In the latest Revolutionary Stuart Parliaments blog, guest blogger Dr Fraser Dickinson considers the changes in the fortunes of the circles at the Caroline court as one of the reasons for the problems that Charles I faced during the crisis of 1641 and 1642.

In the second half of the 1630s, England presented the appearance of stability. One cause of this state of affairs was that at court Charles I could rely on a triumvirate of support from the ‘Protestant Party’ (or the ‘Northumberland-Leicester’ circle), the ‘Spanish Party’ and his Queen, Henriette Marie, and her associates. This blog considers these three groups, and how, over the space of a few months, the king lost the support of two of them, with catastrophic results.

The Northumberland-Leicester circle consisted of a number of important officeholders – Algernon Percy, 4th earl of Northumberland, the lord admiral; Robert Sidney, 2nd earl of Leicester, the extraordinary ambassador to France; Philip Herbert, 4th earl of Pembroke, the lord chamberlain; William Cecil, 2nd earl of Salisbury, captain of the band of the king’s gentlemen pensioners; Sir John Coke, senior secretary of state; and Sir Henry Vane senior, Coke’s replacement. Similarly, the Spanish party comprised principal persons of state, notably William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury; Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford and lord lieutenant of Ireland; Francis Cottington, 1st Baron Cottington, chancellor of the exchequer and master of the Court of Wards; and Sir Francis Windebanke, the junior secretary of state.

This triad of support held great benefits for Charles, as he could use it to strike his own balance of policies. The king had access to a wide spread of counsel ranging from doctrinal Calvinists, who promoted the ‘Protestant cause’ in Europe and the Thirty Years War, to individuals who were also Protestants (albeit that some were Arminians, while others were crypto-Catholics), who leaned towards the Habsburgs. Members of the two groups, notably, Northumberland and Leicester and Laud and Strafford, were able individuals. Participants across the circles, particularly, Northumberland and Strafford, got on well, though others, such as Strafford and Vane senior, hated each other.

All this changed in 1641 and 1642. The Spanish party had been destroyed by the middle of 1641. Strafford and Laud were proscribed at the end of 1640, with Strafford being executed in May 1641. Windebanke fled abroad in December 1640. Cottington relinquished his offices in the summer of 1641. Equally damaging, the erstwhile loyalist Northumberland-Leicester circle deserted Charles, and began to oppose him. Pembroke was important in securing a majority in the House of Lords for Strafford’s attainder in May, and Vane senior was also deeply involved in the lord lieutenant’s downfall. None of the group would side with the king in the civil war. Northumberland, Pembroke, Salisbury and Vane senior would all oppose him actively, while Leicester and Coke would remain neutral.

The origins of the fall of the Spanish Party and the alienation of the Northumberland-Leicester circle went back to the change in Caroline foreign policy that occurred in the final months of 1639. The battle of the Downs, which in October had witnessed the defeat of a Spanish armada by a Dutch fleet in English waters, radically altered the diplomatic and strategic balance in Europe. The outcome of the battle meant that Charles could transfer his efforts from trying to finalize the Anglo-French alliance that he had sought since 1636 to realizing a league with Spain to provide him with aid in his war against the Scots Covenanters. Negotiations for a Spanish alliance began in April 1640, with terms being agreed in August. Yet, the Spanish party paid the price for what turned out to be the failed league with the Spaniards, which Strafford had championed and negotiated. (Spain’s problems in the Iberian peninsula in1640 meant it could not deliver the money and possibly the troops that Charles needed to re-establish control over his realms.)

The estrangement of the Northumberland-Leicester circle began with the Spanish negotiations in April 1640 and the dissolution of the Short Parliament in May, crystalizing in the advent of the Long Parliament in November. Northumberland now felt confident enough to break with Charles and align with the other Protestant group at court – the circle on its fringes based around Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, and Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford – the godly ‘Warwick-Bedford’ group. From the end of 1640, Northumberland and Vane senior played an important role in bringing about an Anglo-Dutch marriage alliance in May 1641 – something that the Warwick-Bedford circle espoused, but which the king and the queen opposed. Leicester’s move away from Charles came in the first quarter of 1641, when he gave up on the Anglo-French alliance that he had been trying to finalize. The ambassador then set his sights on Strafford’s position of lord lieutenant of Ireland, a post that he attained in June.

The political implications of these changes were enormous. Charles’s position was greatly weakened in 1641 and 1642 by the loss of the Spanish party and the withdrawal of the backing of the Northumberland-Leicester circle. He could no longer rely on a broad base of support as he had in the second half of the 1630s. The result was that the king fell back on the problematic (from the perspective of many, if not all, of his Protestant subjects) advice of his already very influential Catholic queen. With wider support in 1642, Charles might have been able to secure victory in the Civil War in that year. He might even have avoided conflict, and achieved a favourable peaceful resolution of the crisis of 1641 and 1642. Either outcome would have been better for the king than the four years of conflict that ensued from 1642 onwards, ending in his defeat in 1646.

F.D.

Further reading

John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (2007)

Richard Cust, Charles I and the Aristocracy, 1625-1642 (Cambridge, 2013)

Fraser Dickinson, ‘The French Connection’, History Today, 72, 1, January 2022, pp. 50-63

Biographies of Sir Henry Vane senior and Sir Francis Windebanke can be found in House of Commons 1640-60. The peers named will be covered in the forthcoming House of Lords, 1640-60.