Stubbs - Reprobates : the cavaliers of the English Civil War

By the same author

Donne: The Reformed Soul

Reprobates

The Cavaliers of the English Civil War

JOHN STUBBS

W. W. Norton & Company

New York London

Copyright 2011 by John Stubbs

First American Edition 2011

First published in Great Britain by Viking,
a publishing division of Penguin Books Ltd.

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First published as a Norton paperback 2012

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stubbs, John, 1977
Reprobates : the cavaliers of the English Civil War /
John Stubbs. 1st American ed. 2011.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-393-06880-1 (hardcover)
1. Great BritainHistoryCivil War, 16421649.
2. Great BritainCourts and courtiersHistory17th century.
3. Great BritainIntellectual life17th century.
4. Great BritainCivilization17th century. I. Title.
DA415.S78 2011
942.06 2dc22

2011013849

ISBN 978-0-393-34413-4 pbk.
ISBN 978-0-393-24330-7 (e-book)

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For Katja, Lana and Martin

For the People are naturally not valiant, and not much cavalier.

Sir John Suckling

Note on the Text

Superscribed numerals refer to notes at the end of the text, which are mainly bibliographical. Early modern spelling has been preserved except where it would no longer be intelligible to the general reader. Dates are given according to new style i.e. following a calendar beginning on 1 January rather than on 25 March.

In mid-March 1641, a military rider was dispatched to London from a defeated army in the north. Captain John Chudleigh bore a letter from a council of officers at York intended for their commander-in-chief, the Earl of Northumberland. Wee complayne as gentleman, they wrote. They were owed pay, they were supporting their men out of their own pockets, and they were despised in the towns and villages where they were billeted. But it was more important to them that they be allowed to redeem their honour against the rebel Scottish army currently occupying the north-east of England. Their forces had been routed by the Scots at Newburn the summer before.

The capital Chudleigh entered on 21 March was on the verge of a coup dtat. The king was being plucked of his powers by Parliament: his two chief councillors faced a trial for their lives. Mobs regularly took to the streets demanding the head of Black Tom Tyrant Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

Given the urgency of his assignment, it was strange that Chudleigh did not immediately seek out Northumberland, who harboured grievances of his own from the worsening quarrel. For instead, on riding past the mews and into the rambling precincts of the palace of Whitehall, he shared the letter with the poet laureate, Sir William Davenant, a playwright and masque-maker with an amiable bearing and a ruined countenance.

Davenant was both troubled and excited by what he read. The officers words were formal and restrained, but the depth of feeling behind them was obvious and sent a stronger message this, he told Chudleigh, was a matter of greater consequence than he imagined. He persuaded the captain to come and meet some friends.

Chudleigh may already have been acquainted with Sir John Suckling, infamous for his losses at the card table and the bowling green, and for his drubbing in a dispute over an heiress. Only a complete stranger to the court, meanwhile, would have been unfamiliar with Henry Jermyn, the queens favourite. Davenant convened their meeting hastily, ushering in the courier to a back-room and urging him to share the contents of the letter once more. Chudleigh was willing, yet again, to do so.

Suckling and Davenant were brother officers and veterans of the two disastrous campaigns against the Scottish rebellion. Suckling and Jermyn were also long-standing associates, although a pair of figures less alike would be difficult to find. Suckling was a slight, light-timbered, almost boyishly built man; Jermyn, the courts most notorious philanderer, was louche and heavy-limbed, with the shoulders of a drayman and the backbone said Andrew Marvell of an elephant. Both, however, were equally coiffeured Suckling with a well-brushed reddish mane attired in rustling silks, and marked by an arrogant demeanour. Both also shared the burden of disgrace. Jermyn had returned not long before from banishment. He had been packed off to France after one of the queens ladies-in-waiting became pregnant with his child.

The two courtiers agreed with Davenant. The letter meant more than the messenger could know; and could be made to mean more than its writers intended. With practised circumspection Jermyn asked Chudleigh if he might show the letter to the queen. At this point Chudleigh remembered himself. He refused to leave the paper with them before delivering it to Northumberland.1

Why should this meeting of minor personages matter, to the civil war which was to follow or to the longer course of English history? Davenant was the chief writer of royal entertainments. His contemporaries noted him chiefly by his all but destroyed nose, burnt off by a cure for syphilis. Suckling was a gambler and a showman. Jermyn was rumoured to be the queens lover. Meanwhile Chudleigh had a walk-on, walk-off part in the conspiratorial drama. When he rode from London a week later, bearing notes for his comrades in the north, his significance in the larger story came to an end.

The hasty conference established in the minds of Suckling, Jermyn and Davenant that they might rely on the army to come south and take London for the king. They could set in motion a plot which, until that point, had seemed little more than fantasy. They were willing to use force against Parliament, to free the kings chief minister and regain control of the capital. Now it appeared that the military lay at their disposal. The impression they took from their interview with Chudleigh placed them, for the first time, in a state of civil war. It also brought about the creation of a faction and the coining of a byword for impractical heroics, dash, disdain and debauchery. When Davenant, Suckling and Jermyn met the dusty horseman on that early spring day in 1641, they were courtiers of varying influence in an embattled royal entourage. When they let Chudleigh go on his way, displeased at his reluctance to give up his missive but stirred by the sea-change it suggested, they merited the name their enemies would cast upon them in the streets: they were cavaliers.

The predicament of King Charles was truly dire; and he shouldered his share of the blame. In 1639 he had faced a rebellion from his subjects in Scotland. His campaign that year to crush the Scottish covenant ended in an anti-climax that his officers found humiliating. The next year he took up arms against the Scots again; and this time his forces were routed. In the meantime the situation in England had shifted against him. Mistakes in foreign policy touched old insecurities. Long-held grudges against his rule rose up at the worst possible moment. Yet he needed money for his war in the north, and for this he was obliged to summon a Parliament for the first time in eleven years. A strong party of critics in the House of Commons, directed by a set of dissatisfied peers, insisted on reparation for old wrongs before they would grant the king funds. He dismissed them disgustedly. Recalled, however, after his armys defeat in the summer of 1640, the Commons began forcing Charles to give up key powers and renounce much-hated ministers. The Archbishop of Canterbury was locked up in the Tower. Other councillors fled one making for France in a rowboat.