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By Root 1411 0

body, raising taxes, seizing property, ejecting ministers, licensing the press, setting armies in the field and fleets out to sea, all on the authority of ordinances which had originally been justified as measures necessary owing to the absence of the King. A careful reading of Husbands” Exact collection revealed the case for defensive arms, in defence of religion, law and the liberty of Parliament. But iconoclasm, the burning of the Book of Sports, the (possibly malicious) ejection of parish clergy, not to mention the constitutional and administrative radicalism of the parliamentary war effort, all threatened to open a fatal gap between the rhetoric and the reality of the parliamentary cause. This was a carefully chosen and cautiously staged answer to the common concern that zealous reformation led to social disorder, but it was clearly much beyond the aims of redress in 1640. So too, the Vow and Covenant had severed the defence of the King’s person, crown and dignity from the defence of the true religion and the liberties of Parliament. Even before a military alliance with the Covenanters was ratified, these developments had put a strain on the loyalty men felt to the choices they had made in 1642. Bruno Ryves clearly recognized the potential here.

The relief of Gloucester had required the loan of fifty subsidies from London, ten times as many as had been granted at any one time during the 1620s, which was forced out of the city on 18 August. At the same time the Commons felt the need to rebuke John Saltmarsh, the increasingly radical divine, for some apparently derogatory remarks about the royal family. When the issue was discussed Henry Marten defended Saltmarsh, saying ‘it were better one family were destroyed than the whole kingdom should perish’ – a not very coded statement of conditional loyalty to the King. Challenged, he said without hesitation that he did indeed mean the royal family. He was imprisoned in the Tower and excluded from the House for three years.78 Parliamentarians trod an increasingly thin line: as the measures necessary to fight the war became more radical, the claim to be in defensive arms to protect monarchical government seemed increasingly difficult to justify. The King’s posture of respect for local offices was undermined by the behaviour of some royalist troops, but it is easy to see why those who had chosen Parliament might have begun to feel that they had chosen wrongly, or were backing a losing side.

Sir Hugh Cholmley, for one, had acted reluctantly in taking up arms for Parliament. He later claimed that he had regarded the Militia Ordinance as an act of war against Charles and the Nineteen Propositions as unjust and unreasonable. However, ties of friendship (most of his friends were parliamentarians) and hostility to Strafford’s friends and allies, who were throwing in their lot with the King, had persuaded him to accept a commission from the Earl of Essex. Acting decisively, he took control of Scarborough Castle and led 500 men in a successful action at Guisborough on 16 January 1643. Slingsby, his royalist opponent, died of his wounds three days later. Although this was a relatively minor skirmish, which figures barely at all in the military histories of the war, Cholmley was sickened by what he saw. He had refused to lead his forces into the West Riding in support of the Fairfaxes, convincing his commanders in London that this was prudent, rather than treacherous. When the Queen arrived in York from Bridlington, however, in March 1643, he changed allegiances. He claimed now to be certain that Pym, not Charles, was the warmonger; and he admitted to acting to defend his home, tenants and constituents from invasion and plunder by the royalists. He subsequently held Scarborough for the King, stubbornly in 1644 after the war in the north had turned against the royalists, and went into exile after he eventually surrendered it. He returned to England in the 1650s, but was widely distrusted, and even despised.79 Cholmley was later able to present all this as consistent and personally honourable,