God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [61]
Charles had lost patience with his parliament and dissolved it: his needs unsupplied, the grievances of the country unaddressed. The response revealed a powerful strain of anti-popery, associated with hostility to Laud and an attachment to parliaments. A failed parliament did not provide the best basis for renewed war in defence of Laudian ceremonial: indeed, it was worse than no parliament at all.48
Unsurprisingly Charles’s military preparations for the 1640 campaign were once again problematic. The intention, as in 1639, had not been to depend on English resources alone. Once again, however, the strategy disintegrated and Charles depended entirely on a response in England that was measured, to put the best gloss on it. When Wentworth had returned from Ireland the previous September he had urged Charles to form a committee for Scottish affairs. It was at a meeting of that body in the aftermath of the dissolution that he suggested to Charles: ‘you have an army in Ireland that you may employ here to reduce this kingdom?. From the context there is no doubt that he meant that the 8,000 men in Ireland could be used in Scotland, but the accusation that he meant to use an Irish army to enforce the royal will in England was later to be a crucial charge against him.49 In the event the Irish army did not materialize, and neither did the foreign mercenaries or money which Wentworth, now the Earl of Strafford, had advised Charles to seek.50
Political will was failing, both in the Privy Council and out in the provinces, and in this tense political situation rumour and news assumed a crucial importance. The Lord General and commander of Charles’s army, the Earl of Northumberland, was dismayed by the attempt to pursue the war without parliamentary supply, not least because of the public knowledge of this financial weakness: ‘What will the world judge of us abroad, to see us enter into such an action as this, not knowing how to maintain it for one month’. The Earl of Northumberland confessed that ‘It grieves my soul to be involved in these counsels’,51 but if the newsletter writer John Castle is to be believed he was soon to be in an even more uncomfortable position. In May, Castle wrote to Bridgewater that at a Privy Council meeting the King had complained of ‘the liberty the people took to discourse of his action intended for the North, as if he had not means to make a war, but was calling back his troops’. He bade his councillors to ‘publish the contrary’.52
This was one battle that the King was certain to lose: there was a lively and unstoppable appetite for news and rumour. The speeches by Pym and Rous on 17 April had been delivered from scripts, which may have reflected an intention to circulate them outside the walls of the chamber. It was a practice that was frowned upon, but became increasingly common. Certainly these two speeches circulated widely and Pym’s speech of 17 April was circulated in manuscript by Edward Rossingham, the newsletter writer, as an account of the grievances of Parliament.53
In fact, the buzz of rumour and news made life difficult for a newsletter writer. Castle was always eager to name and weigh his sources when reporting to Bridgewater: ‘This relation, because it comes from Mr Kellaway, one that waits very near him [Charles], I have thought fit to advertise your lordship of it, as a matter that is likely to be true’; ‘I was told by an inward confident of his [Secretary Coke]’; ‘This morning, meeting with a friend of mine who dined yesterday with my Lord Keeper, I was confidently assured by him, that he had heard the news there’. Similarly, he distinguished between the varieties of news, rumour and gossip that he heard: ‘On Tuesday last there went