Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. Episode 2 Personal Rule.
你好,欢迎收听《革命之路》第二集“个人统治”。
So last time, we blazed through a lot of necessary background and followed King Charles through the first four years of his reign, culminating with his decision in March 1629 to dissolve Parliament and then so help me God never call another one.
If Charles wanted to rule without Parliament, that was fine, but he was going to have to figure out a way to fund his administration without levying any taxes.
This week, we are going to explore some of the admittedly creative but ultimately self-defeating ways Charles raised money without having to raise a Parliament.
We're also going to grapple with the other big question that loomed over the era of personal rule, what will the religion of Britain be?
我们还将应对那个在个人统治时代笼罩其上的另一个重大问题:英国的宗教将会是什么?
These two threads, Finance and Religion, will both come to a head in 1637, at which point event starts sloping dramatically downhill toward revolt, civil war and revolution.
The first thing Charles did after closing up shop on Parliament was close up shop on the wars he and Buckingham had pursued in the first years of his reign.
查尔斯在结束议会营业后所做的第一件事,是结束他和白金汉公爵在他统治的早期所追求的战争营业。
As I said last week, the main reason a monarch needs Parliament is to fund their wars, so as long as the monarch avoids war, he has a shot at avoiding Parliament.
So King Charles worked out a treaty with France in April 1629 and then concluded peace with Spain in November 1630.
所以,查理国王在1629年4月与法国签订了一项条约,然后在1630年11月与西班牙达成了和平协议。
The trick of course would be staying out of future wars, which was not impossible, but with the 30 years war raging on the continent, it was not necessarily probable.
The funny thing though, is that while Charles managed to avoid getting dragged into the 30 years war, he wound up needlessly picking a fight with the Scots in 1637, which is what we're going to get into next week.
With Parliament out of the picture, Charles governed his domains through a semi-formal group of councillors.
没有议会干涉,查尔斯通过一组半正式的顾问统治了他的领土。
Some of them sat on the more formal Prairie Council, the standing body of peers who advised the King, but other councillors were men of lower rank who simply held positions within the royal household that put them in close proximity to Charles on a daily basis.
Some of these advisers were dependable administrators, some flaky courteers, but two men were by far the most talented in terms of intelligence, drive and ambition.
When Charles issued the force loans in 1627, Wentworth refused to pay, and he was locked up for six months, which, so far, is not exactly the early career arc of someone who was about to become so identified with the tyrannies of King Charles.
But the break came when Buckingham was assassinated in 1628, because unlike other members of Parliament who seemed to be using Buckingham as a proxy through which they could wedge wider political, economic and religious reforms, Wentworth really just hated Buckingham, thought he was terrible for England, refused the force loan because he thought Buckingham was going to embezzle half of it and blow the other half on embarrassing military boondoggles, which is pretty much what happened.
When Buckingham was killed, Wentworth was satisfied.
当巴克汉姆被杀时,文特沃斯感到满意。
Charles was alerted to the fact that this smart, energetic, and capable member of the opposition could probably be had at the right price.
查尔斯意识到这位聪明、精力充沛、能力卓越的反对党成员,只要出得起合适的价格,就可能被争取过来。
So the King made Wentworth a vi-count, then appointed him Lord President of the North in 1628.
于是国王封了温特沃斯为子爵,然后在1628年任命他为北部地区的总统。
The North, being the Northern County Senator on York, which at the time formed its own administrative district.
北部是约克郡的北部县议员,当时它形成了自己的行政区域。
Wentworth whipped the North into shape and was named to the Privy Council in 1629.
温特沃斯特把北方整顿有序,并在1629年被任命为内阁特别顾问。
He probably would have risen even higher, even faster, but as talented as he was, he was also harsh and despotic, and he alienated subordinates, colleagues, and superiors wherever he went.
So some of those alienated rivals on the Privy Council convinced King Charles that Wentworth was the best man to run Ireland.
有些在国务院被疏远的对手说服查理王,温特沃斯是管理爱尔兰的最佳人选。
Technically being made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1633 was a promotion, but it also meant being shipped off to Dublin, which is a long way from Whitehall, exactly where Wentworth's rivals wanted him.
But still, he managed to stay in contact with the court, most especially through his friend Bishop Laud, because of course the two most friendless men in England would wind up becoming friends.
Together they hammered out what has become known to history as the thorough policy, which is basically a scheme to establish absolute monarchy in Britain.
他们一起制定了历史上被称为彻底政策的计划,基本上是为了在英国建立绝对君主制。
The religious aspects of this policy were spearheaded by Laud from his new position as Archbishop of Canterbury.
这项政策的宗教方面是由劳德在他担任坎特伯雷大主教的新职位上领导的。
As I mentioned last week, King Charles and his new Archbishop were of one mind about religion. It should be formal, it should be ceremonial, it should be exalted, and most importantly, it should be uniform across all the King's domains.
So with Charles's blessing, Laud launched an effort to bring some uniformity in order to the Church of England. No more of this turning a blind eye to local custom as had been the norm since the Elizabethan settlement.
Through the 1630s, Laud slowly but surely started to establish a harder principle of one set of religious practices for everybody, no exceptions. Most he focused on small fish, congregations of ex-patriates living in Holland, for example, who had started adopting the practices of their Dutch neighbors, then he focused on foreigners living in England, who had been allowed to maintain their own forms of worship.
In a flurry of letters, he demanded that both follow the liturgy of the Church of England or face prosecution. This process then extended out to the various English counties where Puritan-leaning congregations faced demands that altars be placed on the East end of the Church and that they be railed in, that parishioners approached the minister for communion rather than taking it at their seats. Basically, a slew of ceremonial tweaks that the more Puritan congregations had ditched a long time ago because it all smacked of popery.
The idea, like I said, was to bring some uniformity to religious worship in the King's domains. But to an awful lot of people, it came across as an attempt to undermine the Reformation and pave the way for a return to Catholicism.
And it did not help at all that through this same period, Charles was busy indulging the Catholicism of his French-born wife, Queen Henry at a Maria. So on the one hand, you have godly Protestants being prosecuted for resisting Lod's popish innovations, and on the other, you have Catholics now practicing right out in the open.
It did not look good, especially to the Puritan-leaning lords who were also getting pretty ticked off at Charles' batch of illegal fundraising schemes, and who would form the core of opposition when Charles was forced to call a new parliament in 1640 after trying to extend his policy of religious uniformity up to Scotland, which, yeah, he should not have done that.
So who were these Puritan-leaning lords who formed the opposition? And is it even fair at this point to call them an opposition?
那么,这些倾向清教主义的贵族反对派究竟是谁?而且现在称他们为反对派还公正吗?
Historian Conrad Russell, who knows of which he speaks, makes the point repeatedly that right now we should think of these guys as forming a faction within the ruling party rather than a distinct opposition party, which is to say that they may have personally opposed the King's policies but still dutifully carried them out back in the home counties.
But subtleties of tension aside, in a few years, there is going to be a civil war. So who formed the core of what became the parliamentary cause?
但是暂且不谈紧张局势的微妙之处,几年后将会爆发一场内战。那么,到底是谁组成了最初的议会派核心?
In no particular order, we have, first of all, the Earl of Warck, who was one of the largest landowners in England, and whose great grandfather had been one of the key figures in the English Reformation. After being raised to the period in 1619, Warck had focused a great deal of his time and money on privateering expeditions against the hated Spanish and colonization projects in the New World.
Then there was the Earl of Bedford, who had been a strong supporter of the petition of right and stood as one of the main centers of gravity around which this network of dissenting Puritan swirled. Warck, for example, an up-and-coming young Puritan peer, married Bedford's daughter in 1631 and began working closely with his father-in-law on various commercial projects.
Viscount Say and Seely formed another center of gravity, and that's one guy, his name is Viscount Say and Seely. He was a staunch Puritan and clever politician whose home at Broughton Castle became something of a home base for the godly dissidents. Say and Brook were also both heavy investors in New World colonization, and if you've ever been to Old Saberite Connecticut, well, that's where the name comes from.
Viscount Say and Seely成为另一个重心,他就是那个叫做Viscount Say and Seely的人。他是坚定的清教徒和聪明的政治家,他在Broughton Castle的家中成为了虔诚异端的重要基地。Say和Brook也都是新世界殖民的重要投资者,如果你去过Old Saberite Connecticut,那么这个地名就来自他们的名字。
Finally, I'll mention Young Lord Mandavill, who married one of Warck's daughters in 1626, and who we will get to know much better after he inherits his father's title in 1642 and becomes the second Earl of Manchester.
As depressed as these lords were about the state of true religion in England, you'll notice that most of them looked to the Americas as a place where the godly could build communities untainted by heresy.
And there was one colonization project in particular that kept them all tied together during the long years of personal rule, the Providence Island Company. The point of the company was to set up a community in the West Indies that would be run on strict godly principles and maybe engage in a little anti-Spanish piracy on the side.
Most of the Puritan lords I've just mentioned were shareholders, and company business was, if not necessarily an excuse, then certainly a reason for them and their men of business to stay in regular contact. And if talks strayed into larger matters from time to time, well, you know, things happen.
Of the men of business who were brought into the distant godly circle by the Providence Island Company, two deserve special attention. The first is Oliver Sinjin, whose name when you read it is clearly Oliver St. John, but apparently it was pronounced Oliver Sinjin. Sinjin was brought in by Bedford to serve as a lawyer for the Providence Island Company, and he distinguished himself as a brilliant, if humorous attorney. Sinjin is about to catapult to national fame when we get into the ship money case at the end of this episode.
有两个商人被强行引入普罗维登斯岛公司的远离世俗的圈子中,其中有两人特别值得一提。第一个人是奥利弗·辛津(Oliver Sinjin)。当你看到这个名字时,你可能会很清楚地知道它实际上是奥利弗·圣约翰(Oliver St. John),但显然它的发音是奥利弗·辛津。由贝德福德引进的辛津作为普罗维登斯岛公司的律师,以其出色的幽默才能和能力脱颖而出。在接下来的任务中,我们将看到辛津在反对征税上的出色表现,将带领它一鸣惊人,名扬全国。
The other man of business we need to introduce is of course John Pym. John Pym, he is a really important. Pym was born in 1584, so he's actually a little bit older than most of the guys have just rattle off. He had been a member of all three of Charles's first parliaments, which would distinguish him from most of his colleagues in the short and long parliaments, the vast majority of whom were sitting for the first time.
The Earl of Warwick took notice of Pym and hired him to serve his treasure for the Providence Island Company through the 1630s, where he earned the trust and loyalty of the godly peers. So even though the attempt to establish a Puritan Commonwealth in the Caribbean wound up a dismal failure, the company formed a critical link between the men who would emerge as the leaders of the parliamentary opposition in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords in the 1640s.
So broadly speaking, when we talk about the opposition, what we're talking about is an informal network of like-minded men connected by marriage, religion, and commerce, who complained bitterly about the direction Charles was taking the country. Besides their obvious beef with Archbishop Laud for giving Satan the keys to the Church of England, the other thing these men complained about when they got together at Broughton Castle or wherever was the obnoxious schemes Charles and his royal treasures had dreamed up to fund the monarchy without Parliament.
Because if there were some small technical royal prerogative that could be exploited for profit, the king was all for exploiting it. And while Charles slept peacefully at night, satisfied that he was well within his rights as king, his subjects grew deeply annoyed by what they considered a batch of unjust and illegal money grabs. So for example, there were things like monopolies.
Monopolies were royal grants giving a corporation exclusive rights to trade or manufacture something. You know, a monopoly. These monopolies could apply to practically anything. Salt, coal, wine. There was a particularly hated one on soap that was particularly hated because of the monopoly soap was vastly inferior to the soap made by independent craftsman and Bristol. Macarles made money, both selling the monopolies and then collecting portions of the profit. The soap monopoly alone brought in something like 30,000 pounds a year, which was big money in those days. It also ticked off every merchant cut out of the loop because they didn't have the right connections at court.
Besides the monopolies, Charles also revived long dormant medieval laws and started applying them in pretty twisted ways. For example, once upon a time, gentry worth more than 40 shillings annually were supposed to be knighted so that they would be ready for service if, you know, the Vikings invaded. If they skipped knighthood, the king levy to fine. The fine was supposed to prod the unwilling in the direction of doing their duty to the king. But when Charles revived the fine, it was not too prod meant in the direction of their duty because the king didn't want the men to get knighted, he wanted them to stay unknighted so he could collect the fine every year. It was clever, but it was also annoying.
Another example were fines levied for living in royal forests and building outside designated zones in London. With the demographic blow to the previous century, restless squatters had taken root in various forests in the country and urban dwellers had thrown up houses beyond the walls in the city. The king's advisors found ancient finds still on the books for both activities. These finds were meant to keep families from squatting in the forests or living outside the city walls. But Charles didn't want these people to move, you see, he wanted them to stay so he could find them for staying. The spirit of the law was being upended to service the lucrative letter of the law. It may have been technically legal, but it felt petty and unjust.
Another major feudal holdover was the despised court of wards. In the sub-tidium of English property law, some states were held by families through a grant from the king. But this grant had long sent seas to mean anything, except that if a family held one of these properties in the head of the household died and left only a minority heir, the land technically reverted to the crown, from whom the family then had to repurchase it.
So Charles sent out royal agents to hunt around in county records, digging up properties that were technically royal grants, despite the fact that no one, not even the king, was actually aware of it anymore. Again, Charles was acting within the technical bounds of the law, and he was putting his regime on sound financial footing, but he was endearing himself to exactly no one.
But of course, the most infamous of Charles's financial expedience was a thing called ship money. In theory, ship money worked like this. There was a national security crisis. The Spanish are on their way, that sort of thing. The king goes to the coastal counties and says, okay, we need to build a navy in a hurry, and there's no time to call a parliament. So you each owe me one ship. If you don't have the facilities to build a ship, then you owe me enough money to build one ship. And please do hurry, the Spanish are on their way.
So the two key points here are one, it's an emergency, and two, it applies to the coastal counties. In 1634, Charles revived ship money, and then in 1635, he started applying it to all counties, which struck everyone is a little crazy because one, there's no emergency, and two, I don't live anywhere near the coast, why am I paying ship money.
But Charles was developing a pretty modern notion of the national interest, and reason that there was no difference between coastal counties and inland counties were all in this together. Which yeah, okay, that's very progressive of you, but still, there's no emergency. We're not at war. Whereupon Charles, or more accurately Charles's lawyers, produced a nice body of precedence establishing that it was the king and the king alone who decided what did and did not constitute an emergency. So if he set emergency, it was an emergency, and that was that.
So now everyone is rolling their eyes, but wow, okay, neat trek, here's your stupid ship money. But then ship money came back the next year, and now we have a problem, because, as you'll recall, legally, only parliament can levy attacks. So you can have your fines and your monopolies, you can even have your emergency ship money, but if you try to make it a regular annual thing, I'm sorry, it's attacks. I don't care how you dress it up, it's attacks, and it's illegal, and we're not going to pay it.
In 1637, the two main sources of tension during personal rule came to a head. The religious tensions burst out into the open in June 1637, with the very public punishment of three radical Puritans who had been found guilty by the Archbishop-Lawd-controlled star chamber.
The particular beliefs and crimes of William Prin, Henry Burton, and John Bastick are not nearly as important as the sentence that was handed down on them. They were marched through the streets of London, surrounded by a large sympathetic crowds, tossed into the stocks with pilleries thrown across their necks. Then, after a couple of hours, the executioner came along and cut their ears off. In Prin, who had raised Lod's particular eye, had the letters SL for seditious libeler burnt into his cheeks.
Then, the three broken men were exiled to distant castles, the idea being that they would never be heard from again. The crowd roared at sympathy for the suffering of the three men, and underground circular started getting passed around, wondering aloud what kind of kingdom England was becoming when Catholics walked free while godly men suffered such gruesome punishment.
The political tensions burst into the open when John Hamden was brought to trial in November 1637 for refusing to pay ship money. Hamden was the son of a Puritan landowner, and he had inherited the family of states at the tender age of two when his father died. He, like Pym, served in all of Charles's initial parliaments and had garnered a reputation as a man of both strong will and strong principle.
He refused to pay the forced loans and was imprisoned, but was released on the eve of Charles's third parliament. He kept his head down through the 1630s, but when Charles rolled out ship money, Hamden decided to take a stand. Even though his share of ship money was one measly pound, he refused to pay.
But this was not just some random point of pride. The network of dissonant Puritans had been looking for someone to run a test case through, and Hamden, blameless, well regarded, well spoken John Hamden seemed like the right guy for the job.
Now, Hamden was not the only one refusing. If I count saying Cele, for example, was also refusing in the hopes that the king would prosecute him, but Charles let it go because he didn't want to give lord say the spotlight, much to say is great annoyance.
So in November 1637, John Hamden was brought before the court of ex-Jekker and tried for his refusal to pay. The case was a bonafide national sensation, and crowds in London thronged to hear the arguments of both sides and then waited impatiently for the verdict.
Hamden was represented by a group of lawyers, but the most famous of them was Oliver Singen, whose eloquent and let's face a damn convincing argument that ship money was attacks and therefore illegal without parliamentary approval, made the pirate and lawyer a legal rock star. On the other side, Hamden was prosecuted by the attorney general himself. This case was a big deal.
The 12 judges of the ex-Jekker listened carefully to both sides and then retired to consider how they would rule. In the weeks that followed, their decisions began to be published one by one, with the crowds of London hanging on every yea or nay. In the end, the court found seven to five against Hamden, which was, yes, a win for the king, but only by the narrowest margin possible.
It was another of Charles's purec victories, and despite the legal triumph, the court of public opinion found decisively for Hamden. So just as the king was reveling in the legal sanctioning of ship money, the number of men refusing to pay shot up dramatically. Charles had been doing a fine business with ship money receipts until he won the Hamden case, then Revenue dropped off a cliff.
The ironic part was that ship money was about to die due to massive popular resistance, right at the moment when England was actually facing a national emergency. Because in between the punishment of Bryn, Burton, and Bastick, and June, and the ship money trial in November, Charles had gone and shot himself in the foot up in Scotland, shot himself in both feet, shot himself in the head, and then fired himself out of a cannon.
Next week, we will see the attempt to establish religious uniformity head north, where the Scots and their beloved Presbyterianism had long been left to their own devices. But in July 1637, Charles and Laud would attempt to force the Scots to bend to the Church of England. It was an attempt as ill-conceived as it was ill-fated, and it would mark the beginning of the end for King Charles.