victory in 1588 over the Spanish Armada – allegedly full of whips and instruments of torture for use on Protestant Englishmen – was attributed to direct divine intervention, and played a big part in building up the conception, which Milton adopted, of Protestant England as a chosen nation.
James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth in 1603, five years before Milton’s birth. James had many disadvantages. He was a foreigner, married to a papist, and son of Mary Queen of Scots who had been the Spanish and papal candidate to replace Elizabeth on the throne. But Gunpowder Plot gave James a good start, and he might have continued to exploit the patriotic anti-Catholic legend, since he was certainly a more convinced Protestant than Elizabeth. For a variety of reasons, however, good, bad and indifferent, James hankered after the role of peace-maker in Europe, of mediator between Protestant and Catholic extremists. But he was short of cash, for which he depended on the vote of M.Ps. most of whom accepted the full Protestant legend and had no use for James’s pacific schemes. He suffered the normal fate of the would-be mediator who lacks the wherewithal to intervene effectively. Spain was interested only in preventing Parliament from driving James into the Protestant camp as Europe lined up for the Thirty Years War.
When war started in 1618 James failed – despite prodding from Parliament whenever it met – to give effective military aid to his son-in-law the Elector Palatine, who had been ignominiously ejected not only from the Bohemian throne to which he had aspired but also from his hereditary dominions in the Palatinate. Instead, James sent his favourite the Duke of Buckingham with Prince Charles to Madrid to woo the daughter of the King of Spain. It looked in the early twenties as though all continental Europe was going to fall before the Catholic sword. Church lands were being resumed in Germany, and it seemed only a matter of time before England’s national independence and the property of the inheritors of monastic lands fell too. When John Rushworth began to publish his documented history of the English Revolution in 1659, he found it necessary to go back to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618, though he had originally intended to start in November 1640.1
Charles I, who succeeded in 1625, did not share his father’s illusions of European grandeur; but he too suffered from lack of money. He abandoned the unpopular scheme for a Spanish marriage alliance: instead he married the daughter of the King of France. In terms of Realpolitik this was sound: France was as hostile to Spain as could be wished. But Queen Henrietta Maria was no less Catholic than the Infanta of Spain; the marriage involved concessions to English Catholics, seen by many as a potential fifth column in England. Buckingham continued to be influential under Charles as under James, and many of his relations were Catholics. After Buckingham’s assassination in 1628 the influence of Henrietta Maria over her husband grew; conversions to Catholicism became fashionable; and in 1637 a papal agent was admitted to England, for the first time since the reign of Bloody Mary. Contemporary fears of an international Catholic plot against English independence appeared to be confirmed when eight years later a papal nuncio arrived in Ireland to head a full-scale Catholic revolt against English rule. Two generations earlier Nicholas Sander had been papal legate to the Irish rebels who rose in 1579.
The French alliance involved Charles in what Milton was to call a ‘treacherous and antichristian war against the poor protestants of La Rochelle’.1 The Protestant cause in Europe was finally saved not by England but by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who in 1630 marched into Germany to win spectacular victories. Court sentiment was expressed by Carew:
What though the German drum
Bellow for freedom and revenge, the noise
Concerns not us, nor should divert our joys.2
That was written in 1632, the year of the death of Gustavus Adolphus. On that occasion John Bradshaw, later President of the court that tried Charles I, perhaps Milton’s kinsman, wrote that ‘more sad or heavy tidings hath not in this age been brought since Prince Harry’s death to the true-hearted English.’3 At the time of Gustavus’s intervention the English government was actually negotiating with Spain for an alliance against Sweden and the Netherlands. Those patriotic Englishmen who were bitterly ashamed that Sweden and not England had saved the day for Protestantism did not know of these negotiations. But plainly the English court was less than enthusiastic about the Protestant cause. In 1632 a financial deal with Spain helped the latter to pay her armies in the Netherlands; in 1639 Dutch and Spanish fleets fought a battle in English territorial waters, with the English fleet passively looking on.
Nor was it only a question of foreign policy. There were alarming developments in England itself. William Laud, in effect head of the church from 1628 onwards, introduced innovations which to many Englishmen seemed steps in the direction of popery. Transference of the communion table from the centre of the church to the east end, where it was railed off, seemed to imply the Catholic doctrine of the real presence. ‘A table of separation’, Milton was to call it. It elevated the priest above the congregation, thus undoing what for many had been one of the Reformation’s most important achievements. There was a deliberate re-introduction of Catholic motifs into ecclesiastical architecture and sculpture. Laud was also effective Prime Minister of England. He made the Bishop of London Lord Treasurer – the first cleric to hold that office since the Reformation, Laud proudly noted in his Diary. Laud attempted to increase tithe payments from the laity to the clergy; to recover for the church tithes which had passed to laymen at the dissolution of the monasteries. His partisans dominated the two universities, and got the best preferments in the church; their opponents were silenced or driven into exile. In the eleven years without Parliament, 1629–40, Laud and his dependants ruled through the prerogative courts, Star Chamber and High Commission, which fiercely enforced government policy, regardless of the social rank of those who opposed it. ‘Lordly prelates raised from the dunghill’, ‘equal commonly in birth to the meanest peasants’, as their opponents elegantly called them, inflicted corporal punishments on gentlemen with the same ferocity as the latter flogged and branded the lower orders;1 as soon as a Parliament met they were certain to be called to account.
Parliament ultimately had to meet because of Scotland. The English government had imposed bishops on the Scottish Kirk, and under Laud their power was enhanced. There had been dangerous talk of a resumption of Scottish church lands. When a new prayer book was brought in, with changes which weakened Protestant doctrine, the Scottish gentry and aristocracy encouraged a resistance which soon reached national proportions. Most patriotic Englishmen sympathized with the old but now Protestant enemy against their own government. When Charles sent an army north, the rank and file were more hostile to their papist officers than to the Scots, better at pulling down altar rails than at fighting. National disaster and bankruptcy could be avoided only by calling a Parliament.
By now the idea had taken root in England that the government, under the baleful influence of Henrietta Maria and Laud, was involved in a vast international Catholic plot against the liberties of Protestant Englishmen. Laud of course was no papist. We know, as contemporaries did not, that he refused the offer of a cardinal’s hat. But if they had known, the fact that the Pope thought the offer worth making might have seemed more significant than Laud’s refusal. Events in Scotland seemed to fit into this international conspiracy. So did events in Ireland.
There, in natural resentment at the oppressions of English colonizers, Catholicism had become equated with nationalism just as Protestantism had in England, and as Presbyterianism had in Scotland. In 1598 a Spanish landing in Ireland had been beaten off with difficulty: the possibility of its recurrence was a perpetual nightmare. The appointment of Sir Thomas Wentworth as Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1632 increased anxiety. Went-worth was a Protestant, but he was also a renegade leader of the opposition in the English Parliament. He made what many Englishmen thought excessive concessions to the Catholic majority in Ireland, and started building up an army there composed largely of papists. What for? Wentworth himself suggested using it against the Scottish Covenanters; for most Protestant Englishmen this was equivalent to using it against England, for the subversion of their liberties, religion and property.
