Charles became convinced that strong action against a tiny band was all that was needed to give him back his life, his court, his rule. He was a knight-errant. He was, it turned out, Don Quixote, living in a world that did not exist. Like other mildly stupid people, he gave no thought to what would happen if his plans went awry and the bold action failed. He only saw the dazzling sun of success.
On 4 January 1642, the king set off at about three o’clock for Westminster. He had decided to arrest his five worst enemies, those wretched fellows, Pym and his junto. He had identified the men he thought most dangerous – Pym; John Hampden, his old foe, who had spoken so stoutly for the Remonstrance; Denzil Holles, another Ship Money refuser; young Arthur Haselrig, who had suggested the plan to attaint Strafford, and (unexpectedly) William Strode. They were all men with a history of opposing him, but his shortlist of ringleaders omitted many key figures, including all Pym’s supporters in the Lords. Even if his expedition had been successful it would not have silenced all his critics.
Charles knew he could find his quarries in the Commons. Accounts differ as to whether the king advanced on Parliament with his guards, or on his own, but it seems unlikely that even Charles would have set out to face a defiant House with only Prince Rupert for company. Bulstrode Whitelocke says ‘the King came, guarded with his pensioners, and followed by about two hundred of his courtiers and soldiers of fortune, most of them armed with swords and pistols’. Whoever he took with him, he was too late. The birds had flown, as he himself later quipped. The phrase shows that he saw himself as a hunter, a role in which he felt at home.
For a moment he could not believe his failure. Charles looked desperately around the chamber for the men he wanted. He called their names, unable to give up hope that they were there. Then he asked the Speaker for his chair, with careful courtesy. It was like Charles to say ‘By your leave, Mr Speaker, I must borrow your chair’; the politeness and deference of his words emphasized rather than concealed the gross disregard of the Commons’ independence implied in his entry with armed guards. He knew how they might feel: ‘I must declare’, he said carefully, ‘that no king that ever was in England shall be more careful of your privileges’, but he went on, ‘yet you must know that in cases of Treason no person has a privilege’.
The House was not impressed. As Charles left, in defeat, the Commons roared ‘Privilege! Privilege!’ The cry was echoed by the London crowds next day.
Historians do not quite like the idea that it was Lucy Hay who warned the Five Members, but this is no mere fantasy invented by romantic lady novelists. There are contemporary voices who believed it to be true. Philip Warwick saw Charles’s plans frustrated by the countess personally: ‘Yet his coming to the Lower House, being betrayed by that busy stateswoman, the Countess of Carlisle, who has now changed her gallant from Strafford to Mr Pym, and was become such a she-saint, that she frequented their sermons, and took notes, he lost the opportunity of seizing their persons.’ Thomas Burton, for example, in his diary of Cromwell’s Parliament, quotes Haselrig himself as the source for Lucy’s intervention:
The King demanded five members, by his Attorney-General. He then came personally to the House, with five hundred men at his heels, and sat in your [the Speaker’s] chair. It pleased God to hide those members. I shall never forget the kindness of that great lady, the Lady Carlisle, that gave timely notice. Yet some of them were in the house, after the notice came. It was questioned if, for the safety of the house, they should be gone; but the debate was shortened, and it was thought fit for them, in discretion, to withdraw. Mr Hampden and myself being then in the House, withdrew. Away we went. The King immediately came in, and was in the house before we got to the water. The queen, on the King’s return, raged and gave him an unhandsome name, ‘poltroon’, for that he did not take others out, and certainly if he had, they would have been killed at the door.
Similarly, the poet John Dryden remarks that ‘Mr Waller used to say that he would raze any Line out of his Poems, which did not imply some Motive to virtue, but he was unhappy in the choice of subject of his admirable vein in poetry. The Countess of C. was the Helen of her country’ – as if the war had been fought over Lucy herself. Bishop Warburton called her ‘the Erinnys of that time’, and claimed that she was the source of information and intelligence ‘on his majesty’s intentions’.
It was not only Restoration writers who saw Lucy as the chief instrument of knowledge. Henry Neville, republican intellectual, portrayed her as Pym’s lover in 1647: ‘first charged in the fore-deck by Master [Denzil] Hollis, in the Poop by Master Pym, while she clapped my Lord of Holland under hatches’. Astrologer William Lilly, though he names another party as the direct source of Pym’s warning, provides information about leakages from the king’s secret councils via the queen’s circle: ‘All this Christmas, 1641, there was nothing but private whispering at court, and secret councils held by the Queen and her party, with whom the King sat in council very late many nights.’
Lucy was certainly still a visible member of the queen’s party, but events show that her heart by now lay elsewhere. Lucy liked and embraced change. While her sister, equally ambitious, married a staid aristocrat of whom her father thoroughly approved, Lucy had married a young man of fashion. Tiring of him, she fell in love with an authoritative statesman of pronounced political philosophy. Neither choice was remotely snobbish; if anything, Lucy seemed particularly attracted by men with more than a touch of the people in their makeup. When her statesman fell, Lucy seems to have fallen in turn for his intelligent foe, John Pym, another change for her. Here was a man who was like her previous lovers in intelligence and power, but who was capable of showing her quite another world, a world to which she was attracted by its very difference.
It is also quite possible that Lucy – just like the rest of Pym’s followers, and a strong minority of the nation – was outraged by Charles’s behaviour. No Catholic, she disliked the influence exerted by Laud on the Church. Her personal attraction to Strafford may have been strong, but she may not necessarily have sided with him on questions of absolutism, and his fall and the king’s willingness to sign his death warrant may have done something to put her off the absolute power of monarchy, as well as forcing her to realize that it was not in fact absolute. This may not have been a matter of direct personal vengeance either. Lucy had just seen a great self-made man struck down by the king. To a woman who had spent years trying to advance herself and her family in the eyes of a monarch, this cannot have been very reassuring. It might have reminded her of her father’s fate, or even of the entire history of the Percys, a family struggling to maintain a powerful aristocratic position without monarchic interference, which had seen several members executed for treason. Strafford’s death confirmed in Lucy Hay an ideology of monarchy limited by strong Protestantism and aristocratic counsel, an ideology she was to adhere to throughout the Civil War years. And odd as it may have seemed, Pym and the saints offered a more rational path to that goal than did any of those remaining about the king.
Self-preservation, too, was always a central plank in Lucy’s motivation. If Lucy knew anything of Pym’s plans to impeach the queen, she may have become anxious that she would herself be implicated.
Strafford’s death was a warning that no one could escape by virtue of position or rank. It may have seemed sensible to have a foot in both camps. And since she was almost certainly not the only one who disclosed the king’s plans, it was sensible. Strafford’s fall from power was a warning. It might have looked like the beginning of the end for everyone in the king’s and queen’s immediate circle.
Ironically, too, if Lucy did send a message to Pym, it may suggest that he was more circumspect with her than others had been, for some historians think that Pym lured Charles into the rash invasion of the House, that the whole attempted arrest was a trap. If so, Pym may have been making use of Lucy, knowing only too well that she had a foot in both camps and an eye on the winning side. If Lucy was lurking in Pym’s camp