Dan Snow's History Hit - 1. The English Civil War: How it Started

Episode Date: February 3, 2025

Episode 1/2. King Charles I's decision to rule without Parliament was just one of the many reasons that England found itself embroiled in a bloody civil war. In this first episode, we learn how subtle religious and political differences upset the balance of power in England, and plunged the kingdom into chaos.For this, Dan is joined by Minoo Dinshaw, author of 'Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War'. He explains this tumultuous period from the perspective of Bulstrode Whitelocke and Edward Hyde, two close friends who reluctantly found themselves on opposing sides of the conflict that split England in two.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Max Carrey.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear from you. You can email the podcast at [e-mail].

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I've got another short series for you today, the first of two episodes on the English Civil War, a period in British and Irish history where families and friends were pitted against one another, fighting for opposing visions of the country's future. Joining me is the brilliant Minoo Dinshaw. He just published Friends in Youth, Choosing Sides in the English Civil War.

And he's written a book about two very close friends who joined opposing sides in the war and tried to navigate their country back to peace. And I thought what we'd be able to do for this series is embed his story of his two friends in the wider tale of the war. So this first episode is all about the backdrop, the context, the buildup to civil war,

why it happened, how something apparently unimaginable came to be. And there's a lesson in there for all societies. Episode two is out on Wednesday, and that takes us through the First Civil War itself. We sketch out the main battles, where the Royalists and the Parliamentarians, the Roundheads and the Cavaliers went head-to-head. Make sure you tune in to listen to that one as well. This series was another listener request.

It was a request from Sarah Wright, so thank you, Sarah, for reaching out. And everyone else, please keep on sending in those suggestions one day. Day two might become an episode of the podcast. But for now, here is our first ep on the Civil War. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity very much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you for having me. Well, we're going to try and do the impossible here. It's Mission Impossible. We're going to try and tell the story of what we could loosely call the first civil war, the period leading up to it, and then its outbreak. And we're going to do it over two episodes. It's going to be very, very exciting indeed. Thanks for joining me on this adventure.

Total pleasure. Now, the hardest question that I have ever wrestled with is sort of religion in the mid-17th century, and then politics as well. So a bit of a warning coming up, folks. But what is the political context here? What is going on with the English monarchy? And of course, we've got to remember the fact that he's also King of Ireland and King of Scotland at the same time. So what's going on with the sort of British and Irish monarchies at this time that makes them, well, vulnerable to this kind of rebellion? Or was it just bad luck?

Was it just a bit of bad personality and a bit of bad bit of timing? Is there something more substantial going on beneath the surface? Well, of course, it's always all of the above, isn't it? And I suppose in the story that I've been inhabiting through these two friends, the politics takes precedent over the religion, and the religion at times comes across almost like a political pretext. Nonetheless, it is a fact, as you implied, that we have here three kingdoms different in their

religious natures. We have England with a dominant established church, but a substantial and growing dissenting wing. We have Scotland with the Kirk, the Mont Plain, hot Protestant Kirk, and also Catholic dissenters. We have Ireland with a minority state church ruling over a Catholic population. So each of these kingdoms are innately different, but in a way that leads us back to politics. Insofar as religion is important, it is important for political reasons. And it certainly became my contention, seen through the eyes of my two protagonists, that religion was an instrument, a weapon, often in unscrupulous hands. Well, that's interesting. That makes one think about the Thirty Years' War that was raging in Europe at the same time, when things are said about some of the protagonists in that particular war as well. So let's talk about the politics. First of

all, off the back of Elizabeth's glorious, quote unquote, reign, there were profound problems, weren't there, with the English state, in particular the money. They were quite poor, weren't they, the English monarch? Yes, and also the way in which they had garnered fiscal liquidity was by using Parliament, something that on the whole went smoothly under the Tudors and began to go less smoothly under the Stuarts, to the point where legitimate taxes were raised through Parliament. And if the King and Parliament fell out, then you reach this critical impasse, for instance, where control of the army was associated by law and tradition, by definition, with the crown. But if the king

was not being given any money to pay the army by parliament, you ended up with this sort of rock, paper, scissors situation, where both parliament and king unable to force a compromise that would make the country's military capacity, the country's security run normally. And you talk about the legitimate taxes. So is it just an increasing sort of convention, a tradition that all taxes have to be approved by Parliament? Or are there certain taxes that only Parliament can choose, but certain that are connected with the Crown, for example, regulation of trade or exile or something like that? Or is it becoming now the norm that every piece of money raising has to be done with the approval of Parliament? It's certainly the norm. The primary form of taxation is subsidies granted

to the King by Parliament. And when the King's relations with Parliament go south to such a very extreme extent. The King is resorting to what many people view as archaic or legally overreaching expedients that predate this level of power in Parliament. To medieval commissions of array, to raise troops, and famously to ship money, which was a coastal tax that the King could raise to deal with pirates and so on, but is extended possibly illegally to the inland regions of the country. So that's the new Stuart Kings do that, particularly Charles I. Let's just come on to the Stuarts. Why are relations between Parliament and James I and his son Charles I, why do they just seem more fraught than under Elizabeth? What's happened there? I think it is, to some degree, a case of culture shock. Scottish Parliament was far less important and powerful. In Scotland, I suppose the most powerful part of the body politic had sometime been the nobility and the clerk. The king was trying his best to control his nobles and his rather

frightening clerics, but not worrying about Parliament too much. He was used, perhaps, to regarding Parliament as upper servants, whereas the irony was that the English parliament had been such useful upper servants to the Tudors that it had gained a great measure of power. And therefore, they weren't quite speaking the same language. However, I would say that under James, things did not approach complete breakdown. And under Charles, you started getting almost changes in the very definition of what Parliament was. The origins of our ideas of government versus opposition, of parties, of a governing party, all emerge in this period. Parliament was supposed to be a theoretically unanimous body that always gave the king united advice. It was treasonous to suggest that

Parliament could break down in schism. And yet this was the time where this polite fiction could no longer be perpetuated, especially over a critical debate that will come to the grand remonstrance, where you very clearly have parliament dividing into two factions. I've always thought religion helps to explain that sort of schism, but let's put the individuals back in. What about the character of Charles I? There's such a debate over whether he was just a man struggling to deal with this kind of evangelical, almost religious extremism

that was suddenly breaking over him like a wave, or other people would say he was absolutely bloody useless. Where do you come down on sort of his role in deepening this conflict that would eventually lead to war? Well, one of the many things that draws me to my two protagonists is that I found that attitude to the king fascinatingly united. They both see him as a conscientious, attractive, theoretically decent and able and intelligent monarch who is badly advised. Of course, the ancient trope of the wicked advisors. But in Hyde's case, he very much sees the king as led astray in particular by his Catholic wife.

But they both find the king a decent character doing his best. When it comes to Charles, they don't fault his character. They do, however, see him as easily influenced by wrong ends. And in terms of was he dealing with bad faith extremists? Yes, I think he was. I think in the case of leaders in the commons, like John Pym, their situation politically, financially, and in terms of their physical peril was going to be pretty bad, unless they could force a proper break with the king and wrench power off him. Their interest was very much not in reaching a compromise. People talk a lot about the divine right of kings, this theory of absolutist monarchy that was very attractive to the Stuarts and

particularly Charles I. Again, trying to make Charles more of an active participant in the breakdown of relations. Did he believe that he'd been divinely ordained? Did he believe this any more than the Tudors or the monarchs that would come after him? I think the answer is that he did sometimes. Neither of our main friends, protagonists, saw monarchy in that way. And both of them tried to influence him away from that doctrine. It was, of course, quite a recent doctrine. It had been codified, among others, by the king's father, James.

It was not of indigenous or ancient English or British origin. It was a sort of product of the Reformation. Sometimes you found that the divinely sanctioned monarch was a Protestant idea even and denied by Catholics. It's a complex question, but both Hyde and Whitlock were much more attracted to the older idea of the mixed monarchy, the three estates of the realm, the king, the lords, the commons, working together in harmony. And that was the sort of more traditional idea that they both worked and hoped to restore. And so Charles I comes to the throne. He attempts, doesn't he, to rule without Parliament. How does he do that? Well, initially, he comes to the throne on a wave of

bellicose enthusiasm about fighting the Spanish, about the failed marriage arrangement with the Spanish. His father's favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, is still his favourite. And Charles and Buckingham are very popular, warlike Protestants, also riding to the rescue of Charles's dethroned Protestant sister in Central Europe. It goes terribly badly. They find themselves at war with both Spain and France. It's a disaster. And Charles realises that he just doesn't have the ability to make Parliament biddable and to have money and to wage war successfully. And so the best thing to do is not to bother with Parliament, with it as a source of cash or with war. And there ensues this long period of renowned peace, which even my parliamentarian protagonist Whitlock can't help being rather attracted to,

a time where there are all kinds of things simmering under the surface, but the country is peaceful, elites are enjoying an extraordinary cultural life of poetry, masks. There's a sort of general tranquility and prosperity and such relief after two very badly managed wars. So Charles almost kind of calls the bluff of Parliament, says, well, if you're not going to vote me the tax I want, then I won't engage in the sort of swashbuckling Protestant interventions to save our allies on the continent and elsewhere. And actually, both sides are sort of reasonably happy with this. But I mean, there must be a parliamentary critique of Charles's determination not to even summon Parliament. I think it's very much a subterranean river of ambition and dissatisfaction.

One that you can see definitely affects are two bright, middle class pushy ambitious young men who both want to have a slice of the sort of power and voice in the nation's senate that their fathers and uncles had access to but find themselves locked out by this strange historical anomaly of extended rule without parliament so both of them you see this contradictory impulse where they're both enjoying and appreciating the long peace, but also feeling that sense of civic frustration and ambition. Absolutely. They represent a huge body of intelligent, busy, locked out gentry wanting to have more influence. Let's talk about those two men now. You've mentioned them a couple of times. Let's get

into it. They're both upper middle class. Where are they from and how do they know each other? So Whitlock's from just outside London in Henley, where his father amasses estates. He's from a legal family, but crucially, his father is quite a brilliant younger son who has made a fortune and become a judge. So although there are lots of lawyers on both sides of the country, the father is very much a sort of meritocratic, brilliant prodigy. Hyde is also from a legal family, in his case from Wiltshire. His father is quite the opposite of Whitlock's father, never got on with the law, but took any means he could to escape from his profession, eventually settled down happily in the country, married a rich heiress. And Ned Hyde, although forced to become a lawyer by the death of an elder brother, rather shares his attitude to the law

initially. He's much more drawn to poetry, to literature, to history, and he's a more reluctant lawyer. However, the two friends, Whitlock, who, like his father, is a brilliant, gifted lawyer by nature, and Hyde, who is perhaps more drawn to culture, literature, history, theology, they do meet at the ends of court and for whatever reason become inseparable. They have a good amount of friends and eventually ideals in common. Where do they start to diverge in those ideals? Are they in agreement during the long period of Charles I not summoning Parliament? Well, my feeling became that the central tragedy of this story was that to the extent that they ever disagreed, they didn't, in a way, diverge more

and more. The situation divided them. But there were subtle political and religious differences between them throughout. But those differences remained subtle. Fundamentally, they were on the same side. They continued to be on the same side. They hated the civil war. They wanted to stop it. It was an atrocity and a sort of act of national self-harm. Okay, interesting. So let's say early 1630s, they want Parliament to be called, they want to take their place in it and argue and win eternal renown. Exactly, you're so right. And I think we both glimpsed them together in a fascinating moment in history in the summer of 1628, not long before the assassination of the royal favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, which will change everything. But we see Whitlock and Hyde and their friends at the house of a mysterious landlady on Fleet Street, where Whitlock was born,

incidentally, Mrs Percy. And what these friends are doing are they're having a satirical debate, pretending to be members of the hated Star Chamber Extra-Parliamentary Judicial Court, which was regarded as handing out very harsh punishments. It was an instrument of the Crown to oppress the people in the eyes of many. And Whitlock, Hyde and their friends were making joking speeches, pretending to be lawyers acting in the star chamber at Mrs Percy's that's how we first see them almost you could imagine them as a pair of sort of Richard Ingram's types minor public school gut boys running private eye making jokes about the government that kind of thing. How does that turn into serious political crisis, let alone war, armies crisscrossing English soil? What's the process?

Well, a lot of blame or credit has traditionally been given to a figure who may never have existed, a herbs woman in Edinburgh called Jenny Geddes, who threw a stool at the Dean of St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, where the King's prayer book, an Anglican Church of England high church prayer book, was being imposed on the Scots. And I suppose that that leads us to the figure of Archbishop Lord, the King's favourite prelate, closely connected to both Whitlock and Hyde, at whose feet arguably a lot of the intensification of this drama should be put. But yes, that led to a Scottish rebellion, a need for the king to have some money and recall parliament and knock on results.

Yes, so this riot that begins with these women in the centre of Edinburgh, you can still go to where it all began today, it turns into a full rebellion against these religious reforms the king's introducing, that kind of high church, Anglican-style prayer book in Scotland, which the Scots absolutely hated. And because you've now got war, war's expensive, and so the king, who's been tinkering around and inventing these rather unpopular but sort of reluctantly obeyed taxes all over the place, like ship money and things, they're no longer able to cover the cost of this serious outbreak of violence. Yes, the king also makes poor decisions about his commanders. Of course,

we go back to the personal and the political. The king decides, rather than putting the stodgy, Protestant, rather popular, continentally experienced Earl of Essex in charge, to put the Earl of Holland in charge, who's a sort of very slippery, charming character who gets on with his wife. The Earl of Holland completely falls for a Scottish trick and retreats, even though he possibly had the numbers to prevail. But all this is also with an army that's ill-equipped and with low morale because of the lack of parliamentary cash. There are two major bishops' wars before the civil war breaks out. One thing I find interesting about it is that an important mutual friend of my two main characters, Lord Falkland, who will emerge as the key moderate royalist, fights as a volunteer with Lord Essex

against the Scots, and a real sense of division in England. On the one hand, a lot of people don't really see the point of a war with the Scots over an unpopular religious cause. But on the other hand, many people, including Essex, despite his later parliamentary career, including both characters, despite Whitlock's parliamentary allegiance, they regard the Scots as foreign rebels against their natural prince, and they think they should be put down. So you have a genuinely divided country about what to do about the Scots. But it is true that Charles could have broken the tradition of the King's dependence on Parliament had he not footled around with religious reforms at the same time. If he just tried to be a little bit passive, let things run on, then slowly people would have potentially, would they,

like as happened in France, almost forgotten about the parliamentary tradition. I don't disagree. And I think the key comparison here is with his father, who, if you like, had much worse bark than bite. He talked a good or bad game about the divine right of kings. He wrote books about that, among other things, about witchcraft, about tobacco. You know, he was a gobby chap, but he was actually a wise old bird who'd survived a very tough childhood and a long reign in Scotland, who knew when not to push things too far. And Charles, and particularly Lord at his elbow, lacked this sense of tact and prudence. So they drive through these religious reforms,

drive Scotland into open revolt. Scotland invades north of England and the King's army is unable to stop them. So cash is the sinews of war. He's got to ask for some money. Yes. And our friends are absolutely thrilled at their call of Parliament. Despite, as I say, that they had appreciated the long peace, this for them is the real thing, the moment to enter history, to put their country right, and to help get their king and parliament unkinked, working together, and themselves doing very well in the process. Yeah, absolutely not imagining that you're on the brink of civil war, presumably. No. In fact, they're thinking, this country has a few problems. It could be so much better with a more sympathetic ministry,

including us, and a better ruled king. We can improve things. We can improve the religious settlement, the political settlement, the judicial settlement. Both of them are lawyers, of course. We can stop all these abuses

by corrupt courts getting around Parliament. We can make everything splendid and dandy. That's what they're thinking at this point. Absolutely. A few little tweaks, reorder things in a way more conducive, more aligned with our views, and we'll advance the sunlit uplands. Feels very, very relatable. So at 1640, you've got a foreign occupying army. The Scots are occupying bits of North East England. Charles is out of options. He's got to go and ask his people. He's got to ask Parliament for money.

What happens then? Well, the leader of Parliament emerges as this man, John Pym, who's a master of procedure, very experienced, rather low on cash and high on debt, not perhaps an orator of style or flair, but one of immense stamina. And to young cubs like Hyde and Whitlock, Pym is an obvious leader. They all get on with him, especially Hyde, interestingly, of the two of them, is personally close to Pym and his very rich right-hand man, John Hampton. So Pym very much sets the agenda. And as a result, the king is frustrated

by this parliament and soon crucially dismisses it. Hyde is horrified by the dismissal of this first parliament. He goes to his friend, Archbishop the Lord, and pleads, saying, you'll never get a more loyal parliament than this one. This is the best that the king is likely to expect. And why does the king dismiss it? Because they don't want to give him the money without lots of annoying strings attached. They want to seek redress for various things that have gone on and do the things that parliament does. Exactly.

So to take one small example, the one in which Hyde first comes prominent in that short parliament, he goes after one of these corrupt extra parliamentary courts, the Earl Marshall's court. Now, the Earl Marshall is an ancient noble Earl of Arundel who Hyde gets on badly personally, as luck would have it, a very distinguished collector of art, but in political terms, racking up enormous fines and lots of corrupt cash by quibbling about people's heraldry. And Hyde makes a very amusing speech about sort of boatmen being punished for having a swan rather than a goose on their banners and stuff like that. And it goes down very well with

the House. And Pym sees Hyde as a starry young performer on his side. So they've got grievances like this. Hyde in particular is after the extrajudicial courts. But there is one big grievance that awaits the next parliament, which is that they all both hate and crucially fear the king's most effective minister, the Earl of Stratford. Oh, yes. So poor old Stratford. So this parliament is dismissed quite quickly by the king, but he's forced to call another one. Why? This parliament is dismissed quite quickly by the king, but he's forced to call another one. Why? Well, it's still an insoluble Rubik's cube that's got wreaking havoc. There's no other answer. He also has the example of Stratford, who's been an excellent henchman, first in the north of England and then crucially in Ireland. And Stratford has succeeded in producing in Ireland a biddable parliament and a surplus of money. So Stratford,

among others, but crucially Stratford, is urging the king to keep going with the parliament option and saying that between them they'll sort out parliament and get a decent measure of cash and obedience out of it. Well, instead Stratford gets something very different from parliament. So this second meeting of parliament, what happens in that one? Well, I find this fascinating because this is, I think, the moment where you see our friends absolutely united on what will later come to be seen as very much the anti-royalist cause, because Hyde and his equally royalist friend Falkland,

their fingerprints are all over the prosecution of Stratford, often for quite petty and personal factional reasons that date back to the ascendancy of Buckingham. Essentially, Hyde, Falkland, a lot of their friends, and indeed Whitlock and a lot of his friends, are leftovers from the Buckingham faction. And Stratford came to power as a chief minister as an anti-Buckingham sort of chap. So there are a lot of scores being settled here. And it's actually a case of seeing good men do something more important and consequential than they realise for ambitious and petty reasons. I think it's the moment where I find my protagonists attractive, but it's the moment where they let their own ideals down in the way in which they dispose of Stratford.

And they do dispose of Stratford. They do not like that they, as you say, that it's the ancient cliche, we like the king, but we don't like his advisors. And so Stratford becomes the conjurer for everything that's gone wrong over the previous few years, or nearly everything. And Parliament have him executed, basically.

They have him executed by a tinder, which does not require a guilty verdict, proven in court after a farcically collapsed prosecution, presided over by none other than our friend, Bolstered Whitlock. Bolstered Whitlock himself feels lastingly guilty and uneasy about this prosecution for the rest of his life, and always avoided prosecuting another capital case. But Hyde is also involved in an attempted compromise that would have seen Stratford escape with his life

and maybe escape into banishment without any offices. But that also falls through with the Earl of Essex incredibly memorably saying, stone dead hath no fellow about Stratford. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about theratford. At least the Dan Snow's history hit. We're talking about the Civil War. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis.

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by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. what begins as sort of a grievance bit of political wrangling trying to sort of outmaneuver strafford for ideological reasons but also as you point out through sort of because of personal almost tribal reasons you end up killing the man. Is that a symbol that things are spiralling? Are positions hardening up? Absolutely. I think you can see it in the rhetoric in Strafford's extraordinary speeches in his defence, where he points out that some of the very feeble evidence being used against him is based on private conversations. He says society would

become a wilderness, a hermitage, if everyone was afraid to speak in private to each other over matters like that. And Oliver St. John, one of his chief prosecutors, describes finishing off Stratford as being like finishing off savage beasts of prey, foxes, you know, sort of wind in the willows, stoats and weasels type thing. Annoying Bevan, he compares Stratford to vermin. sort of wind in the willows, stoats and weasels type thing. I know you're in Bevan, he compares Stratford to Vermin. So there's a coarsening of rhetoric and a deficit on mercy, absolutely. Okay, coarsening on rhetoric, that seems very worryingly familiar.

What else is going on? As well as trying to sort of isolate and neutralise Stratford, what is this Parliament doing? And you've hinted at it earlier, but what is this big sort of other list of grievances that they're presenting to Charles? Before they're going to give him any money to deal with the Scots? Well, shit money is absolutely dealt with. And again, all of our main characters, Hyde, Whitlock, Falkland are intimately involved with that. No more shit money, no more extra judicial courts, including the Court of the North, which Stratford came to prominence as the president of.

And not all of the extra parliamentary courts are got rid of, but most of them are. There's a strange survival in Wales, for instance, the Court of Marches. But I think that that lasted the late 17th century or something, but it's just an oddity. But most of them are got rid of. And so these are these strange bodies that have been reanimated and used by Charles and Strafford to try and sidetrack Parliament and raise money through taxation to give the Crown independence from Parliament? Yes, and also in other matters as well, most notably the case of William Prynne, who was tried in the Star Chamber for his libel of the Queen. It was felt that he'd implied she

was a quote-unquote notorious whore because of her fondness for amateur dramaticals. This is an interesting case because it's one in which Hyde and Whitlock emerge literally on stage because they both arrange the mask which lawyers put on to say sorry, essentially, for the outrageous behaviour of a brother lawyer, William Prynne, in calling the Queen a notorious whore. Yes, as well as raising money, it's almost a sort of shadow, an alternative administration where the King is able to harass political enemies, raise money, all of it outside that traditional institutions of judiciary and Parliament. Absolutely. And especially because of Hyde, interestingly, rather than Whitlock, many

of these courts are now no more after the good work done, which Hyde, interestingly, rather than Whitlock. Many of these courts are now no more after the good work done, which Hyde is very proud of, early in 1641. In fact, on the day where he fails to broker the compromise to spare Stratford is also the day when he oversees the final abolition of the Court of the North. Okay, so from the parliamentary point of view, there's some much needed clarifying, really, about how Britain is to be won. Charles is not enjoying this experience. What's he objecting to most? Just being told what to do full stop? The fact that his advisers are being stripped from his side and executed, dragged out and their heads chopped off? What's Charles's thinking during all this?

Even worse than the execution of Stratford, I think, for him is the case of church reform. And this is what causes Hyde to begin to drift back over to the king's side and ultimately Falkland. With Stratford gone, the attention of Parliament shifts to the question of church reform and especially issues such as whether bishops should be allowed to vote in the lords. They've essentially been functioning as a pro-crown trade union, a bloc vote, that enables the king to get his will in the lords. And again, for political reasons buttressed by religious concerns, bishops are associated with old Catholic hierarchy, with potpourri. Now, good old Queen Elizabeth,

loved by all these Puritans, had no problem with bishops. But even though we have plenty of evidence that Pym, for example, was not in his religious preferences particularly concerned about bishops for political reasons, it's very successful for the parliamentarian leaders to amp up anti-bishop animus among the Puritan populace of the City of London and go after the bishops. And this is what proves too much for the king and increasingly for many more moderate royalist-leaning MPs such as Hyde. So this is an interesting example where are we slightly reaching outside the very, very senior elite of the kingdom. You talk about the population of London. What do we mean by the people of London? And so it was seen as useful, was it, to have the street on your side, to generate a little bit of energy, a little bit of noise?

Well, of course, we're in an era where printing has become newly important. And while there's no real way of knowing fundamentally what the majority of people in the country at large thought, it is clear that the majority of people in the city tended towards religious puritanism. That said, even the city did go back and forth. You've got a royalist resurgence, a royalist Lord Mayor, after Charles went to Scotland to try and sort things out diplomatically, then returned to the city. He was greeted with great joy and the royalist election swung to his side. But the city did tend towards the parliamentarian and perhaps small P Puritan cause. The city's allegiance continues to be an open question actually into the civil war,

which we can return to. But it was thought by some of those in Parliament, so exploiting this anti-bishop sense, they felt, oh, it's quite nice to have a bit of energy on the streets of London, the wind at our back, as we're having these debates within Parliament, for example. Well, they could certainly impose a measure of pressure and fear on the minority that was against them. For instance, the defenders of Stratford were completely character assassinated as Stratfordians, enemies of their country. And it's very interesting to see the minority that did dare to stand with Stratford. Hyde was not among them. And some unexpected people were,

for instance, the great lawyer, authority, parliamentarian, John Selden, mentor of both Hyde and Whitlock, was firmly a Stratfordian because he could see in legal terms there was no case against Stratford. And he spoke the truth. He wasn't going to be intimidated by some mob. But often you find future royalists stayed quiet and voted for Stratford's death, while future parliamentarians in a few cases pointed out the problems of the case. But you mentioned the mob, you might get a few windows broken if you were on the wrong side of that argument, according to the street. I think it would have been terrifying. Yes, I mean, your name would have been known and shouted. You would have been identified with

potpourri, this sort of nebulous concept, a slightly aestheticising high church with some vaguely more Catholic resembling doctrine becomes conflated with allegiance to the actual Pope. A lot of tarring with rather unjustified brushes going on. Okay, so Charles is willing to compromise on some of these things and talk to them about tax raising measures and his ability to prosecute people, etc. But he's getting increasingly annoyed. But their list of grievances seems to be expanding, does it? Because they're now moving into church reform. And at some stage, Charles, what, he just draws the line, saying, I'm no longer prepared to keep giving up

parts of my power. I think it's not so much Charles drawing the line, but even more interestingly, a large section of the Commons itself drawing the line. Now, many lords are already on the King's side of the Commons is the crucial question here. We get to this point where the Commons essentially splits halfway down the middle. There's also a rebellion in Ireland now, caused, among other things, by the death of Stratford, an effective governor of Ireland. So there are two rebellions going up, even more need for troops to repress these rebellions. No question of how to pay for them. A question of who should command troops, whether the generals should be nominated by the Crown or by Parliament. So much is going on. And at this

point, Pym is trying to burn further bridges by dredging up more old grievances in this document called the Grand Remonstrance, which is a huge list of almost by the king and his advisors as the leader of the members of the commons who are sympathetic to the king. And it's only won by Pym's side by 11 votes. So it's really a handful that could go either way. And so the point is, in a way, the king has achieved a propaganda victory here. The extremism of Pym and his friends has led almost half of the Commons, of what was once a pretty united reforming Commons, to think that the King's case has some merit. And one of those men is Hyde. Absolutely. In fact, arguably the most consequential. Yeah. But his old buddy has gone the other way. Yes, but it's a very narrow thing. And in the case of the Grand Remonstrance debate itself, although we can't know for sure, it seems to me fairly clear that Whitlock and Hyde voted on the same side, who should ultimately nominate commanders to deal with Irish

rebellions and so on, whether the nation's sword should be in the royal hand or the parliament's hand. And in this debate, Whitlock actually attempts to engineer a compromise answer. So even in that debate, he doesn't firmly nail his colours to parliament's masks. He tries to come up with a peaceful option that will please everyone. He fails very honourably, whereas Hyde commits to the king and to the tradition whereby the king has always had control, by definition, of his office over the nation's armed forces. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about the Civil War. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. When you're talking about who's in charge of the armed forces, you are beginning to get into some pretty dangerous territory, aren't you?

Absolutely. I mean, you mentioned the Thirty Years' War earlier. We're talking about a kingdom, a militarily inexperienced kingdom. We've got a few ramshackle sailors who've had bad times in wars with France and Spain. But basically, the kingdom has been at peace for an awfully long time. And the Thirty Years' War, meanwhile, has been not yet called the Thirty Years' War. A nameless religious monstrosity of a war has been blazing throughout Germany. And now people like Whitlock conjure in their speeches, they conjure the ghosts of ancient Rome through texts like Lucan, the Roman civil wars, and also they're always aware of the continental civil wars.

They warn of what will happen if this is imported to England. They warn with extraordinary and depressing prophecy of mercenaries burning down your farmsteads and ravishing your wives. But hang on, why has this escalated so quickly? At what stage do you think they opened their minds to the fact, I mean, admittedly, there was a war going on in British soil, the Scots were occupying the north-east of England, but the idea of a civil war, where does that really, can you identify where that begins?

The civil war within England itself is a remarkably late development, I think. I think. I think very late into the summer of 1642, parliamentarian politicians and MPs are still claiming that they don't see any real prospect of conflict with the king, that they think it's all a game of poker, that the king will surely back down. So you have the king issuing his medieval archaic commissions of array on the one hand, you have parliament pushing through a technically illegal militia ordinance with no consent from the king on the other. So they both have these incomplete legal

instruments to raise forces. Whichever side you're on, you're illegal, according to how things have always been done. There's certainly no talk ever of getting rid of the king, with the exception of one extraordinary and eccentric man, oddly enough, a close friend of Hyde's initially called Harry Martin, who's a sort of notorious free thinking drunk and says, one man is not wise enough to govern the kingdom, but everyone writes him off as a maniac. Everyone else is just talking about how we get the king and parliament to work together. Well, you took us the summer of 1642. I'm just going to drag you slightly back now because we, after the grand remonstrance, you know, huge debate, we do have the king dashing into parliament

itself to arrest people, which is usually seen as one of the great milestones. What happens there? That's quite right. And it's fascinating because the king had just taken the step of making Hyde's a close friend, the extremely moderate and reluctant royalist Falkland, and another ally of theirs, Culpeper. He'd made them ministers underneath him. And yet, at the same time, he embraced this course that they considered disastrous and detestable of attempting to arrest five members of the commons and also one member member of the Lords. A totally cack-handed operation. If it had gone well, it would have still been outrageous, but it might have strengthened his position. In fact, he had the worst of all worlds. He failed to get what he called his birds.

They were allowed to escape partly by the cunning contrivance of the Speaker, birds. They were allowed to escape partly by the cunning contrivance of the Speaker, Lent Hall, who I think is a fascinating figure who arguably continues to assist people he likes on both sides. I think he might have slightly winked at Hyde's escape from Parliament later. I see him as a brave human and undoctrinaire figure. But the birds were allowed to fly. The king played his hand. He played it badly. Why did he play that hand? Rumours are extremely contorted. There are many possible culprits involved.

One is an extraordinary character, in many ways the Boris Johnson of the age, called Lord Digby. Another is the queen and the circle around her. Another is the king's drunken Scottish childhood friend, Will Murray. We don't quite know how the story leaked and the arrest was frustrated, but there are a dozen explanations. So the king gallops into Parliament.

Is it right no sovereign has ever stepped foot in the House of Commons since that moment? Yes, I believe it is. So he dashes in, he says, I see the birds have flown. He fails to arrest them. But for those who argue that the king is behaving autocratically, like someone getting a bit high on their own supply of divine rights ideology, then it does play into their hands. I mean, he does look like, he looks pretty autocratic,

dashing in at the head of soldiers to arrest members of parliament. Well, of course, Oliver Cromwell would do it many times in the future, but crucially successfully. Isn't the problem less that he appears autocratic, but that he actually fails to be autocratic? Yes, that's always the killer. Yeah, absolutely. It's the worst of both worlds to be an ineffective autocrat. I mean, that's terrible. Okay, so even after that summer of 1642, so this is the point at which both sides are sort of trying to govern,

I suppose. They're both issuing, I can't say legislation, whatever they're both issuing, ordinances. Yes, and there's a lot of propaganda war going on in which Hyde and Whitlock from their by now opposing camps are both intimately involved. And again, it's a propaganda war that the king arguably is successful in, very much not preaching divine right, but instead preaching mixed monarchy tradition, the way things have always been done. And he manages, despite an innate disadvantage in men and ammunition and money, to gain enough of a party to keep a stalemate to victory civil war in action. But what's interesting, the summer of 1642, events on the ground seem to start accelerating. For example, just near me in Portsmouth, the garrison famously declare for the king.

I mean, is the political centre starting to sort of lose control of events in the kingdom? centre starting to sort of lose control of events in the kingdom? I certainly think this strange situation of commissions of array and the militia ordinance and the deputy lieutenants appointed by parliament does cause abundant events of local interest, shall we say. The one which gets most attention in my book perhaps is Bulstrad Whitlock's role as a deputy lieutenant. He's a slightly unlikely soldier as a rather delicate lawyer, but quite an enthusiastic one. And as deputy lieutenant, he arrests a royalist notable, the Earl of Berkshire, in the act of trying to have a commission of array

read out, raise some royalist troops in Watlington. And so, sorry, deputy lieutenant, this is a sort of a shadow chain of administrators all over the country, separate from royal government, basically. Deputy lieutenants are the military men for parliament at this point, and they are mostly MPs. Right. And they are seeking to wield executive power in areas of the country. They are raising troops to deal with the king kings, in their view, illegally raised troops via the commissions of array. And their job is also to stop these commissions of array, to nip them in the bud, to stop them being read out. The Earl of Berkshire wasn't the only royalist

noble or notable who was simply essentially kidnapped. Before he could read out his scroll and call out a group of stalwart county Adonises, he was, you know, hoisted onto a horse and taken off. Are your two protagonists, do they have an official break? Do they say farewell to each other? That's such an interesting question. I think they have several in a way, but also their relationship is unbroken, even when they're on opposite sides. There is a letter, a rather rueful and in a way almost dryly amusing and deeply ambiguous letter that Hyde writes to Whitlock at the point where he is in the midst of a rather deceptive scheme for deserting to the king and also getting the great seal for which normal government requires the great seal as an object to function. Hyde

gets that removed from parliament in a heist while running after the king, all while claiming to have a medical note to recuperate in the country. But at the same time, he's up to all these tricks. He writes Whitlock a friendly valedictory letter in a rather understated way. They continue to meet, but increasingly they meet in the context of diplomats negotiating on opposite sides, both in public and in private. And it does seem eventually that their correspondence tails off, if we believe Whitlock as well. So it's a strange summer of both sides trying to demonstrate their control, that they are in fact in charge. It's a proper old-fashioned battle for running the country, I suppose, and dispersing patronage. But when does Charles

raise his standard? He raises it at Nottingham in August, I believe. Charles has a sort of array of not-quite-capitals, all of them rather depressing. There's York, which is filled with controversy because the Court of the North has just been abolished by Charles's now friend Hyde. And a lot of the local notables are pissed off about this and furious to find Hyde at the king's side having just abolished their court. That's a strange paradox. And then later on, Nottingham, the raising of the standard is a uniquely depressing affair. The banner sort of flops in the wind. The motto is extremely uninspiring.

Give unto Caesar his due. Later on, there's Shrewsbury, which they managed to sort of bustle into with the help of a friendly Anglican cleric that Hyde gets on side. But it's not exactly a grand entrance. There are a lot of makeshift capitals with Oxford, of course, laying in the future. And we should say the reason there are all these slightly depressing and satellite capitals is, we should have said, Charles flees London. He worries for the safety of himself and his family and then can't get back into the capital.

And the capital is a big, powerful, rich place and hugely important port. It is the centre of the money. It's a great loss to Charles. The Navy is essentially on Parliament's side, most of the commerce, as you say. I found one interesting aspect, the cellars and larders. It seems that the Royalists, once they'd got hold of Oxford, at least the more elite among them, could lead a fairly pleasant life, though expensive, with game, fish and college sellers while they lasted. But also the parliament would emphasise that they could still

import expensive wines from abroad. Their diplomats would throw wonderful feasts and invite all the royalist courtiers to sort of see what they were missing in a way. But yes, the king loses London permanently. He will return to it only as a man under prosecution. And the Navy is so important. I don't need to tell listeners this podcast my love of maritime history, but the fact that the Parliament controls the Navy will prove arguably ultimately decisive. But our two gentlemen have chosen opposing sides. The King has raised his banner, as you say, with his unbelievably tin-haired motto. I love that render of the Caesar.

England is at war in the second half of 1642. It's amazing how us humans adapt to things. I mean, do either of your two gentlemen express incredulity, amazement, or do we just move on? Do we accept new realities and suddenly these two men find themselves as part of opposing war machines? accept new realities, and suddenly these two men find themselves as part of opposing war machines. I think Whitlock is, by common consent, author of the most articulate expression of amazement about the process you described. He makes a little speech that he obviously rightly

thought was so great that he repeated it in a letter to his wife, word for word. Who has not been so pleased themselves that when they got home, quoted themselves at length to their partner? Exactly. Here it is. It is strange to note how we have insensibly slid into this beginning of a civil war by one unexpected accident after another, as waves of the sea which have brought us thus far. And we scarce know how, but from paper combats, by declarations, remonstrances, protestations, votes, messages, answers and replies, we are now come to the question of raising forces and naming a general and officers of an army. Amazing.

It's such an extraordinary story. So our two protagonists have decided where their loyalties lie. England is at war. There are years of violence ahead. And you will join us in the next episode of this podcast. Tell us how that war goes. Indeed. And we'll find out about not only the fate of England and the fate of the kingdoms, but also the fate of our protagonists as well. But in the meantime, people need to go and buy your book so

they can spoil it for themselves. Tell us what your book is called. Ah, yes. Critical. My book is Friends and Youth, Choosing Sides in the English Civil War. So people can get that and do a bit of background reading for the next episode. Minou, see you next time. Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, folks, that brings the end of this episode. We are in a state of war. The king has raised his banner. Render unto Caesar. What a rallying call. It's the autumn. It's the fall of 1642. War has been declared and we're getting ready for some fighting. Episode

two is coming out Wednesday. We'll be hearing about how the fighting went, what happened to our two protagonists, and how that first civil war eventually came to an end. So make sure you tune back in. Remember to like and subscribe wherever you get your pods. you