God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [54]
This strategy, however, quickly collapsed. In Ireland, Charles was in the hands of Sir Thomas Wentworth, the Lord Deputy. Schooled in the harsh world of Yorkshire politics, Wentworth had made his way by appealing to the royal court for patronage and protection and, when it suited, to the country as a champion of local interests. He was prominent in the parliaments of the 1620s as a critic of the court, but rose to be president of the Council of the North, vanquishing local rivals in the process. He was then made Lord Deputy in Ireland, the kind of promotion which can also be seen as an exile. In Ireland he acquired a reputation for authoritarian government, partly because he was indeed authoritarian and partly because he attacked all vested interests equally boldly. His service there was valued by the King, however, who gave him the title of Lord Lieutenant in January 1640 and elevated him to the peerage shortly after as the first Earl of Strafford. In England, in more normal circumstances, he would have been less authoritarian than in Ireland, but in the Scottish crisis he counselled Charles to take a strong line.8 Nonetheless, he opposed Antrim’s mobilization, and doubted the usefulness of his troops. In north-east Scotland, Huntly was outfaced by a better-mobilized Covenanter force, which took a number of castles, leading Huntly to disband his forces rather than risk defeat, and Hamilton was diverted from his rendezvous with Huntly to the Firth of Forth. There he found landing unsafe, not least because his own mother appeared in public with a pistol and threatened to shoot him if he came ashore. Charles had also sought help from the Dutch and the Spanish. The Dutch were completely uninterested and the Spanish claimed that they could not commit troops because suitable bread ovens would not be available in England. That the Privy Council explored the range of available bread ovens perhaps reflects a certain desperation, or an inability to take a hint.9
Despite his initial intentions, therefore, Charles had to rely entirely on his English forces. The achievement was not negligible: two large armies were mobilized to fight the Covenanters in just over a year, 15,000 in May 1639 and nearly 25,000 in August 1640.10 But the Earl of Northumberland, commander of the English forces, had counselled against going to war in July 1638, on the grounds that ‘The People through all England are generally so discontented, by reason of the multitude of projects daily imposed upon them, as I think there is reason to fear that a great part of them will be readier to join with the Scots, than to draw their swords in the King’s service’.11 Things were little better once war broke out. On their way to fight in the second of the Bishops” Wars, in 1640, some English troops did in fact behave as if they were on the other side, carrying out iconoclastic acts to purify parish churches and refusing to obey papistical officers. English opinion was divided, and complex, not uniformly hostile to the war, and we should not ignore the achievement; but division was not what Charles had expected, and it was not welcome. It precipitated the end of his Personal Rule in England and prompted a crisis which ultimately led to the dissolution of his authority in England, Scotland and Ireland.
On 9 February 1639 the Privy Council had conceded that members of the Trained Bands (that part of the able-bodied population summoned to muster which had been equipped and trained to modern standards) need not serve. They could instead send substitutes, an important concession