KINGS CARPENTERS AND HERETICS DURING THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR: A STUDY OF THE ANCIENT ART OF THE SHIPWRIGHT AND THE PETT DYNASTY BY S HOLBOURN, PART 6

In 1533 Henry VIIIth disputed Papal Supremacy over the English Church because the Pope refused to grant his divorce from Catherine of Aragorn, it is this singular event that can be said to have inspired the widespread acceptance of Protestantism that was to follow and in later years play such a decisive role in the thinking of Parliamentarians. It was of course Thomas Cromwell who resolved the ‘King’s great matter’ in bringing Anne Bolin and Henry Tudor together, severing the English Church from its Papal Obedience. In so doing he won over the support of the majority of the Countries Protestants as well as many others, although not heretics, these sympathisers were bitterly dissatisfied with the corruption and wealth of the Clergy. Thus empowered, Cromwell was able to resolve the King’s financial difficulties in closing down the Monasteries and diverting their wealth to the Treasury. It has been pointed out that only a man of exceptional vision could have conceived so radical an undertaking, requiring as it did immense application and stamina.

The ‘Dissolution’ then, developed into an enormous program of social and administrative reform touching upon matters of Religion, Government, Education and Commerce and was nothing short of a revolution, albeit reactionary; staged to continue the King’s excesses, as only Oliver Cromwell’s rebellion and Republic has ever come close to any claim to such a pure ideology as Revolution, before it deteriorated into a military protectorate. Protestantism albeit originally largely supportive of the doctrine of ‘Absolute Monarchy’ was to considerably weaken the powers of the Clergy, and stressed the relevance of the individual in ‘the Eyes of God’. It denounced Ritual and other ‘detractions’ from prayer and the Sermon, but above all favored the widest possible teaching of the Bible.

With the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603 and the subsequent succession of the Catholic line of James I, a Royal truce was hastily founded concluding the long drawn out war with Spain. Throughout his reign scarcely any soldiers or military planning were seen, even along the Thames, regular troops were not required as the remaining militia was considered sufficient for all purposes of defense. When James Stuart ascended to the throne, six Men o’ War and two armed Pinnaces were fully equipped on the river, and ready to cruise against the Spanish, but were quickly decommissioned. During his long reign a general Anti~Spanish sentiment and attendant religious discontent steadily precipitated. It was against this darkening economic backdrop and after his death in 1625 that the new King Charles’s Government was drawn into a costly and unsuccessful war with Spain, and in 1627 an equally disastrous conflict with France began. Both of these successive campaigns required considerably more funding than Parliament was prepared for, and these opening events ominously set the tone for Charles’s reign. In 1603 William Laud, (born in 1573, the son of a Clothier), the Churchman whose fortunes rose to almost limitless power and sank in an equally disastrous eclipse with the Stuarts, was chosen as proctor of the University of Oxford. Nationally, another truce with the Spanish and the King’s neutrality over the ‘30 Year War’ furthered little in the way of securing Royal popularity.

With the death in 1612 of Sir Robert Cecil, Lord Burleigh, a power vacuum opened at the Royal Court, giving rise to a struggle to fill the late Secretaries position. During this period a curious scandal broke out involving the sister of Douglas Dudley, Frances (nee Howard) who was then married to the Earl of Essex. She had been courted into an affair with Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester. The divorce proceedings that followed were the basis of the scandal, and as a friend of the King’s favorite and secretary, Sir Thomas Overbury, who initially aided the affair became less enthusiastic when the Countess began proceedings to dissolve her marriage. Overbury saw Frances as a ruthless, unprincipled whore as well as a dabbler in the Black Arts8 and earnestly sought to disentangle his old friend, Carr from her.

The Lady Essex initially persuaded the King to offer Sir Thomas an overseas diplomatic appointment to prevent him from further jeopardising the proceedings, but Overbury declined. In 1613 he was arrested at Court and imprisoned in the Tower. By means of bribery the conspirators found a replacement at the Tower for its loyal and astute sitting Lieutenant Sir William Waad, who would not be personally bribed. The replacement was an accomplice of the Howard’s, Sir Gervase Elwes, and a new gaoler was secured. Another confederate of Frances’s, whose job it was to administer the poison that was used to keep Overbury quiet. He died in agony as the poison was administered slowly to avoid suspicion, but was buried quickly and discreetly beneath flagstone at St. Peter’s Chancery, when his end finally came. Eager for his job and suspicious, the lesser players in this nasty little plot were uncovered by Waad and later hanged. Only after the marriage did the King learn of the cunning disposal of Overbury. Although the couple were sentenced to death as guilty by the Lords, Frances and Robert Carr were spared, not to be released from the Tower until 1622.

It was the English Common Lawyers that chiefly represented the educated and ever more independent minded Gentry who initially resented the dominion of ‘Cannon law’ over Civil Law and who tended toward Protestantism, with their abhorrence of the continuing practices of foreign Papists. This body of men, seldom thought of as innovators were well established at the Inns of Court by the reign of Elizabeth who in 1574 was to exclude Roman Catholics from such membership. These ‘Common Lawyers’, like the rest of the Gentry were generally content to overlook their distaste for the Prerogative Courts, the Court of Star Chamber and the use of torture, so long as Elizabeth remained the Queen. As soon as this changed they began to oppose the Royal policy. Sir Edward Coke, as Solicitor General for Elizabeth may be thus seen as a willing instrument of the Crown in the prosecution and torture of Papists and Puritans alike, but as Lord Chief Justice to James he issued a number of judicial rulings limiting the powers of the Royal Prerogative, which led to his eventual dismissal, whereupon Coke became one of the leaders of the Parliamentary Opposition.

It was during the years of 1621/2 that Sir Edward Coke, described as the Countries leading legal expert, was thrown into the Tower for continuing to uphold one of the fundamentals of what is today’s modern Constitutional Government, the independence of the Judiciary. King James’s Government recognised Coke’s immense talent and tried to win his support by preferment, but Sir Edward was uncompromising. In 1610 he made it clear that the King could not continue to change or make laws by proclamation and despite being made Chief Justice of the King’s Bench he was determined not to submit to political pressures. So it was that in 1616 he was suddenly dismissed from Office, after challenging the Crown’s right to quash Common Law proceedings by the issuing of a Writ.

Although he was to regain some favour, he was never again appointed to high office. It was thus he made Parliament his principal arena, where he became the most outspoken of the Governments opponents of Pro~Spanish policy and especially of the proposed marriage alliance between the two Nations. The patience of the King was by now at its tether, and it snapped, He told the Speaker to stop the House debating ‘anything concerning our Government on matters of State’ and further warned that punishment would befall any member who defied Him. Coke and his supporters responded by the drawing up of a ‘Protestation’ asserting their ancient privileges concerning debate and freedom from arrest. The King set to by apprehending Coke and other leaders, throwing them into the Tower. Thereupon he sent for the Commons journal and tore out the offending protestation. Sir Edward remained in the Tower for nine months but was released with no charges proven against him, triumphant in the name of the law. The Common Lawyers began to take over from the Puritan Clergy, the leadership of the struggle against the King and his oppressive regime. Legal and constitutional arguments gradually replacing religious text in the debates that were to follow.

Charles Ist had dissolved his third Parliament by 1629, the very year after the young and ambitious Oliver Cromwell* (b.1599) took his first Parliamentary Office, representing the Constituency of Huntingdon, as had his father Robert Cromwell before him. Oliver Cromwell had an uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell, partly of Welsh extraction whose family had long been in the King’s Service as Sheriffs and Justices of the Peace. Cromwell appeared in Parliament at about that time the House of Commons was incorporating its grievances into a Petition of Rights, to which the King refused to give his authority. Cromwell being a cousin of Oliver St. John amongst other prominent parliamentarians was soon to find his place in the House. This was at a time of transition for many of the King’s Opposition, who believing the subsequent events in 1629 too extreme for their own liking switched their loyalty to the King. Amongst these moderates was William Noy, who for his efforts was made Attorney General, and Thomas Wentworth who was created President of the Council of the North. Amongst other reasons these men were not happy with the way the House had refused to approve of the King’s right to collect ‘Tonnage and Poundage’ the Customs Duty that all former monarchs had been granted at the outset of their reign since the Fifteenth Century, which had set it in their minds as a preordained gift of God!

These events shortly followed the assassination of the hated Duke of Buckingham, who was known to have put to shame Royal Honour and held great sway over the King’s actions, but was most valued by Charles for his effective control over the freedom loving peoples of Ireland. Buckingham it was openly said ruled the King, ‘the Devil,’ further ‘ruled the Duke’! Charles held that the ‘wicked rebel’ Sir John Elliot was responsible for this event on account of the ruthless attacks on Buckingham made by Elliot in his Parliamentary speeches, and was subsequently imprisoned in the Tower where he died, suffering acute tuberculosis, after three years. The nations religious sentimentalities were still reeling from the effects of the bedding in of Protestantism, their was wide spread hatred of ‘Popery’ and strong Puritan feelings throughout the land, it was the burning issue of the day. The King claimed to have Protestant sentiments but his French Queen seems to have influenced Him and many of his Court, tirelessly advocating her own Catholic views. The Bishops were also much detested as the King’s instruments in the Church who were stating that non payment of the King’s illegal taxes was a direct sin against God.

So prolific were the religious factions of the times that it is still difficult to make any clear cut definition of them as is commonly supposed. In 1619 the Lord’s Prayer was rendered at Canterbury Cathedral on the 5th of November by Dr. John Boys with ‘Our Pope which art in Rome’. The Bishop of Chichester identified Popery with tyranny and Puritanism with anarchy both alike being ‘enemies unto piety’ and these opinions were said to have been endorsed by the King who in a speech to Parliament condemned the popular doctrines of the radical Puritans, he wished the Church to return to the ‘purist times of Queen Elizabeth’s days’ but had not the wit to know how to go about it. Perhaps as some historians have implied the whole sorry mess was
resultant from his marriage to an unpopular French Catholic Queen over whom he had little control, who cajoled him into acts against his Parliament and who saw him as a week and ineffective ruler. A manipulation of Customs Duties and an agreement with Spain for the transportation of gold in English ships for payment to Spanish troops was put in the shadows by his struggle in the enforcement of 'Tonnage and Poundage' without the sanction of Parliament. It was at about this time that the more extreme ‘left~wing’ Protestants or Puritans, having more than a stomach full of English reforms, that by today’s measure would be called reactionary decided to abandon ship and attempt to found a new colony in the Americas. One such individual was the 53 year old Thomas Dudley* who sailed on the ‘Arebella’ of 350 tons, with 28 guns and a crew of 52. She was one of eight small ships that sailed together ferrying over 900 refugees from the conflicts at home. This particular expedition left Cowes on the Isle of White on Easter Monday of 1626.

In England, Liberty was no more than a condition of the Royal whim, Sir John Eliot’s arrest was as a consequence of his encouragement of his colleagues in refusing to confirm the Crown’s right to its traditional revenues until they had debated a resolution that ‘the affairs of the King of Earth must give way to the affairs of the King of Heaven’ it was thus that Charles sent orders for the adjournment of the House, which were rejected with the Speaker firmly held down in his chair and the chamber door barred. Freedom of speech was a very tenuous notion, even in Parliament. Eliot’s prominent part in this affair was the excuse the King had been waiting for to have him thrown into the Tower. Simon D’Ewes, referring to the dissolution said of this day that it was the ‘most gloomy, sad and dismal day for England that (had) happened in five hundred years’ No further Parliament was to sit until ‘the Short Parliament’ of 1640, at which time Cromwell returned to be elected for the seat of Cambridge. During these eleven years the King attempted to independently raise his own taxes as part of his determined plans to rule without Parliament.

Nicholas Holborne of Chichester’s first son Robert was to become the Lawyer who rose to prominence in his co~defence with Oliver St. John on behalf of John Hampton, a close associate and cousin of Oliver Cromwell. The Protector was in fact Hampden’s nephew, who, born in London in 1594 with his family lived at their ancestral Manor House at Great Hamden in Buckinghamshire. John’s father William, like his father before him had both been Members of Parliament in the Commons and his refusal to pay Ship Money to the King became a test case for the whole matter of Ship Money.

William Hampden had been an influential figure and owned lands in Oxfordshire and Essex as well as Buckinghamshire, and was said to have been the wealthiest commoner in all England. His wife was the daughter of Sir Henry Cromwell of Hinchinbrooke in Huntingdonshire, and the aunt of Oliver Cromwell.11 Like very many other gentlemen of his district John Hampden was raised a zealous Protestant and a Patriot, and devoted to the memory of Elizabeth, firmly taught to uphold the Common laws of England. When he was nineteen he was admitted as a law student at the Inner Temple.

The majority of MP’s were men like Hampden ~ Country Gentlemen, committed Protestants educated at a University and then at an Inne of Court. Critical of James for his wanton neglect of his duties especially when it came to his neutrality in the ‘30 Years War’. An issue about which Hampden spoke out, being in favour of going to war in defense of Protestant Bohemia and it’s half Scottish Queen. For in the Parliament of 1621 news had arrived that the Catholic Austrian Armies had defeated the Protestant King and Queen of Bohemia at the battle of the White Hill, outside Prague and had compelled Frederick and Elizabeth to abandon their Kingdom. Public opinion was outraged at this disaster upon the popular Queen of Bohemia. Frederick and his Queen were exiled to Holland.

It was in 1626, the year following the death of King James, that Sir Edmund Hampden, Johns uncle was one of the five Knights who, being instrumental in voting down the new King’s petition for ‘Supplies’ were imprisoned, but who applied for a Writ of Habeas Corpus in the Court of King’s Bench. They argued that their imprisonment was illegal, as they had not been charged with any offence. Although the Court upheld the King’s ‘Right’, this move was the first significant challenge to the old and tired Tudor autocracy, and represented a major legal precedent for the Common Lawyers.

Still unable to obtain any money from Parliament the King proceeded by demanding that his wealthy landowners contribute to a loan to the Crown under the threat of imprisonment if they should refuse, which is just what many of them, including John Hampden did. Hampden was summoned before the Privy Council for this refusal, where he argued that the King was in violation of Magna Carta, he was duly imprisoned in Westminster for several weeks and then again after a second summons sent to be held in confinement for a year in Hampshire. In 1628 John Hampden and the other MP’s were released and another Parliament, the last one prior to the eleven years Charles tried to rule alone, was summoned.

Earlier in his career, in 1622, the young Lawyer Robert Holborne had become Steward for the Sussex Manor of Bosham which it appears he inherited from his father, Nicholas of Chichester, who presumably died in that year. Robert was also engaged in other legal transactions involving some Sussex lands in 1628 and 1636.12 Holborne was a Bencher at Lincoln’s Inn and in 1639 attacked ‘Tonnage and Poundage, on behalf of a merchant’s widow’. His first stand as an MP was ushered in under a cloud of confusion. As to the result of the poll for Westminster, where at the time he stood in opposition against William Bell, it seems he may have actually polled a higher number of votes than the returned Member, but that some interference from the Court saw to Bell’s election. He was thereafter proposed by the Viscount (Thomas) Savile and elected to the ‘Short Parliament’, for Southwark ‘on the basis of his reputation as foe of the King and of oppression’, his popular reputation having been assured by his ‘bold’ and protracted defense of Hampden. Savile supported Holborne putting it about that the Lawyer ‘did always oppose the King, the Ship Money, and all monopolies whatever’. He was dispatched along with Oliver St. John to require the King’s Judges to give up records concerning the ‘Ship Money’ case relating to Hampden. As one of the MP’s in favour of the fullest consideration of Grievances, he played a prominent part in the ‘Short Parliament’ being named to eight Committees including ‘Privileges’. Later from 1640-42 serving as a JP for Middlesex, his radical thinking had been softened by a change in loyalties, perhaps out of pity to his wife’s dis~inheirtance ? He spent some time as a ‘Marshal’ and a ‘Reader’ at Lincoln’s Inn, wherein he first entered in 1615, after his training at Furnival’s Inne although he was not ‘called to the bar’ until 1624, a not unusual period of preparation. Robert Holborne was Knighted in 1643 at Oxford by Charles Ist and was soon to be promoted to Attorney General to the Prince of Wales, Prince Rupert. He was also married to Lady Anne Dudley, the grand daughter of the famous Earl of Leicester, who to all intents and purposes had been consort apparent to Queen Elizabeth Ist. Lady Anne was one of the abandoned daughters and co~heirs of Sir Robert Dudley, formally of Kenilworth castle, Warwickshire, Ist Duca de Northumbria.

In the England of the 1630’s on the whole, their had been a general dislike for the presumptions of the ‘Laudian’ Clergy who held that the Bishop’s inherited their authority in a direct line from the Apostles and therefore somehow from the Christ Himself and displeasure at this arrogance extended equally to the illegal efforts of the King in attempting to raise taxes outside the Consent of Parliament. In keeping with the general mood the Sheriff of Kent during 1636/7, Sir George Sondes chose to ‘turn a blind eye’ to those refusing to pay the Ship Money tax. He later summed up the general feeling of the people thus : ‘I was never so great a Royalist as to forget I was born a free subject’, therefore the acts that Parliament introduced to abolish the ‘Prerogative Courts’ and declaring ‘Ship Money’ illegal, were wholly welcomed by the Kentish people as well as by the rest of England, especially those in non coastal areas.

‘Ship Money’, as a form of taxation had existed during the Elizabethan era, that it was confined to those coastal towns whose peoples proffered from a trade by way of the sea made it largely acceptable. The benefits of being located besides major trading routes was seen to outweigh the risk when exposed to the full force of a foreign aggressor. Then the ‘Ship Money’ was seen to be invested in the Royal Navy, and this was to be extensively to the first benefit of coastal Counties. It was principally that Charles Ist sought to levy the tax nation~wide, including inland areas that was to spark of a National debate. Although Holborne was quick to raise objections to the King’s proposal to exchange Ship Money for 12 subsidies, on legal grounds, he doubted that Ship Money could be separated from the Crown. He was said by a number of judges to have argued that ‘Ship Money was such a Prerogative so incident to the Crown that an Act of Parliament could not take it away;’ yet this was at a time when he was still seen as Anti~Court by intention.

For his part, Robert Holborne had clearly dispelled any rumours that he might oppose the right of the Court by defecting to the King not that long after these events. During his Parliamentarian days he seems to have gained much support for his role with Oliver St. John, another rising London barrister, as council for Hampden in the ‘Ship Money’ debate of 1637, wherein Hampden was prosecuted by the Crown as ‘to show reason why he should not pay 20 shillings levied on his lands’ in the parish of Stoke Manderville. The case went first in the autumn of 1637 before the four Barons of the Exchequer and thereafter lengthy consideration it was passed to the ‘Judges of the King’s Bench and Common Pleas.’ Despite the eventual ruling, which went in
favour of the King, (by a slender majority the Judges upheld the legality of ‘Ship Money’13), in 1637 wide feelings of public dissatisfaction were being expressed throughout the Country and Hampden’s stand came to symbolise the defense of individual property rights against arbitrary Royal Tyranny.

The case, and interest in it was inevitably prolonged by the fact that the Court convened for but one day in any week to hear the arguments put before it. Hampden had briefed his friend and political colleague Oliver St. John as his council, and St. John’s speech to the Court was as much a political appeal to the people as it was a legal argument to the Court. Although his Plee that their could be no taxation without the Consent of Parliament was inevitably phrased in legalistic language and strengthened with legal precedents. The speech was printed and distributed widely throughout the land, whereupon it was often to be read aloud in public places and much discussed in the taverns. In the eyes of those who partook of this exercise in democratic thinking it was accepted an authoritative statement of the law of England as if it were the final judgment of a Supreme Court, and not merely the persuasive argument of one of the parties involved in the case, demonstrating the powerful effect that public proclamations held for the populace in those times. Regardless of the technical outcome John Hampden was acknowledged as a National Hero for his struggle.

Robert Holborne's lengthy discourse has also been described as ‘a case of outstanding political significance’, and lasted for three days :(2nd ~5th Dec.), ‘albeit a professional brief’. This, in the days when it can be said of Holborne ‘that (he) did always oppose the King, the Ship Money, and all monopolies whatever’. Ship Money being also one of the topics covered by John Pym in a speech during 1640, concerning the peoples grievances against the King. ‘Break a rule and our liberties are gone’: Holborne also concurred with Pym unequivocally, that ‘subsidies were the gift of the Commons’ rejecting the Lords request for a Conference.

The presumption of a number of the Judges was that as the Monarchy predated Parliament; this alone would provide their basis for supporting the King’s demands, that He was entitled to raise the levy. Yet by 1640 resistance to the tax was almost nation~wide. The eventual outcome and its consequence, although not alone sufficient to call a halt to the King’s autocracy, were compounded on Charles with ‘The Bishops War’ which was to hasten discontent. In 1638 the Puritan subscribers to the National Covenant in Scotland had sworn to resist Anglican innovations on the Kirks, to the death, and to defend by arms the right of the Scottish Church to decide in free assembly what religious changes should be acceptable. Charles was finding it difficult to maintain either of his British Kingdoms and having made his home in England, where he was eminently unpopular, gave the Scott’s even more reason to despise him. He made two humiliating attempts at war on Scotland, these adventures of war against his own people were most costly. On the first occasion in 1639 he was forced to sign a truce at Berwick with the Covenanters who outnumbered him. Following the events prompted by Hampden’s appeal the King was finally pressed to offer to abandon ‘Ship Money’, but only in exchange for a generous financial supply to be voted in by the Commons. It was when this financial aid was refused that Charles, principally on the advice of Thomas Wentworth, then dissolved what was to become known as the ‘Short Parliament’, thereafter setting the Nation on a path to Civil War.

Before his departure for Scotland, the King, clearly paranoid, maliciously dispatched a party of his Officers to search the London homes of the leading opposition Parliamentarians, notably including Hampden, but was to find no evidence linking any of them to the Covenanters. By 1640 the Northern Counties looked to the Scott’s, who had invaded Northern England in anticipation of the King’s effrontery, as liberators and joined in the uprising against him. The King’s Army was routed at Newburn, forcing Charles to sign a second Peace on the Covenanters terms. At a meeting of a special committee of but eight select members of the Royal Council at the time of the dissolution of the ‘Short Parliament’ Strafford had argued that the King should then consider himself free from all legal restraints. Thus after the King’s second routing, this time at York the House of Commons immediately set about to impeach the Earl of Strafford (Thomas Wentworth) former Lord Deputy in Ireland, whose powerful force of character was to gain him the fear and respect that allowed him to employ a ruthless authority in dispensing with legal forms and precedents to support the King in his unshakeable belief in Royal Absolutism, and the Archbishop William Laud who between them were as hated as had been Edmund Dudley and Empson under Henry VIIth, and as despised as much as Charles I had himself become.

A number of those same men who were the King’s Judges flew into exile when the process of impeachment became directed towards them. The charges against Laud and Strafford were of High Treason for having advised the King to betray the Liberties of the People. Strafford, again like Northumberland, some time before him and for not dissimilar reasons, was considered to be far too dangerous to remain at liberty. Thus the procedure begun against him was altered from impeachment, a process in which the House of Lord’s acted as a court and normal legal rules applied, ~ to an Act of Attainder by which process an Act of Parliament assigned the individual to death. Without their being need for precise proof, but requiring the Consent of the King, as in any other Parliamentary matter.

What was later to be called ‘The Long Parliament’ was summoned in 1640, in a bid to secure funds for the King, and the elections, as such they were, came to be fought chiefly on the basis of the candidates stand, being for Parliament or for the King. The result being a crushing defeat for the King, even in such Royal strongholds as Cornwall where Holborne was successfully returned for the King. Yet in its first year only about one third of its members could have been called Royalist in sympathy. Most of those who were later to fight for Charles during the Civil War were then his opponents, Robert Holborne having already declared his position. Edward Hyde being the more commonly cited opponent of the King to change sides at around this time. Hyde was created Earl of Clarendon in 1661, a better known Royal advisor he also became a well known historian of the Civil War. Like Holborne, although clearly better remembered he was a prominent opponent of the King, only to return to his side when it became clear to those that had not seen the portent in Eliot’s tactics that the movement to restrict Royal power was evolving now more rapidly into the proportions of a revolution that would go far beyond any happy medium either with regard to Politics or Religion.

In May 1641 an ‘Act against the dissolution of this Parliament without it’s own Consent’ was passed, in July the King compelled by his guilt in signing away the life of Wentworth was forced to accept the abolition of the Prerogative Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission and in August Ship Money was finally declared illegal. Robert Holborne, before he became Attorney General, it seems had a hand in the end of the Star Chamber that many years earlier had ruled against Sir Robert Dudley’s son retaining his titles which arguably should have in part at least come down to a branch of the Holborne family. As he was manager of the conference on two bills to abolish The Star Chamber, which like the other conciliar courts which had been introduced into England under the Tudors adopted the Inquisitorial procedure which was unknown in the English Common Law Courts.

The King, that same month ventured upon a State visit to Scotland, the House of Commons were uneasy and suspicious of his motives and so appointed a number of MP’s including John Hampden to accompany Him. It would appear the King endeavored to take advantage of Hampden’s good nature, for having thereof made a favorable impression on the King, who himself ‘knew how to exercise personal charm to good effect’ Charles offered to appoint Hampden as one of the King’s Ministers! Hampden dutifully declined, showing that his own personal good nature had not been cultivated, as a means to obtain such ‘good effect’.

Come 1642 it is clear the King had brooked enough, with even the Lords refusing to comply with his order for the arrest of Sir Edward Herbert, then Attorney General, and a number of prominent MP’s. So Charles descended upon the House himself at the head of an armed party hoping to seize six of the Parliamentary leaders, one Peer and five Common Members, including Hampden, Oliver St. John and Pym, accusing them of High Treason for having ‘traitorously endeavored to subvert the fundamental Laws and Government of the Kingdom of England, to deprive the King of his Royal Power, and to place in subjects an arbitrary and tyrannical power over the lives, liberties, and estates of His Majesties Liege People’ Such was the ensuing outcry of the people of London to this act that barricades were set up throughout the City against the King’s Troop’s. He was mobbed to such an extent that he had to make such a hasty retreat from Whitehall to Hamden Court that he failed to include sufficient furnishings for the Royal Progress, the whole family having to sleep like Lawyers or paupers in the same bed. Thus in 1642 Civil War began, with London in popular control of Parliament the King set up his Capital at Oxford. That July Parliament commanded the Earl of Warwick to take command of the Navy, which was already mostly parliamentarian in it sympathies and for Essex to command the Army, like his grand father in law, the Lord ‘Leycester’ before him in 1588. Charles raised the Royal Standard in a field outside Nottingham, the wind that shortly thereafter blew it down, if nothing else was a sign of the changing times to come.

Holborne’s father, Nicholas had died in Bosham, near Chichester, and the Attorney had inherited his fathers Manor in 1622. This area being within the then heavily industrial Weald of Sussex was of great strategic importance not only for its foundries which like those in neighboring Kent were able to manufacture suitable quantities of cannon and other armaments but also provided the safest route to Europe* on which the King relied for his munitions, imported largely from France. Thus many of the early skirmishes of the Civil War were fought in Sussex. Of the 59 signatories to the Death Warrant of the King at least seven were men of Sussex, three of them being great land owners. Throughout the land, as in Sussex across all divides of class families were very often opposed in their loyalties, brother against brother, father against son and so forth. Sussex had thirteen boroughs returning members to Parliament, of these, only three were decidedly Royalist, and five were undecided, the other five were Parliamentarians. Chichester was divided in its loyalties, the Clergy almost entirely Royalist with the majority of the burgesses for Parliament, but early on fell to the King for a brief period, but as soon as this news reached Parliament 6000 troop were sent under General Waller to retake the town. Within a week control of Arundel and Chichester was secured for Parliament, giving it
control over the rest of that County. A year following however late in 1643 the Royalist General Hopton managed to recapture Arundel Castle and some neighboring fortified Houses until Colonel Morley, the local Parliamentary leader with assistance again from Waller with 10,000 men laid siege to the Royal Garrison, and after a couple of weeks heavy fighting, virtually leveled the town and recaptured the Castle thus County for Parliament for the rest of the War.

In general however, it has been said of Sussex that the County suffered much less disruption to the day to day living of its inhabitants than many other parts of the Country. Some families had been reduced to poverty by heavy fines and parts of Chichester had also been destroyed along with a number of Country houses. Naturally enough as the prolonged conflict dragged out a growing resentment to the fact of the war developed amongst the farmers and villagers at the food levies and the billeting of troops. They began to organise their own public meetings, the first at Rooks Hill in 1645 being attended by over a thousand people. These meetings were quickly suppressed by the Parliamentary leaders highlighting the whole incredulous irony of those early struggles to supplant Monarchical autocracy with something said to be better!

Robert Holborne’s position as son in law to Robert Dudley could have swayed his opinions either way, as he was already married to the Duchess Anne (nee) Dudley, grand daughter of ‘Leycester’ and it has been suggested this relationship may have influenced his initial Anti~Court reputation. As mentioned Robert Holbourn later transferred his support to the Crown, this was to occur in 1640. His change of heart may be seen as an act of personal ambition for it was after the dissolution of Parliament that it was already rumoured he might be chosen as the ‘Solicitor General’, but for his distinct differences with the Court. Perhaps considering that he had done sufficient for the cause he seems to have turned his attentions to his own position, and again just perhaps forewarned by his wife’s family history, chose not to put himself out ‘on a limb’ with his close associates the Parliamentarian rebels. As mentioned above his appearance as an MP in the ‘Long Parliament’ was for the Cornish borough of Mitchell, where the Arundel’s of Trerice had an interest after John Arundel (IInd), himself also closely connected with Lincoln’s Inne, had announced his intention of standing for the Seat of Bodmin.

Holborne was duly elected and returned to Westminster and thereafter was no longer associated with the popular cause. He gained five committee appointments, and this time four of them were chiefly concerned with the ‘Authority of Convocation’ and reform of the Church, which he opposed. He made a learned legalistic argument on behalf of the Bishops who only four years earlier he would have opposed. He wished to defer Pym’s motion to vote the ecclesiastical cannons as illegal and in their defense made a two hour speech in which he supported convocations right to bind both clergy and laity with the Consent of the Crown, stating : ‘Surely the Church ought to be governed by itself, and the layman not to intermeddle in it. . . . such cannons as were directly against the law were void, but such as constitute indifferent things are not against the law but ought to bind.’ ~ To all intents and purpose, it seems he was loosing the plot and even opposed the Earl of Stafford’s attainder! He argued with another Lawyer John Selden ‘as strongly on the (Earl’s) side as his council could have done’ that Stafford’s actions did not amount to treason, and despite the clamour for revenge at the time he was conceivably justified, perhaps he had in his mind considered Edmund Dudley’s position some decades earlier ?

The Presumptions of Parliament now replacing those of the Laudian Clergy, he took the Protestation. After the recess his support for the Church and the King’s Rights was uncompromising and he was among those recommended to the King by Secretary Nicholas as one of the Chief champions of the Royal Prerogative, and opposed the Grand Remonstrance, considering Parliament to be over~streaching its own authority. He argued : ‘A Parliament may do a thing unlawful, as to change our Religion, and then we are bound to ask leave to protest against it’.15 Robert had previously distinguished himself (Feb.28th 1641) with ‘The reading in Lincoln' s Inne upon the statutes.........of treason’ His ‘Discourse on Treason’ was subsequently published by an Oxford printer as Royalist propaganda about the time he was expelled from the House along with other Royalists, although he had not been present therein for the best part of that summer of 1642.

In his younger days the rising Lawyer was said also to have been a great lover of Astrology, ‘having experienced the truth of it thereof himself’. The practice had perhaps reached its peak during the Civil War and Interregnum with its most celebrated exponent being William Lilly who explained that astrologers, by God's permission were the instruments ‘whereby many contingent events may be Foreseen’ by study of the Heavens. It was with these notions that astrology was able to coexist beside the Christian viewpoint. During these times astrology became an essential aspect of the intellectual framework in which men were educated, that Robert then was keen to see what fated his future with the Lady Anne Dudley may also have played some part in his later political judgments. The £100/~ he paid out on the astrologers chart may have provided for him the opportunity to consider that weighty precedence of his Father in law’s upon the very Throne of the Realm ~then floundering under the onslaught of Cromwell and his many cousins, in the name of the People.

Given the illustrious ancestry of the Earl of ‘Leycester’, son of John Dudley the Lawyer Robert Holborne would have had no doubt as to the implications of his marital status, yet he and the Lady Anne do not appear to have had any children. In his Horoscope ‘a long journey by sea or land’ is said to have been predicted for him in the November of 1642, yet from whence he came to join the King at Oxford is uncertain. It was their he sat in the Oxford Parliament and at this point in his journey through life was made Attorney General to the Prince of Wales and a member of his Council. It has further been suggested that his late loyalty to the crown may have been a consideration in the granting of a Patent to his Mother in Law, the Lady Alice Dudley, a woman of noted piety and charity, which conferred on her the Dignity of a Duchess and the Precedence of a Duke’s daughter on her children.

In 1643 the MP’s who were Royalist joined the King at Oxford. His professional ambition may have motivated Robert Holborne to be amongst this group. The King, who would no doubt have known of Holborne’s legal abilities personally created him a Knight at Oxford in 1643. Holborne was perhaps rather like Sir Thomas Fairfax in that he had harboured Royalist sympathies. In 1645 Fairfax was to be Commander in Chief of the New Model Army. His basic objection to the execution of the King ultimately influenced his decision later in helping in the restoration of Charles II. Sir Robert Holborne was disabled as a Royalist in 1644 (22nd Jan.) soon to return however as a Commander for the King at Uxbridge in 1645. He was present Sturbridge at the peace negotiations as an advisor to the King. He filled the role of Attorney General to the Prince, from 1644 to 1646 as well as being an ordinary member of the Council of the Prince of Wales, who was then Prince Rupert.

From the 55 defecting Members of Parliament their had remained at least some other two hundred loyal to Cromwell’s administration. Of the whole three basic opinions had been galvanised, these being, firstly of those insisting on ‘Constitutional Monarchy’, then their were others wishing to see the King taught a lesson, later to be restored to power, and finally their were Members wishing to negotiate, setting the King’s terms; that he accepts the Parliamentary nominations of his Ministers and reduce the power of the Bishops. Pym, Oliver St. John, and Hampden were of this opinion, as at first was Holborne. In 1643 both Pym and Hampden died, Oliver St. John subsequently took over the leadership of this group, to which Cromwell continued to adhere, whilst these events may have also had some bearing on the decision Holborne made to join the King at Oxford, so leaving Cromwell, St .John and Harry Vane to fashion what became termed ‘The New Model Army.’

John Hampden’s death was a great loss to the Parliamentarian cause, the circumstances of which are lamentably ironic as it was in the middle of June 1643 that a Cavalry commanded by the King’s nephew Prince Rupert, the son of Elizabeth, that Queen of Bohemia that Hampden had sought support for during the previous Reign, and who now traveling to Oxford met a troop led by Hampden near Chalgrove. Early in the engagement against Rupert’s men John Hampden was wounded in the shoulder by a musket ball and so was forced to withdraw from the battle. He was fortunate in being able to reach safety some twelve miles from his Buckinghamshire home. The King soon learnt of Hampden’s fatal wounding and despite all sent the offer of a physician to his assistance. Had he just sent the physician Hampden may not have died within the week, aged but 49! John Hampden was thereafter laid to rest at his Family Vault at Great Hampden.

Despite it being a great object lesson for all future ‘ill~desposed’ Monarchs and ‘would be’ Dictators the net results of the Civil War were considerably less than they might seem, for it is a fair comment that the objectives on which the Puritans, the Gentry, Lawyers and the House of Commons began the struggle under James I, had already been fulfilled to all intents before 1642 and the advances made after this point ~ the abolition of the Bishops, the establishment of Presbyterianism, religious toleration, the creation of a Republic and the duty of a Monarch to uphold the law by obeying it were all rejected at the Restoration eighteen years later. In the year 1648 Sir Robert Holborne is recorded as having died aged 50, having spent his last days at Covent Garden. Oddly enough Sir Robert is recorded as having two final resting places, in the first instance it has been said that he was buried at night in Lincoln’s Inn Chapel on 16th February of 1648, where as, elsewhere he is mentioned on the monument of Lady Anne at St Giles. This difference, although probably no more than an error of clerical administration is nevertheless so specific as to be worthy of brief note :

‘Lady Anne Holborne17 was one of the daughters of the Duchess Dudley, and resided with her mother at Dudley House, ‘in 1623......she afterward became the wife of Sir Robert Holbourn of Lincoln's Inne, Knight, who in the patent in nobility granted to her mother by Charles I, is styled ‘Robert Holborne, Esquire.’
Lady Anne died in 1668 ......and was buried in St. Giles Church, with a monument and Inscription. Sir Robert Holborne, the husband, was a Lawyer of considerable eminence, and Solicitor General to Charles I ; and is said in the patent alluded to, (to) “have much served His Majesty, by his learned pen and otherwise” he was also buried at St. Giles’s, with an epitaph.’

Quite unaware of his (apparent) death and burial (at night in Lincoln’s Inne Chapel) the King later requested Sir Robert’s presence at Newport. These were indeed strange times and the Cromwellian Interregnum was to become a period unique in English History, during which eleven long years Cromwell struggled to achieve his Constitutional Government. In Kent, the poignant event of the rebellion, only six months before the fatal Execution* brought the refractory Kent Gentry and others for a short time to be swept by deep feelings of anguish and revolt at the consequence of their insurrection, with which it was associated locally. Yet their had been “such a general and public unanimity” toward the execution on January 30th 1649 that their was such a ‘concurrence as was never yet seen or heard of in one Country.’

The estates of those MP’s such as Sir Robert Holbourn, who later demonstrated their loyalty to the King were subsequently subject to sequestration by the reforming Parliamentary Committee. Their can be no doubt that by 1650 a great many Gentry in Kent (as in other parts) had, similar retributions placed upon them leading many into a ‘terrifying web of debt’ thus the Kentish petitioners in Parliament accepted the new ‘County Committee of Kent for Compositions’ opinion that moderation ‘toward those who have been misled by others’ would “be a winning mercy upon ingenious spirits”. Although at the beginning Parliament insisted that the rebel Gentry should pay for the maintenance of the County Forces by ‘Composition fines’, these, though, with time were largely disregarded. In July of 1650 the Cavalier forces in Kent were planning to occupy Dover Castle, strategic rising to this end being organised across Kent, Surrey and Sussex, but Dover Castle was shortly thereafter secured for Parliament by the Republican Algernon Sidney and the efforts at resistance to Parliament amounted to naught. That summer in Kent was to pass quietly whilst war raged in Scotland and the North, the Kentish Cavaliers holding out for the sake of their own Estates.

In late 17th and 18th Century England, the poorest inhabitants of London lived in the most appalling of conditions. The Great Issues of Religion, that had burnt headlong through the Centuries continued beyond the Civil War and still inspired widespread debates. These having matured into reasoned arguments, concerned many divisions of opinion thrown up out of the period, continued long after the restoration. Considerable activity during the reign of Queen Anne (1702~1714)concerning the growth of spirited public conscience saw the beginnings of a now great national institution. The eminent parishioners of St Giles clearly demonstrating a duty in matters of Charity long before Voluntary Societies had become established. It is nevertheless fitting that the ‘S.P.C.K.,’19 one of the longest serving and well known of Charities, was founded in 1698 with membership from a variety of religious backgrounds, Clerics and laymen alike. These developments along side the growing national interest in helping those imperiled on the sea seem to reflect a gradual growth in accepting the responsibilities that must come with the radical new approaches to religion and politics that we have traced.