Why did Charles I fight the Civil War?

Civil wars are like other quarrels: it takes two to make them. It is, then, something of a curiosity that we possess no full analysis of why Charles I chose to fight a Civil War in 1642. Yet the early seventeenth century was in many ways a good period for gentry, and a bad period for kings. If we were to search the period for long-term reasons why the King might have wanted to fight a Civil War, we would find the task far easier than it has ever been to find long-term causes why the gentry might have wanted to fight a Civil War.

Why, then, has the task never been attempted? The trouble, I think, comes from our reliance on the concept of 'revolution.' Revolutions are thought of as things done to the head of state and not by him. The result is that Charles has been treated as if he were largely passive in the drift to Civil War, as a man who reacted to what others did, rather than doing much to set the pace himself. This picture is definitely incorrect. Whether the notion of an 'English Revolution' is also incorrect is a question I will not discuss here. Anyone who is determined to find an 'English Revolution' should not be looking here, but later on, in the years 1647-1653, and those years are outside the scope of this article. This article is concerned with the outbreak of Civil War, an event in which the King was a very active participant.

If we look carefully at the slow process of escalation by which the political crisis of 1640 was transformed into the Civil War of 1642, it was usually Charles who raised the stakes by introducing threats of force. It was Charles, in August 1642, who raised his standard and legally began a state of wax. This fact repeated a pattern which was already visible. In January 1642, it was Charles who left London, and thereby first separated the combatants into two armed camps. The physical division of the political community caused by the rival summonses to rally to York and to Westminster made an enormous contribution to the creation of an atmosphere in which Civil War became a real possibility. Moreover, the week before Charles left London, it was he who brought armed guards to arrest the Five Members, not the Five Members who brought armed guards to Whitehall Palace.

If we trace the cycle of failed deterrents backwards, and ask who first introduced the threat of armed force, the answer is again Charles. The first threat to use armed force to resolve the deadlock at Westminster was the Army Plot of April and May 1641, and this was clearly Charles's plot. The first Parliamentary strivings towards control of the militia begin the week after the Army Plot, and this is a case where chronology is the best guide to causation. If we go farther back still, and ask who first introduced armed force in the British Isles, the answer is Charles, in the misguided attempt to conquer Scotland, the first round of the conflict which was later localised as the English Civil War.

In the light of these facts, it seems hard to deny that Charles made some contribution to the drift to war. It is, then, important to ask, both how big this contribution was, and what motives, short and long term, might have led Charles to make it.

To understand Charles's contribution, it is necessary to understand the aims of his opponents. They were not aiming at Civil War, though from Charles's point of view, their actions were at least as provocative as if they had been. His opponents were following a strategy with precedents going back at least to Simon de Montfort, in which the object was to impersonalise royal authority by putting it into the hands of a Council and great officers, to be nominated in Parliament and answerable to Parliament. As a Parliamentary declaration put it in May 1642, Charles was to be treated as if he were a minor, a captive or insane. Charles's opponents, many of whom were experienced Privy Councillors, believed government was too important to be left to Kings.

This strategy depended for its success, not on skilled party leadership but on keeping the community united. If it succeeded, there would be no civil war. If it failed, the idea was to be able to blame the King, as Simon de Montfort and Thomas of Lancaster had done, in effect for waging war against his own government. It was thus a secondary objective to be able to blame the King if the strategy failed and fighting did result. This impersonalisation of public authority, under the doctrine of the King's Two Bodies, actually went so deep that Parliamentary declarations complained that gathering of forces round the King might lead to a breach of the King's peace, and that the King's forces might start a 'rebellion'.

Every time this strategy had been used in the past (1215, 1258, 1311, 1386), it had produced the same result. Each time, after a delay of two years or more, it had produced a civil war in which the King had been the apparent aggressor. Each time, the delay in the outbreak of fighting had depended on the length of time the King's critics were in power before they built up their own body of enemies, and thereby presented the King with a party. Each time, this baronial strategy had forced the King to play a waiting game, until he could divide his critics enough to raise a force and fight back. The situation was one which forced the King to divide the nation, as it forced his opponents to try to unite it. Thus, some part of the appearance that the King began the war is illusory: it is the result of Parliamentarian tactics which put the pressure to fight, and therefore the blame for doing so, squarely onto the King's shoulders.

Yet, though this appearance is in part illusory, it is also in part genuine. True, Charles was under pressure to fight, but it was a pressure he showed no great determination to resist. Indeed, he nearly threw away his chance by trying to fight too soon. Twice, over the Army Plot and over the attempt on the Five Members, Charles moved before the reaction in his favour had gone far enough, and thereby did his critics the priceless service of reuniting them. Richelieu, before the Army Plot, had wisely advised him to wait until the wheel of fortune turned, but Charles was too impatient to take his advice.

Charles, then, had become eager to fight. In creating this eagerness, he was influenced by short-term indignities he suffered during the Long Parliament, but he was also influenced by long-term frustrations, and the study of those frustrations tells us something important about seventeenth-century government.

Among these frustrations, the issue of money is somewhere near the centre of the stage. All through his reign, he had tried to do, and indeed was expected to do, things for which the money was simply not available. On a number of occasions, notably 1626, his Parliaments had made helpful noises about the shortage of money, but no action had ever followed. By August 1642, Charles was quoting Rudyerd's 1626 offer to make him 'safe at home and feared abroad' as simply a piece of mockery. In 1628, after agreeing to the Petition of Right, Charles had expected a grant to allow him to collect Tonnage and Poundage legally, to be faced instead with a remonstrance for collecting it illegally. In 1629, he had called another session of Parliament largely in the hope of getting a legal grant of Tonnage and Poundage, only to find that the Commons wanted instead to punish those who had obeyed his orders to collect it. In 1640, he had listened to Parliamentary offers to give him a legal grant of Tonnage and Poundage and a new book of rates to assess it by. Instead, by the end of 1641, he had been given a series of grants for a few weeks at a time, no new book of rates and an Act of Parliament saying he could not collect it without Parliamentary assent. Since over 50 per cent of his ordinary revenue was covered by Tonnage and Poundage, it is no wonder that Charles's hope of ever getting a permanent grant had grown slim, and his irritation had grown large in proportion.

It was clear by 1642 that royal revenue had failed to keep up with the previous century's inflation. Some major new source of revenue was needed, and Charles was entitled to his scepticism about whether the House of Commons was ever likely to provide it. The Bill of Tonnage and Poundage has been rightly described as 'the bill the Commons never seemed to have time to pass', and other proposals for revenue reform had made even less progress than Tonnage and Poundage. By contrast, Charles's attempts in the 1630s to increase his revenue without Parliamentary assent had been comparatively successful. If, as appears probable, Charles decided sometime around December 1641 that he would never be solvent until he ceased to rely on Parliaments concerned to ease burdens on their constituents, it is not possible to dismiss his conclusion as against the weight of the evidence.

More specifically, Charles appeared to be facing a situation in which he could not fight when relying on Parliaments. Over the century before the Civil War, the costs of war had inflated more than most other costs, and the growth of firearms, together with the need for standardisation they implied, had increased the proportion of military costs which had to fall on public funds. In 1624-5, Charles believed with some plausibility that he had entered into a war with Spain which a Parliament really wanted him to undertake, only to find, when the war came, that the next Parliament would only vote a paltry supply, and the next none at all unless they could impeach his chief minister. Yet in 1626, even the sums the Commons had offered to vote if they could impeach Buckingham were less than half what the King needed. What was the point of making his peace with Parliaments, at great political cost, if they did not then give him enough to avoid arbitrary taxes likely to lead to another crisis? No king during the Thirty Years' War could accept a situation in which he could never fight. If Charles, as appeared likely, could never fight with parliaments, he might have to make himself able to fight without them.

It was also Charles' misfortune to rule at about the time when the Augsburg principle of cuius regio, eius religio became out of date. With each generation since the Reformation, confessional loyalties became more established, and therefore harder to change with a change of monarch. When Charles looked back at the history of the Church of England, he could see that Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, and to an extent James had all been able to make it in their own image. In trying to introduce Laud's brand of ceremonial Arminianism, Charles was only trying to do what they had done. Moreover, this commitment seems to have been, for Charles, something which was not negotiable. Even in January 1641, when he went farther in exploring possible concessions than at any time before or after, he still hoped the Arminian William Juxon could succeed Laud as Archbishop. If he hoped, as he appears to have done, that he could have Juxon as Archbishop at the same time as he had Bedford as Lord Treasurer and Pym as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was living in cloud cuckoo land. He simply did not see that what had been perfectly possible for Edward VI and Mary was not possible for him. If he believed, as he appears to have done, that a situation in which he could not enforce his own religion was one in which he would have lost a substantial part of his authority, we must allow that he was probably right. Since both Charles and his critics took it for granted that religious unity must be enforced, if Charles could not enforce his religion on the country, he would have to let the country enforce theirs on him. One may understand why he found such a notion a threat to his authority.

The belief that it was the duty of a ruler to enforce uniformity in the true religion was one which caused difficulties for other authorities, as well as Charles I. A century after the Reformation, religious choice was too established a fact to be very easily denied, and rulers who believed that it was their duty to enforce one form of religion were increasingly obviously setting themselves an impossible task. Philip II in the Netherlands failed in this task for reasons not altogether different from those of Charles I. Both felt themselves obliged to fight rather than give up the struggle.

Other rulers in Europe also found it difficult to achieve harmony between multiple kingdoms, but Charles was the only one who faced the problem of religious unity blended with the problems of multiple kingdoms. For him, then, the problem of religious unity was one of unity between kingdoms, even more than of unity within one kingdom. On this point, Charles' Scottish opponents agreed with him. They too thought that unless there was unity of religion and church government between England and Scotland, there would be permanent instability. Just as Charles was prepared to fight to enforce English religion on Scotland, so the Scots were prepared to fight (and remained so through the Civil War), to enforce Scottish religion on England. Charles, moreover, did not only have a King of England's resistance to Scottish notions of Presbyterianising England: he also had to view such a proposal through the eyes of the King of Ireland. A religious settlement in which it would have been a key point that no papists were to be tolerated would hardly have led to stability in Ireland, and any responsible King of Ireland had to resist such a proposal, by force if need be. Of all the participants in the crisis of 1640-42, Charles was the only one whose position forced him to a genuinely British perspective, which did a lot to restrict his freedom of manoeuvre. It was also his British perspective which led him, back in 1639, to start the war against the Scots from which all the later troubles followed. In thinking of his supposed duty to achieve religious unity between all the parts of the British Isles, Charles could well have repeated Laud's words on his appointment to Canterbury: 'there is more expected of me than the craziness of these times will give me leave to do'.

Indeed, if one were to write a job description of the British monarchy in the early seventeenth century, it would not be an attractive one. The King was expected to cut a major European figure on an income which bore no comparison with those of his European colleagues, and to do so without raising illegal taxes. He was expected, in religion, to enforce both unity and truth, while anyone who did not believe that what he was enforcing was the truth could exclaim: 'we ought to obey God rather than man'. He was expected to solve the problem of multiple kingdoms, in a context in which religious differences merged with the various nationalisms of his kingdoms. The tasks conventional contemporary opinion assigned to Charles I were ones no ordinary political skills could have discharged, and if he finally tried to cut the Gordian knot, we should, perhaps, not be too surprised. It is certainly easier to understand why sheer frustration might have driven Charles to fight than it has ever been to understand why the English gentry might have wanted to make a revolution against him.