Nebuchadnezzar's Dream

I recently mentioned, in a response to Calvin, the Fifth Monarchists and Thomas Venner, a movement and a name that will be familiar to students of seventeenth century England and the millenarian madness that gripped the country as a fever grips a body. I thought I would say a bit more about this.

The movement itself took its name from the Second Book of Daniel, where Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, has a dream interpreted for him by the prophet;

The king had had a dream which greatly perturbed him. He burned with eagerness to know what it meant, but reasoned that he could be sure that an interpretation was correct only if the interpreter was able to narrate the dream itself without being told it. Since none of his masters of occult lore was able to do this, the king ordered his captain of the guard to execute all the savants of Babylon. The officer proceeded to do so, and since Daniel and his companions came under the definition of savants, they were also to be put to death. On asking the captain of the guard for the reason and receiving his answer, Daniel persuaded him to discontinue the slaughter for a few hours and promised that at the end of that time he would come up with the answer to the king's questions. Then he and his companions prayed, and the solution was revealed to Daniel in a dream. Brought before the king, Daniel narrated the king's dream and interpreted it to mean that Nebuchadnezzar's domination of the whole world would be followed by the successive world ascendancies of three other monarchies, after which God would set up a fifth monarchy that would destroy the four previous monarchies and would endure forever.

One of the most important things to bear in mind about the politics of the mid-seventeenth century, when the world truly was turned upside down, is that the Bible became a kind of manifesto, used to interpret and explain events in the secular world, used, moreover, as a guide for action. As we have come to understand, there is no greater danger than the naïve and literal interpretation of sacred texts.

The Fifth Monarchists were a group of people who believed in the literal truth of Daniel’s prophecy, that the four monarchies had come and gone, evidenced finally by the execution of Charles I in January, 1649, and that the Second Coming was immanent, in which Jesus would set up the Fifth and final kingdom of the earth.

So who were they, these people, the Taliban come Marxists of their day? They were the godly in league with God; at least they were according to Thomas Gataker, a leading seventeenth century clergyman and theologian. In practice they were an odd mixture of puritan enthusiasts: soldiers, clergymen, tradesmen, small farmers and the urban poor. Some of them wanted to transform the world by the power of prayer, others by the power of politics.

In normal times history would have passed these people by unnoticed. But the Civil Wars followed by the Interregnum was the most abnormal time in the whole of English history. Prophecy, in one form or another, gave shape to dreams. Besides texts drawn from Daniel and the Book of Revelations, there were popular contemporary works, notably Henry Archer’s The Personal Reign of Christ upon Earth, published in 1642. Archer was nothing if not exact, always a danger with prophets. The Jews would be converted, he said, in 1650, the Turks destroyed - presumably meaning Muslims in general - and Christ would return to earth in 1700. But that wasn’t quick enough for some, as the removal of one king in 1649 clearly portended the arrival of another.

In the meantime they had to make do with Oliver Cromwell. It was in the court of this ersatz king that the Fifth Monarchists achieved their greatest influence. The most influential of all was Thomas Harrison, one of the men who condemned King Charles to death. It was on his urging that Cromwell summoned in 1653 the Parliament of Saints or the Nominated Parliament, better known as the Barebones Parliament after one of its members, a Fifth Monarchist who went by the name of Praise-God Barebone. Yes, that really was his name!

This was the high noon of the Fifth Monarchy men, but as saints are notoriously inept in managing earthly affairs, the Barebones Parliament collapsed after only a few months, dismissed by the more conservative elements around Cromwell, in no mood for millenarian radicalism. Thereafter the movement went in to decline, horrified by the establishment of the Protectorate, King Cromwell and no King Jesus. For these men the new Lord Protector was none other than the Anti-Christ.

Plotting away in the background, they immersed themselves in fresh prophecies, some centring on the year 1666 and its supposed relationship to the Number of the Beast from the Book of Revelations. In other words, it was a case of paradise postponed, until next time, when the Beast will be succeeded by Beauty. Cromwell went and a new king came, though not King Jesus.

Enter Charles II, of blessed memory; enter in his shadow one Thomas Venner, a cooper by trade. Actually Venner was not completely unknown to history, having been involved in a 1657 plot to depose Cromwell. Now, in their senescence, the rump of the Fifth Monarchists gathered around this petty prophet, intending to overthrow the newly restored king. In his biography of Charles II Ronald Hutton describes these people as politically mad if not clinically so, a judgement with which I’m in complete agreement.

Armed with the power of prophecy and little more, Venner and some fifty men began a rebellion against the government in early January 1661, parading around London, shouting out “King Jesus and the heads upon the gates.” There were to be heads upon the gates alright – their own.

Venner’s Rising, as it came to be known, lasted all of four days, more of a kind of minor riot with intent. Suffering from multiple wounds received in fighting with royal troops, Venner was executed along with a number of others. Thereafter the movement slipped into the final shadows, not even revived by the portentous events of 1666, when life in London really did become more beastly than usual.

Good Boy

The May edition of the BBC History Magazine carries a portrait of King Charles I on the front cover. To the left of his head the text runs Sorcery in the Civil War, followed by smaller font announcing How King Charles I used witchcraft as a weapon in his clash with parliament.

This is bold stuff indeed, certainly enough to draw the curious inside the covers, anyone beguiled by the suggestion that a British king resorted to witchcraft, especially the only Anglican saint. It might be an excellent editorial hook but, if you do look inside, you are bound to be disappointed; for the whole thing is utterly misleading, grounds for possible prosecution under the Trade Descriptions Act!

The story is not about the king at all – it’s about a dog. Specifically it’s about Boy, the poodle that once belonged to Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the king’s nephew and the leading commander of the Royal cavalry during the English Civil War. In The Prince and the Devil Dog Mark Stoyle, professor of history at Southampton University, examines some of the myths that attached themselves to the poor beast. It has nothing at all to do with Charles but it’s still a jolly good tale about a tail!

Legends still cling to Boy even so far as the present day, some repeated by Terry Deary in The Slimy Stuarts, part of his Horrible Histories series, amusing interpretations of the past for children. There is even confusion over exactly what kind of dog Boy was. In Cromwell, a biopic starring Richard Harris, he is shown as a toy, as if a fighting prince would carry a lapdog into battle! No, though we can’t be precise, Boy was clearly some kind of hunting poodle, more akin to the standard breeds of today. In contemporary engravings he is shown on the ground just to the front of the mounted Rupert.

The interesting thing is that though pamphlets favourable to the parliamentary cause were quick to attribute a satanic quality to the king’s dashing cavalry commander, it was the royalists themselves who brought Boy into the picture in an attempt to poke fun at the superstitious gullibility of the other side. John Cleveland, a Royalist poet and polemicist, penned some verses in late 1642, claiming that the Roundheads all believed in Prince Rupert’s magical powers, and that Boy was his familiar spirit, the demonic shape-shifter that Satan grants to his acolytes. The concept was certainly familiar enough to those reared on traditional fears about witchcraft.

Cleveland had some fun with this, saying that Rupert taught Boy to cock his leg every time the name of John Pym, the leading Parliamentarian, was mentioned. It was a satire suggesting that the Parliamentary party were all superstitious fools, but it came to be regarded by subsequent generations of historians as a true insight into their beliefs, a myth that made it so far into modern English schoolrooms by way of the Horrible Histories.

Cleveland’s satire was such a hit on the Royalist side that by the beginning of 1643, as Stoyle says, they were even drinking toasts to Boy’s health. One anonymous Royalist writer went so far to compose a whole pamphlet about the dog, entitled Observations upon Prince Rupert’s White Dog Called Boy. It was written in the form of a letter, a parody of the canting style favoured by the Puritans, supposedly from a spy in Oxford, the royalist capital, who detailed Boy’s various ‘powers.’ To give a little extra bite the author claimed that Boy was not a real dog at all but a “handsome white woman” in the shape of a dog, a source of sexual favours for the Prince.

It was now that Boy really achieved prominence on both sides, the most familiar familiar England ever produced. It was a huge laugh, a piece of Cavalier condescension at the expense of their opponents, going so far to create a permanent image of the Roundheads. But poor Boy, or Girl, depending on your point of view, came to a sad end, all his powers notwithstanding. He was among the many Cavaliers who fell in July 1644 at the Battle of Marston Moor not far from the city of York. In revenge for the previous mockery Parliamentary writers wrote gleefully of his death.

But Cleveland, and Boy, have had the more lasting revenge, still colouring popular views of their unattractive opponents so far as the present day, still showing the Roundheads as literal-minded, superstitious and joyless fanatics. Well done Boy!

Freedom in love

I love poetry as I love words. Poetry is language at its purest, the rise and fall of words, of assonance and of dissonance, the simple music that lies at the heart of expression. I can't write poetry, it's a talent beyond me, but I simply can't imagine life without it, I can't imagine not appreciating the beauty of the music of the spheres. To have no understanding or appreciation of poetry is, so far as I am concerned, to have lead in the soul.

I can still recite the poems I learned in early school, still be thrilled by those wonderful verses. There are so many poets I admire, both ancient and modern. There is no point in listing them all but Catullus, Virgil, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Lovelace, Rochester Dryden, Pope, Keats, Swinburne, Christina Rossetti, Tennyson, Yeats, Rilke, Rupert Brooke, T. S Elliot, Stevie Smith and Philip Larkin all come high, though none higher than the sublime John Donne.

But it was Richard Lovelace that I was thinking of recently, the seventeenth century Cavalier poet, specifically of To Althea From Prison, one of the most moving poems ever written, a great tribute to love and to loyalty, the love of a man for a woman, the loyalty of a subject to his king. I find it impossible to say just how much these verses move me, particularly the last. If I have freedom in my love and in my soul am free, angels alone that sore above enjoy such liberty. Is there any finer sentiment than that? God bless your memory, Richard Lovelace, and God bless the memory of King Charles the Martyr.

When love with unconfined wings
Hovers within my gates;
And my divine ALTHEA brings
To whisper at the grates;
When I lye tangled in her haire,
And fetterd to her eye,
The birds, that wanton in the aire,
Know no such liberty.

When flowing cups run swiftly round
With no allaying THAMES,
Our carelesse heads with roses bound,
Our hearts with loyal flames;
When thirsty griefe in wine we steepe,
When healths and draughts go free,
Fishes, that tipple in the deepe,
Know no such libertie.

When (like committed linnets) I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetnes, mercy, majesty,
And glories of my King.
When I shall voyce aloud, how good
He is, how great should be,
Inlarged winds, that curle the flood,
Know no such liberty.

Stone walls doe not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Mindes innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedome in my love,
And in my soule am free,
Angels alone that sore above
Enjoy such liberty.

A battle too far

Why did King Charles decide to fight at Naseby when the odds were so heavily against the Royalists? Sadly for him, it was not just another battle but the great defining moment of the First Civil War. It blooded the recently formed New Model Army, and gave it a taste for victory it was never to lose. Charles had effectively handed his enemies the one great opportunity that they needed. Defeat was all the more tragic because the campaign had opened with such promise for the Royalist cause.

They had taken the Parliamentary stronghold of Leicester, just as Sir Thomas Fairfax, commander-in-chief of the New Model Army, was forced to abandon the siege of Oxford, the King's headquarters. It had not been Charles' original intention to face Fairfax in battle. Rather, as the enemy approached his camp at Market Harborough on the evening of 13 June, he was intending to withdraw to the north and join up with the garrison at Newark. At the last moment he changed his mind, after his scouts reported that Fairfax was at Naseby. Why? The simple answer is that we do not know for certain.

According the account set down later by Clarendon in his History of the Great Rebellion, a council of war was held in the early hours of 14 June, at which Prince Rupert, an able soldier and the King's best commander, urged that the withdrawal continue. This was opposed by Lord Digby and Jack Ashburnham, Charles' chief civilian advisers, who argued that such a move would be dishonourable and demoralising. Charles agreed and overruled Rupert. But Clarendon, writing in 1671, was drawing on an earlier account by Sir Edward Walker, who was not at the meeting and would appear to have been drawing purely on stories that only began to circulate after the defeat. Digby himself, the chief villain of the occasion, was to deny that any such meeting ever took place.

It seems likely that the story of divided counsels was invented as a 'settling of accounts', devised with the specific intention of passing the blame on to the 'politicians', thus exempting both Charles and Rupert. But it is far more likely, drawing on evidence of previous debates in the royal council, that the decision to fight was theirs and theirs alone. They may have believed that they had the initiative; they may not have known that Fairfax's force outnumbered their own by some 5000 men; they may have believed that New Model Army, as yet untested in open battle, was made up of many green troops. We simply do not know. It was a blunder; we know that much

The Man of Sorrows

When Henrietta Maria, the prospective wife of Charles I, saw his image for the first time in Van Dyke’s triple portrait she is said to have wept. It’s possible to understand why. There is something deeply melancholic in those eyes, in that face, something that might even be described as martyrdom foretold.

The royal couple were eventually married in person (there had been an earlier marriage by proxy) in June 1625, a few month after Charles’ accession to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland. After some initial frigidity, they were to find a deep and lasting happiness, which at least went part of the way to balancing the troubles of Charles unhappy public life.

His was never going to be an easy task. A small, retiring, shy man who spoke with a life-long stutter, he was never meant to be king. That was a role to be played by his older brother Henry, by all accounts an intelligent and personable figure, who gave ever sign of playing the part well. But Henry died in 1612 of typhoid fever, not long before Charles’ twelfth birthday.

As far as governance is concerned, the ways of dealing with people and institutions, Charles, now heir apparent, was given next to nothing in the way of practical training and responsibility from his father, James. But he inherited one particularly dangerous dogma – that monarchs ruled by divine right, by the will of God and not by the will of profane human institutions; not by the will of Parliament.

James had been king of Scotland many years before his accession to the English throne in 1603. There he had been involved in a lengthy struggle with the church; with those, like Reverend Andrew Melville, who inclined to a Presbyterian view, a view which held the king to be just an ordinary member of the church, like any other before God. James embraced divine right, and continental forms of absolutism, as a kind of royal declaration of independence. But what worked in Scotland, with its relatively weak parliamentary tradition, was to be disastrous in England.

Divine right was never going to fit within the English constitutional framework, with assertive traditions of parliamentary self-expression going right back to the Middle Ages. James, unsurprisingly, had a less than comfortable relationship with Parliament. But for all his dogma the King was a trimmer, a pragmatist, who only pushed a point so far. Charles, in contrast, was very much a ‘man of principle’, who hid his shyness and insecurity behind a rigid protocol, behind a jealous regard for the royal dignity; and for him the royal dignity truly was bestowed by God.

The struggle between crown and Parliament was the leitmotiv of Charles’ whole reign. He began badly, so badly that he dispensed with Parliament altogether for eleven years, raising money by any means available. This worked up to a point in ordinary circumstances, but a taste of future trouble came with the attempt to extend the Ship Tax, levied in costal counties for defence purposes, to the rest of the country, leading to the famous prosecution of John Hampden. But the whole act of royal management, of royal juggling, if you will, was in danger of falling if something extraordinary happened, and the extraordinary happened: the Scots rose in rebellion over the introduction of a new Anglican-style Prayer Book. Soon after the so-called Bishops’ Wars began.

Charles had not the military resources to repel or subdue the Scots. Such force that was available collapsed in 1640. With his treasury empty the king was obliged to summon the first assembly in eleven years - the Short Parliament, which proved unwilling to grant supply until certain grievances were addressed, and after so long a gap there were many, particularly over the question of religion and church government. Parliament, dominated by puritans like John Hampden, John Pym and latterly Oliver Cromwell, was suspicious of the high Anglicanism favoured by Charles, and the Catholicism embraced by the Queen.

The Short Parliament was dismissed after a few weeks with nothing settled, but as the crown was practically bankrupt Charles had no option but to summon another- the Long Parliament, which was destined only finally to exit the stage of history twenty years later. Now things really got out of hand. No sooner was peace made with the Scots than a major rebellion broke out in Ireland; the balls came down one by one. In England Charles mismanaged Parliament so badly that he was obliged to leave London in early 1642 in the tensest of political atmospheres. After some lengthy manoeuvring by both sides, the English Civil War finally broke out later that summer.

The war, in its first stage, was to last until 1646, leaving the King totally defeated and a prisoner of his enemies. Still he refused to compromise, seeing himself as a key player, playing one side off against the other; the Scots against the English, the New Model Army, which came into existence in 1645, against the Parliament, the monarchists against the republicans. The only effect this had was to radicalise politics still further. Finally, in late 1647, the King entered into a secret compact with the Scots, who promised to send an army into England on his behalf in return for certain religious concessions. The result was the Second Civil War, defeat for the Scots and a death warrant for the King.

Charles’ execution in January 1649 was born of a kind of political necessity; the axe went through his head, it might be said, in the way that Alexander’s sword went through the Gordian Knot. The act, though, had been little better than judicial murder, a decision that could only be secured after the army purged Parliament of all those sympathetic to the King, leaving a compliant and unrepresentative Rump. It was the beginning of a constitutional nightmare, with England eventually slipping into a military dictatorship headed by Cromwell.

Charles finally achieved his martyrdom, a witness for the Anglican ideal that he held so dear. He, more than any other, surely deserved the incorruptible crown.

Great, Good, and Just

Yesterday marked the anniversary of the execution of King Charles I on 30 January, 1649, a cold, tragic day in English history. Here is the poem that always comes to mind when I reflect on his murder and martyrdom

Great, Good, and Just, but I could rate
My grief with thy too rigid fate
I'd weep the world in such a strain
As it should deluge once again
But since thy loud-tongued blood demands supplies
More from Briareus' hands than Argus' eyes
I'll sing thine obsequies with trumpet sounds
And write thine epitaph with blood and wounds

They Called her Babylon

Here is a story about one of my favourite English heroines

Old Lathom House, situated near Ormskirk in Lancashire, has long gone. In the seventeenth century, during the time of the English Civil War, it was the stronghold of the Stanley earls of Derby. The defences were formidable. There was a moat eighteen meters wide and eight meters deep. Within its confines there was a wall eight meters thick, punctuated by nine towers, one flanking the other. In each of these towers there were six pieces of ordnance, three looking in one direction, and three in the other. In the centre, protected by the moat and the walls, stood the main keep, known as the Eagle Tower. But Lathom had a defence more formidable than stones, guns and towers: it had Charlotte de la Tremoüille, Countess of Derby.

In 1644, during the height of the struggle between King and Parliament, James, the seventh earl of Derby, a committed royalist, was ordered to secure the Isle of Man, a hereditary possession of his family. He left Lathom, a royalist island in a puritan sea, in the care of his wife, Charlotte. For the Parliamentary army this was an opportunity, an opportunity to clear Lancashire of the last remaining royalist strongpoint. The task was given to Sir Thomas Fairfax, Black Tom. As he advanced towards Lathom with a force of some two thousand men, equipped with a siege train, the Countess was denounced in sulphuric terms by a puritan minister in Wigan, drawing his text from the Book of Jeremiah:

Put yourself in array against Babylon round about; all ye that bend bow shoot at her; spare no arrows; for she has sinned against the Lord.

When Fairfax arrived before the Lathom in late February 1644 Charlotte had no more than three-hundred men within, some professional soldiers, others not. In a deliberate attempt to conceal the weakness of the defence, the Countess prevaricated when Fairfax called upon her to surrender Lathom on terms. But in the end she called defiance after the latest parley and exchange of proposals;

That she refused this offer, and was truly happy that hers had been refused, protesting that she would rather hazard her life than offer the like again; and that, though a woman and a stranger, divorced from her friends and robbed of her estate she was ready to receive the utmost violence, trusting in God both for protection and deliverance.

With the siege beginning in earnest, the Lathom garrison, as weak as it was, did not await events. Rather repeated surprise sorties were launched against the attackers and the artillery emplacements. In the meantime the Stanley gamekeepers found a new role as expert snipers, shooting from the towers, killing and demoralising the parliamentary soldiers.

At the end of March, Fairfax, whose bombardment made as little impression as his calls for surrender, left for Yorkshire, delegating the furtherance of the siege to Colonel Alexander Rigby, the MP for Wigan, and a fanatical puritan. Although the artillery assault began in real earnest Lathom and Charlotte remained defiant and determined. On 25 April a frustrated Rigby issued yet another summons, the occasion for the Countess’s finest moment;

On Thursday he sends his last message, as he calls it, a furious denunciation to her ladyship to yield up Lathom House, and all the persons, and goods, and arms within it, into his hands, to receive the mercy of the parliament and to return answer the next day by two o’clock. Her ladyship having read this, with a brave indignation calls for the drum, and tells him that, ‘a due reward for his pains is to be hanged up at her gates; but’ sys she, ‘thou art but a foolish instrument of a traitor’s pride; carry this answer back to Rigby’ (with a noble scorn tearing the paper in his sight), ‘and tell that insolent rebel, he shall neither have persons, goods, nor house; when our strength and provision is spent, we shall find a fire more merciful than Rigby’s, and then, if the providence of God prevent it not, my goods and house shall burn in his sight; and myself, children, and soldiers, rather than fall into his hands, will seal our religion and loyalty in the same flame’, which being spoken aloud in her soldier’s hearing they broke into shouts and acclimations of joy, all closing with this general voice, ‘we shall die for his majesty and your honour-God save the king!

This was followed early next morning by yet another sortie, when a battery was captured. By now, acting on the pleadings of the Earl of Derby, Prince Rupert, on his way to York with the main royalist army, diverted to Lathom in late May. Rigby, aware of his approach, withdrew having seen yet another plea for surrender rejected. Having delayed his retreat for too long he was routed at Bolton by Rupert. Afterwards his colours were sent to Charlotte as a trophy.

Bless your memory, my dear lady, and may your name last forever.