his Commission of Array, a counterblast to Parliament’s Militia Ordinance.
All over the country unrest was growing and sides were being taken in bitterness, sadness and anger, as castles were fortified, sentry boxes installed by the gates in city walls, trained bands ordered to keep watch on magazines, as posterns and bridges were barred at night, as horsemen were put through their paces, gentlemen studied such textbooks as Henry Hexham’s Principles of the Art Military as Practised in the Wars of the United Netherlands, and farm workers and yeomen were drilled in town squares and country fields. In Leicester the Mayor was sternly warned not to read the King’s Commission of Array by the Puritan Lord Willoughby of Parham, who had been appointed by Parliament to a military command in the area and who proclaimed Parliament’s Militia Ordinance instead, provoking the Earl of Huntingdon’s son, Henry Hastings, to attempt to capture the city with a company of colliers he had called up from the mines on his family’s estates. In London the Royalist Lord Mayor did manage to read the King’s Commission of Array but soon found himself in the Tower for his pains. Elsewhere the publication of the rival proclamations was attended by uproar and violence. At Cirencester the Lord Lieutenant was chased out of the town when he tried to read the King’s Commission; in Cambridgeshire the Lord Lieutenant was similarly maltreated and the palace at Downham of the Bishop of Ely, ‘one of the greatest Papists in the Kingdom’, was invaded and ransacked; at Watlington in Oxfordshire the Royalist Earl of Berkshire was silenced by John Hampden, and his coach was smashed to pieces. There were clashes in Somerset where a Puritan hurled a stone at a crucifix – in a gesture of hatred for symbols of popery common to nearly all counties – and where the Marquess of Hertford, the Lord Lieutenant of the county, was driven out of Wells by Sir Edward Hungerford and forced to retreat into Dorset and then into Wales, while his second-in-command Sir Ralph Hopton, with less than two hundred men, was obliged to withdraw to Cornwall. There was trouble in Wolverhampton where a crowd of men and women had already chopped up communion rails and tables which had been made ‘an idol of’. There was fighting, too, in Worcestershire where a rabble of other would-be inconoclasts, wild in their hatred of what they took to be