When England panicked, Catholics were usually the first to suffer. Although they were only around 1 per cent of the population, those who stayed in the old faith were a perpetual source of fear and concern for the majority. In the good times, neighbours tended to downplay this, but in times of crisis the uneasy tolerance could quickly strain.
The tension had been evident from the first days of the Long Parliament the previous year. Early speeches by Pym and others blamed England’s political woes on ‘papists’. Meanwhile, the violence began. Within days of Parliament meeting, a crowd attacked and hurled stones at Catholics attending the queen’s chapel. Then, on 21 November 1640, a respected old magistrate Peter Heywood was to be found in a busy Westminster Hall carrying a list of ‘suspected and notorious papists’ living nearby. Heywood had been one of those who, in 1605, had apprehended Guy Fawkes in the cellars under Parliament: it had been him who had seized the Gunpowder plotter’s lamp. This time, Heywood was approached by a man called John James, who stabbed him. James was unhinged – angry that Heywood had put him in the stocks a month ago. Yet most people just assumed that he was a Catholic terrorist. Heywood survived the stabbing, but the House of Commons – on Pym’s motion – ordered James’s hand to be cut off (though it was never actually done).
By the summer of 1641, with tension mounting after Charles’s journey to Scotland, Peter Heywood – now happily recovered – was once again called upon to search the cellars under the Lords for barrels of powder. Whether there was a credible threat, or whether this was just theatre, is not quite clear. Either way, the persecution of Catholics had already taken a bloodier turn. After years of relative disuse, the savage laws against priests and Jesuits were suddenly put into play. On 26 July, an 81-year-old called William Ward, after being convicted at the Old Bailey, was hung, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn – his body parts left to rot around the City. By September, in which month another priest was executed, an Irish Catholic living at Covent Garden felt unable to leave his lodgings, ‘the persecution is so fearfully cruel and hot’. Queen Henrietta Maria saw this too. ‘I feel worse about the suffering of Catholics and others who serve the king than I do about myself,’ she wrote to her sister. In the Commons, the paranoia and repression was becoming frenzied even before news came of the Irish rebellion. But that made things much worse. Some dared call it the ‘Queen’s Rebellion’, and there were, said Pym, ‘secret forces’ that were ‘ready in some places’. There had been ‘secret meetings’ in Hampshire, he said, with various Catholics hatching some ‘wicked design’ or other. Most worrying of all, young Prince Charles was spending a lot of time at the queen’s residence at Oatlands, where it was believed the heir to the throne would ‘receive no good there for soul nor body’.
With the king absent in Scotland, his heir coming under the direct instruction of the Catholic queen was concerning indeed. An order was quickly forthcoming that Prince Charles be removed from the custody of his mother and returned to Richmond. It was an issue that united both sides in Parliament. A committee of four peers, comprising three king’s party men and one Junto supporter, was tasked with drafting a message. Then the Earl of Holland, once a friend to the queen but now a Junto man, and an associate of Lucy Carlisle, was despatched with it to Oatlands. It was a nervous few weeks for the queen. Around the same time she was visited by a local gentleman who said he had been told torendezvous with an armed band, on Parliament’s instruction. She took this as a direct threat and quickly got weapons to as many people in the palace as possible, including the kitchen servants, and waited. Showing what was to become a characteristic fortitude, she took the air in the great park while reports came in of around twenty mounted men in the area. Word was sent to Colonel Goring at Portsmouth, in case she needed to bolt. But, for now, the alarm passed.
In such jittery times, the raising of military force became the single defining issue. The king had written to Parliament from Scotland, telling them he thought the Irish rebellion was of the utmost seriousness, and that it required a ‘sharp war’. He and Parliament were in close agreement about this. The question was how to do it, and under what authority. Here the prospects for concord were not good at all. Neither side, in essence, could trust the other with an armed force. It was a thoroughly tricky issue.
The king’s northern army had been disbanded that summer, so that couldn’t be used. The most obvious solution was therefore simply to raise a new force of volunteers. As D’Ewes himself told the Commons with characteristic antiquarian pomposity, Henry II had once conquered Ireland without conscripting a man. But, to the Junto, a volunteer force like this ran a considerable risk. Many who signed up were likely to be disgruntled veterans of the old royal army: men who broadly despised Parliament and who were therefore dangerous people to give weapons to. Recent reports from around London suggested the searches ordered in late October were having some effect, and the disbanded soldiers had been dispersed. There was little appetite for gathering them together again, for it might provide Charles with yet another opportunity to pursue military force against his political opponents.
The other option, preferred by the Junto, was to create a new ‘pressed’ army, that is: one of conscripts. These could be recruited afresh, creating a rookie force, but a less angry one. Yet, as D’Ewes pointed out, this would require the passing of a bill. Englishmen could not be forced to serve in an army, any more than they could be compelled to pay taxes, without first giving their consent to it via their representatives in Parliament. A bill, though, would need to get the royal assent, and the king was in Scotland. The only way around this would be to pass an ordinance without the king, but this was another radical precedent. To raise an army without the king’s assent would be a major step into the unknown.
There was an obvious third possibility, which was to call again on the Scots. In the eyes of the Westminster Parliament, Ireland was a dominion of England, so it was the southern kingdom’s responsibility. Yet Scotland was geographically closer and had a more reliable track record of armed mobilisation in recent years. More to the point, as D’Ewes argued in one of his fastidiously self- reported speeches, much of Ireland was now ‘planted’ by Scots. And, as the parliamentary commissioners in Edinburgh suggested, the Scottish ‘redshanks’ (Highlanders) were particularly suited to the coming campaign, they being the ‘fittest soldiers to be sent against the Irish being able to grapple with them in their bogs’.
Charles wouldn’t like it, though. Frankly, he’d had his fill of his northern kingdom, and he wasn’t likely to concede them the creation of yet another Scottish armed host. Thus, with all military options unacceptable to one side or the other, England was firmly stuck in political deadlock.
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As November progressed, MPs were attending Parliament in a state of ever more feverish paranoia, and the sense of fear fed into a new, radical drive by the Junto to gain control of the state. On November, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, Pym made a remarkable proposal. In a so-called ‘Additional Instruction’, he demanded that the king remove his ‘evil counsellors’ and only appoint those acceptable to Parliament. If the king didn’t accept, Pym added what amounted to a threat. Parliament would feel absolved from any responsibility towards Ireland.
Next came a motion from the MP for Cambridge, Oliver Cromwell. On 6 November, he proposed that the Earl of Essex be given power to call out the militia south of the River Trent, ‘upon all occasions’. Essex had been appointed as Lord General of the South when the king went to Scotland, but Cromwell’s suggestion would have granted him similar authority from Parliament. It was another assault on the royal prerogative.
The Commons was now at last much better attended than it had been. MPs were drifting back as the plague continued to lift. Around a half or more were there. By the second week of the month, the Commons was finally starting to debate the great Remonstrance: the projected grand statement on what had been achieved and what was still to be done. It was tricky business, but it was now the centrepiece of the Junto’s political strategy. The text itself was long, and took considerable time to read out loud. As soon as the house fell to debate, members rose to add their own‘oppressions and grievances’, which the clerk dutifully noted. Over the next two weeks, the Remonstrance would be discussed and edited, and to an extent, watered down. An attack on the Book of Common Prayer was dropped and replaced with an affirmation not to cast ‘aspersions or scandal’ on it. A move to take away bishops’ lands was abandoned, as was an attempt to defend the September Commons order about ‘popish’ church fittings.
And yet, the greater purpose of the Remonstrance was still remarkably strident. It held a torch to government mismanagement. There had been, the text alleged, ‘a malignant and pernicious design of subverting the fundamental laws and principles of government, upon which the religion and justice of this kingdom are firmly established’. Religion and laws had been undermined by bad government and bad counsellors to the king. And if ill counsels were the major issue, then the implied solution was to remove control of appointments from the king and to give it to Parliament.
Edward Nicholas could see this plainly. He also noted a key feature: the date at which these alleged ill counsels had begun was the third year of the king’s reign, that is around 1627. The critical event at this point was the Forced Loan, of course, as well as a notorious official prayer campaign in favour of divine right kingship. But as Nicholas pointed out, this also meant the Remonstrance couldn’t simply be a piece of puff for the current Parliament. Rather, it was trying to say something deeper – more structural. It wouldn’t be enough to simply remove the current crop of officers (who after all included many Junto supporters). Only a constitutional revolution could solve the problems highlighted. ‘You must needs speak with such of my servants that you may best trust, in my name,’ Charles wrote to Nicholas, ‘that by all means possible this may be stopped.’
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Parliament was fighting the encroaching winter as well as the sheer weight of the business. By 5 p.m. each day, it was starting to get dark. One evening in mid-November, it had become so gloomy by 4.30 that D’Ewes could hardly see to write his notes, so he made a rather facetious motion that ‘we may sit according to the ancient use of Parliaments having the use of as well of our eyes as well as our ears’, and that candles be brought in. In the end, the house simply waited for a break in the debate and rose, before the clock tower across the yard had even struck five.
Nicholas’s royal party were steadily becoming more organised. Particularly notable was the father-and-son team of the Earl of Bristol and Lord Digby in the upper house. ‘Your majesty,’ wrote Nicholas on 12 November, after a particularly heroic stonewalling in the Lords, ‘may be pleased to take notice of the singular good service that was in that business done by those 2 noblemen, and especially by the son, who (I hear) did beyond admiration.’ Both had been reformists, but now their transition to king’s party men seemed well-nigh complete. ‘Thank them from me,’ replied Charles.
Meanwhile, Nicholas and the queen were working together to rally those moderate and royalist members who remained absent. One, in the Lords, was the Earl of Carnarvon, who was sitting things out in his house just twenty miles outside London. The queen took notice, and told Nicholas to tell Carnarvon to get back to Westminster with rather more haste. Alas, he was not at home when the letter arrived, so it was returned to the queen, who promptly burned it. Her enquiries had, though, unearthed that Lords Cottington and Dunsmore, plus the Earl of Southampton, were all available to come to Parliament – or, for the time being to send proxies. So they were duly summoned.
While the queen tried to establish the whereabouts of various loyal peers, Nicholas focused on absent members of the Commons. He realised, as did the king, that these men constituted a vast untapped resource, who – if they could be cajoled into returning – were likely to provide a decisive boost to the new royalist party. By November, both Nicholas and Charles were writing to each other, toying with the idea of a royal proclamation to order these men back to Westminster.
For now, though, the royal firewall in Parliament was strong enough. And although Nicholas himself was rather ill from around the 11th to the 18th, and therefore not quite his usual busy self, there was enough momentum in the party to keep it active and effective. Whatever radical measures the Junto proposed were going nowhere. Any legislation Pym and his allies succeeded in getting through the Commons was increasingly likely to stick in the Lords, and would continue to do so – as Northumberland grumbled – ‘without some alteration’.
Excerpted from THE BLOOD IN WINTER: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642 by Jonathan Healey. Copyright © 2025 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
