God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [86]
More excitement followed the next day, when a rumour swept the City that the House of Commons was being besieged by papists. Wallington closed his shop and rushed to the defence of the Commons, along with many others. When an old woman interrupted the sermon at St Anne’s, Blackfriars, with the news, people ‘ran up and down as if they had been wild’. As armed men hurried through Moorfields on their way to Westminster, women wept in the streets.60
Hostile contemporary accounts habitually claimed that the crowds in London’s streets in May and November 1640, and May 1641, were a low-born rabble. Those that can be identified, however, were often socially respectable, and more fair-minded commentators noted the social mix of these crowds. The leadership and organization seem to have been generated in London, within the City’s middling sort or from activists. There were continuities in the participation of Lilburne, Wallington and others, and there is no reason to suppose they needed, or wanted, the support of MPs in order to mobilize. Indeed, there is every reason to think that they felt the pressure should be operating in the opposite direction. The placards, petitions and crowd mobilizations drew on the crowded commercial society of the City, not on the natural obedience of thousands of inhabitants to MPs representing other constituencies.61
When the Lords did pass the attainder, on 8 May, therefore, there were good grounds for thinking that this significant political gesture, arguably the most significant so far achieved by the parliament, owed something to the pressure of London’s crowds. This was certainly true of the royal assent – the final necessary step to pass the bill into law. Charles was by no means inclined to give his assent – his loyalty to Strafford, and determination to save him, had already been amply demonstrated. But his judgement was affected by the arrival in Whitehall of a crowd said to number four or five thousand, among them armed men. Charles was advised by the Privy Council and the Archbishop of York that the only way to quell these disorders was to sacrifice Strafford. He regretted submitting to this pressure for the rest of his life.
In the days before the execution tensions continued to run high. Rumours spread of a planned French invasion to save Strafford, an attack on a bawdy house served as a guise for economic and social protest, there were attacks on the Queen Mother and a guard was placed on St James’s Palace. The execution itself drew a crowd of 100,000, also immortalized by Hollar, and following Strafford’s death celebrations continued long into the night. Bonfires were lit and those who failed to join the celebrations had their windows broken. Strafford had not made a helpful ‘last dying speech’, with the result that it was necessary to pretend that he had, and a pamphlet was published purporting to be a repentant speech he had made prior to reaching the scaffold. It was immediately denounced as a hoax.62 In all sorts of ways the virtue of the outcome – Strafford’s death – was undermined by the unseemliness of the means.
The execution of the Earl of Strafford
Strafford died unlamented except perhaps for the way that he had come to his end. Here were populism and something close to judicial murder in tandem. Strafford himself thought that the Lords had been affected by the crowds.63 A second important reason for acquiescence in these dubious proceedings was the vividness of fears about a popish plot, but this too was felt differently by different people. On 19 May a board in the gallery of the House of Commons had cracked and Walter Earle’s son had ‘cried out Treason, Treason and many of the burgesses had run away with swords drawn’.