Greg Jenner is joined in 17th-century England by Dr Jonathan Healey and comedian Toussaint Douglass to learn about King Charles I and the causes of the British Civil Wars.This year marks the 400th anniversary of Charles I coming to the throne on 27 March, 1625. Less than two decades later, his antagonistic relationship with Parliament would ignite a civil war, one that would end with his capture, trial and execution, and the rule of Oliver Cromwell. The war is remembered as a fight between Cavaliers and Roundheads, but what did each side actually believe in, and what were the causes of this conflict? Tracing the breakdown of the relationship between the King and Parliament, this episode takes in clashes over taxation, religion and the limits of royal power, disastrous wars, unpopular advisers, and Charles’s attempts to rule without Parliament altogether. It also moves outside London, exploring popular uprisings against everything from the King’s taxes and contentious church reforms to the 17th-century cost-of-living crisis.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Matt Ryan Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: James Cook
Chapter 1: What is the focus of this podcast episode?
BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we're getting political. We're travelling back to the 17th century to discover the causes of the British Civil Wars. You might call them English Civil War. We'll explain later.
Chapter 2: Who are the guests discussing the British Civil Wars?
And to help us separate the Royalists from the Radicals, we have two very special guests. In History Corner, he's Associate Professor in Social History at Kellogg College, University of Oxford, where his research focuses on the social history of early modern England. You might have read his incredible book, The Blazing World, A New History of Revolutionary England.
He's also the author of a forthcoming book, The Blood in Winter, all about the run-up to the Civil War in 1642. It's Dr Jonathan Healy. Welcome, John. Hi, Greg. Lovely to be here. Thank you for Coming in and in Comedy Corner, he's an award-winning stand-up comedian.
You may have seen him on BBC Three's Stand Up for Live Comedy or loads of Dave shows like Outsiders, Hypothetical, Question Team or Late Night Mash. And you will remember him from our episode on Frederick Douglass. It's Toussaint Douglass. Welcome back to the show, Toussaint.
All right, thanks so much for having me, Greg. You also forgot to mention that, just like John, I also have a connection with Kellogg's. I had cornflakes this morning, so I'm also very academic myself. I'll leave it to him mostly, but just to say that I dipped my toes in some milk, so yeah, don't worry.
Tucson, last time you proved yourself a bit of an American history aficionado. You knew quite a lot about Frederick Douglass.
Yeah, well, he was one of my heroes. So someone I, yeah, and also I did study kind of American history at uni a bit. So I had a little bit of a help there. This one, not so much. When you told me about the British Civil Wars, I did think it was like a British version of like the Marvel kind of film, the Civil War film. So I'm not sure if it's going to be that or not, but that's my starting point.
So, yeah, I'll probably be leaving a lot of the history to John, but I'll chip in every now and then, I'm sure.
So what do you know? So what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And as you've probably heard of the British Civil Wars, or rather you've probably heard of the English Civil War. That's not really a name we use that much anymore. And also there aren't that many movies about it or pop culture about it.
We've got King Charles popping up in To Kill a King. There was Blackout of the Cavalier years. Probably you're thinking of Roundheads versus Cavaliers or Oliver Cromwell and his ugly wart or Charles I being beheaded. But how did a civil war actually start? And just how long is a long parliament? Let's find out.
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Chapter 3: What were the early financial struggles of King James I?
So James I was very short of money and that created an awful lot of problems. And in particular, it created a lot of problems in his relationship with with Parliament because the assumption was at this time that for the King to take people's money, they had to give consent to it in Parliament, which met when the King wanted it to.
But the trouble is that when James called parliaments, they tended to want grievances to be addressed. So there's that. He's short of money. There's also a huge amount of kind of social stress In England at this period, there's been a long period of population growth. It means that people can't get on the housing ladder and food prices are very, very high. There's a series of riots in 1607.
This sounds familiar. And there's a lot of religious issues which have hung over from the Reformation.
So, Toussaint, King Charles I comes to the throne, 1625. Do you think he learns from daddy's mistakes?
I'm going to go with no. He didn't have the greatest dad modelling in what he should be doing. So I'm thinking he's more of the same, Greg.
I think that's a pretty good guess. John, things just get worse for young Charles, don't they?
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Chapter 4: How did King Charles I's marriage affect his rule?
The issue of tax didn't go away and completely poisoned Charles's relationship with Parliament because he basically sort of says, well, you know, there's a war. I really should be able to just take your money. But Parliament says, well, actually, we have to vote it to you. And before we do that, we want you to address these grievances that we have.
One of the grievances is Charles has married Princess Henrietta Maria of France, who, of course, was a Catholic. This was a provocative move at the time where religious tensions were high. There's also a weird thing called Toussaint. Tell me if you've heard of this before. Tonnage and poundage.
This is Radio 4, right? I'm going to say no. No.
Tonnage and poundage, as funny as it sounds, it's a tax on imports and exports. And traditionally, Parliament had always granted it to the monarch at the start of their reign for life. But under Charles I, Parliament says you can have it for a year. And then we're going to kind of have another look and see if everything kind of tracks and everything's OK. And then it expired.
So Charles was faced with a bit of a problem, which is that he suddenly lost this source of income. And he approached that problem in the most direct way you probably could, which is that he just collects it anyway. And they've had a recent controversy over something called the petition of rights, whereby Parliament basically says non-parliamentary taxation is illegal.
Charles eventually gives his assent, but fudges it and eventually end up also fighting about religion. There's this group within the English church which wants much more kind of high church ceremonial. They are very much in the ascendancy. Charles likes them very, very much. MPs within Parliament got very angry about that because they saw it as a return to Catholicism.
What does high church involve? What would that be in like church?
There's more sort of ceremony. There's a lot less focus on private prayer, listening to sermons. One of the biggest things is that the communion table, which in the English church at this period was traditionally in the middle, so it's kind of accessible to everyone, gets railed off and put at the east end.
What you're saying here is that one of the key reasons that caused Britain to plunge into civil war was a disagreement over interior design. Is that what we're saying here?
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Chapter 5: Why did King Charles I rule without Parliament?
We've got the third parliament of 1628 called where, again, he's trying to raise money because there's a subsidy bill, John, isn't there? And forced loans, there's martial law, the petition of rights, there's tonnage and poundage again. The subcommittee are in charge of the tonnage and poundage thing and they just suddenly decide to be a subcommittee about Catholicism.
Oh, now we're getting into the nitty gritty subcommittee. Here we go. Subcommittee, that's what he wants.
And Charles is annoyed at this and he demands an adjournment.
Yeah, he basically adjourns Parliament as a kind of prelude to dissolving it. But when he sends his messenger to the House of Commons, they basically bar the door so he can't get in. And they hold the speaker down in his chair for like an hour. And while they do that, MPs pass a series of resolutions, basically saying that if you support all this kind of stuff, you are a traitor.
Very disorderly scenes. Great fun.
I love the idea of just the messenger just outside the door. Like, I can hear you. I know you're in there. Just open the door. Like, this isn't cool, guys.
And the king responds by imprisoning nine MPs. That's not good news, right? John, you can't imprison MPs. Can you?
I mean, he can and he does. He basically decides that he wants to rule without Parliament. So from now on, he will try to rule England without calling another Parliament for as long as he can.
Toussaint, do you want to guess how long this personal rule no Parliament is?
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Chapter 6: What were the religious tensions during Charles I's reign?
Is he raising cash just in his own way then?
Yeah. So, I mean, what he then tried to do was he tried to find new and creative ways of raising money. And in order to do this, the new ways are basically the old ways. And one of his civil servants, a guy called Sir John Burra, had been ferreting away in the 17th century equivalent of the National Archives, which is in the Tower of London.
And he'd found all these kind of crazy medieval ways of raising money and, you know, everything from, you know, attacks on beer, for example, or attacks on death or attacks on lawyers, which I think would have been quite popular.
Something he does too, he turns to ship money. What is ship money?
Well, ship money is a well-established or was a well-established way of raising ships for the Navy. And basically what happened was that coastal communities were told you need to provide a ship for the Royal Navy and that would protect the country. What Charles did was he kind of rolled it out to inland counties on the fairly sensible premise that basically they get protected as well.
And it was very, very controversial because he was essentially doing a new tax and he was doing it without Parliament. But it seems to work. You know, he raises quite a lot of money through it.
You can see the tensions rising here, Tucson, I think, because the king is just doing what he wants. So we've already mentioned tension between the high church Anglicans and the ones who are almost a bit Catholic and the Puritans. What is Armenianism? Is it this high church thing you mentioned?
It comes to a Dutch theologian called Arminius, and he argued for essentially a form of faith where you're not completely predestined to heaven or hell. You have a certain amount of free will. And that then kind of ties into this English idea of ceremonialism. You know, again, interior design, putting the altar, putting the holy table at the east end.
And it's connected by this sort of clumsy guy from Reading who is sort of a bit like a kind of short version of Ricky Gervais. who just alienates everyone, called William Lord. And he became the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was very, very controversial because, you know, the Calvinists and the Puritans didn't like it very much.
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Chapter 7: How did social unrest contribute to the outbreak of the Civil War?
Well, because he liked to bow and do all this kind of stuff so much that he would fall over and drop the prayer book and all this kind of stuff. And this was all in the name of decorum, of course.
Was he also drunk as well, though? Because I feel like just bowing isn't enough to make you fall over. Unless he was really top heavy on his head. I've got quite a big head sometimes. I feel like I've been hitting the communion wine a little bit, surely.
But we also then get the cost of living crisis again, John. Why is this crisis happening? It's not inflation, is it?
Root cause, it is inflation. There's a big growth in population. That means that there's more mouths to feed. There's also a series of really bad harvests from about 1628 onwards that led to food riots. There's a sense in the 1630s that the social order is really kind of fraying. There's a lot of anger out there.
Now, earlier, Toussaint, you mentioned Marvel, and I can ring my Marvel bell because we have Captain Carter show up, who is a lady who sort of rallies the brave lads of Malden in Essex. Do you know what she does, Toussaint?
To rally them?
Yeah, they go on a heist. They go to steal some stuff.
Oh, right. OK. What do they steal?
Well, they're going after the grain. They carted it off. Captain Carter carted it off.
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Chapter 8: What role did women play in protests during the 17th century?
And in 1638, the Scots en masse signed this thing called the Scottish National Covenant, where they basically said that they would protect their church, their kirk. It led to a plan by Charles to invade Scotland, and it all went terribly badly wrong.
So Charles does the obvious thing here. He calls another parliament. And having had the short parliament before, he now goes on a parliamentary bender. It's called the long parliament. He can't get enough. Toussaint, how long is the long parliament?
I'm going to go with two years.
That's a very sensible guess. It's 20 years.
20 years? What? This guy is so random. If I was a parliamentarian, I just wouldn't know where I stand with him. Do you know what I mean? I just want clarity from Charles. I feel like he's like, are you into me? Are you not? You keep pulling me up and then you keep breaking up with me. Come on, what's our relationship status here? 20 years, wow.
In fairness, he was dead for half of that. So, you know, I mean, John, it's a technicality, right? The parliament is never dissolved because the king is executed. But, you know, we're jumping ahead. But that's why it's called the long parliament. Is that fair?
Yeah, but also he can't dissolve it because he needs money. They also then passed an act called the Triennial Act, which is terribly important, which says Parliament must sit every three years. And if it doesn't, if the king doesn't call it, then leading kind of lawyers and politicians can call it anyway.
And that is a massive constitutional revolution because previously Parliament had always been called by the king. That was the only way it could be called. And now they're saying Parliament is permanent and it can be called even if the king doesn't.
Good on Parliament. Yeah, they found their self-worth after all that being messed about and actually like, you know, good. I'm glad.
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