God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [22]
This pattern persisted over the next three months, as widely spaced and long-awaited meetings of the Privy Council were arranged in anticipation of the King’s replies to their letters. In advance of these meetings, which took place on 20 September, 17 October and 15 November, opponents of the Prayer Book were able to organize petitions and demonstrations at their leisure, so that at each meeting the councillors were clear that they were caught between two more or less immovable forces. As it went on, this petitioning campaign was able to muster impressive displays of solidarity. At the time of the meeting in October a ‘multitude’ gathered at the Tolbooth in Edinburgh, in ‘high mood’, threatening to lynch the council if they denied the crowd’s demand for the appointment of commissioners. On 15 November the meeting of the Privy Council was moved out of Edinburgh to try to relieve some of this pressure, although this effectively conceded the capital city to opponents of the Prayer Book.64
Clearly the management of this difficulty was less than ideal. The Scottish council was divided and there was competition among his councillors for the King’s ear, which centred on getting permission to attend him in person. Traquair was advising compromise both on the liturgy and on the role of the bishops in the process since, by September, many of the petitions were quite openly anti-episcopal in tone. Charles was reluctant to allow his councillors to come south since that would concede to his opponents that he was shaken by the protests, and when Traquair was eventually given permission to go to London it was publicly stated that it was because there was Exchequer business to discuss. Because of this reluctance Charles was in the hands of men locally, and unable to respond quickly to events on the ground. Possible solutions might have been to follow their advice, grant them more power, or put in place men to whom he would grant sufficient authority and whose judgement he would trust. In fact he did none of the above, preferring to put pressure on those on the spot to counter the pressure they were feeling from below.65
Whereas the response of the government was hesitant and slow-footed, the campaign of the opponents of the Prayer Book, now known as the Supplicants, was impressively effective. Little is known about the local history of this campaign and little can be said about how this impressive mobilization was achieved, but it clearly owes much to the Presbyterian organization of the kirk. Behind that lay the growing importance of the Scottish middling sort. The increasing economic power of a middling group of landholders found expression in the kirk sessions.66 Such men had been hostile to the Revocation scheme and a number of economic issues – taxation, monopolies and the proposal for a British fishery that would give English fishermen equal access to Scottish waters.67 Crucial too seems to have been the absence of a loyal reaction among the Scottish nobility. It was not until the autumn of 1638 that rivalries among the nobility began to create the possibilities for mobilizing a loyalist response. Here again, the nature of Charles’s government prior to 1637 seems to have been an important reason for the absence of a loyal reaction, particularly concerns about the exclusion of the nobility from political influence and the suspicions surrounding the Revocation.68 Another important factor in the developing solidarity and