In June 1643, as parliament waged war against King Charles I, MP and future regicide Henry Marten marched on Westminster Abbey with the intention of forcing his way into a room containing articles of the royal regalia. He had been provoked into action by the defeat, earlier the same day, of a House of Commons motion obliging the abbey's clergymen to hand him the keys to the treasury believed to contain part of the royal collection.Footnote 1 Marten's ambitions of breaking and entering were scuppered when he was caught in the act by Henry Rich, earl of Holland, as well as Sir Simonds D'Ewes and Denzil Holles, two MPs that the earl had been hosting at his home in Charing Cross. D'Ewes noted that Marten ‘looked as pale as ashes’ upon being found, and that he had submitted to leave with the door intact and regalia concealed.Footnote 2
That, however, was not the end of the matter. The next day, an undeterred Marten tabled an almost identical motion to that defeated the previous day. He proposed, according to D'Ewes's diary, that as the prebendaries of Westminster ‘would not discover’ the keys to ‘that Roome in the Abbey Church on the South side of it where the two royall Crownes and the other Regalia were kept’, he might have liberty to break the door down, justifying his plan on the grounds that ‘the mon[e]y plate and goods of some malignants were laid up there’. Whether Marten considered the king himself to be one such ‘malignant’ seems to have gone unspoken, though this is certainly how some in the chamber had interpreted his outburst. A long debate followed, with some of the more moderate MPs protesting both that the motion was ‘against an order of the Howse’, and, more importantly, ‘because they feared that there by some scandall might bee raised upon the howse as if this were done in contempt of Maiesty it selfe’. The second time around, however, Marten did not table the motion until around one o'clock in the afternoon, when, according to D'Ewes, ‘many men were gone out of the howse’.Footnote 3 His strategic delay proved sufficient to alter the outcome: the motion passed by a single vote, and Marten returned to the abbey to put the order in execution that same afternoon, concerned that any hesitation would result in a busier parliament reversing its verdict once more.Footnote 4
Considering Marten's tenacity and the depth of feeling in the Commons, the motion appears remarkably prosaic on first reading. It merely proposed the drawing up of an inventory of the treasury's contents, explicitly affirming that nothing was to be removed without further parliamentary assent. What appears to be the most contentious clause stipulated only that new locks were to be ‘set upon the Door’.Footnote 5 Yet the vote was evidently highly polarizing, and caused considerable controversy in the chamber. The following article represents an attempt to explain why, both in the narrow context of the ongoing Civil War, and the broader context of assumptions of the relationship between materiality and authority. It argues that parliamentary attitudes towards the crown jewels serve as a paradigm through which to explore the mentalités that underpinned the operation of early modern power, and how they were recast in the white heat of war. The case sheds light on a critical moment of divergence among parliamentarians about the ultimate aims of their war effort. In the two votes on access to the regalia in June 1643, Marten appears to have been allied with a group of fellow ‘war party’ radicals notorious for their hard-line, perhaps even republican, views. However, by tracing the case into 1644, it is possible to see how quickly an initially radical proposal gained popularity within the Commons, to the extent that it was possible for parts of the royal regalia to be melted down and coined just a year later.
We may, therefore, see the crown jewels question as part of an ongoing process of ‘ideological escalation’, through which previously unimaginable political acts came to be seen as not only possible, but necessary for the prosecution of war.Footnote 6 Escalation is thus understood here as the process through which radical proposals gained traction with more moderate figures. This process should not be seen as merely the tactical affectation by moderates of a ‘functional radicalism’ – defined by David Scott as ‘the pragmatic adoption of radical policies to keep pace with political events’ – but rather as a dialectic in which the novel exigencies of war allowed for the articulation of more extreme ideas, whose enunciation in turn radicalized, rather than merely reinforced, the political ambitions of parliamentarians.Footnote 7 In so doing, I follow post-revisionist scholars in recognizing radicalism as both a potent contemporary force and an expedient analytical category.Footnote 8
In treating the crown jewels as a case through which to examine the mechanics of such escalation, this article inevitably engages with scholarship on the ways in which ritual political performance was central to the exercise of power in the early modern period. It is well known that the royal regalia formed a part of the symbolic apparatus of monarchical authority.Footnote 9 However, in this article, I draw upon theoretical scholarship to argue that the controversy caused by the crown jewels question was underpinned by a collective understanding of the centrality of material artefacts to the instantiation of political power. In other words, the problem of access to the royal regalia caused such a storm because these objects were assumed to be not merely decorative, but operative: the powers of the monarch were not simply reflected by, but were inherent within, the crown jewels themselves. Questions over their custody were therefore inseparable from questions of the limits of monarchical authority, and formed part of how parliamentarians considered and contested the very cause for which the Civil War was fought. To destroy them was to destroy a part of monarchy itself. For some, like Marten and his allies, this was likely the intention from the outset; for other, more moderate parliamentarians, the ideological implications of their destruction took a back seat to the immediate need to fund their war effort. Only later – indeed, perhaps only with the regicide and the more unconstrained violence rendered against the regalia – may these implications have been fully realized.
I
June 1643 was not the first point in the 1640s at which parliament had expressed concerns over the whereabouts of the royal regalia. Two years earlier, members had met with Charles at the Banqueting House on Whitehall amid ultimately well-founded reports that Queen Henrietta Maria intended to take some of the crown jewels on her voyage to the Low Countries with the intention of pawning or selling them.Footnote 10 Charles denied the allegations, though as Master of the Jewel Office and eventual regicide Sir Henry Mildmay MP knew, he had a track-record of using the regalia to fill the royal coffers.Footnote 11 In 1625, Mildmay, while acknowledging the ‘necessity for mortgaging the Crown jewels’, advised the king that he transport them abroad and pawn them ‘out of the realm’, for ‘there are too many, both in the Court and kingdom, who look upon…proceedings with more than a curious eye’.Footnote 12 It would not have been unexpected that Charles would countenance a similar strategy as Civil War grew ever more likely. Parliamentarians would likewise have almost certainly been aware that there was a precedent for the borrowing of money against the royal regalia from before Charles had ascended to the throne. A manuscript pamphlet written by Sir Robert Cotton in 1612 affirming precedents between the reigns of Henry III and Elizabeth I for the ‘Pawne upon Jewells’ was published in print in 1642, just weeks before Charles raised his standard at Nottingham to formally initiate the Civil War.Footnote 13 But within this fractious context, any intelligence of unusual – if not unprecedented – royal fundraising was bound to raise suspicion.
A year prior, apprehensions that ‘divers Papists, and others, under the Pretence of Her Majesty's Goods, are like to convey great Sums of Money, and other Treasure, beyond the Seas’ were expressed in the Commons, ‘which will not only impoverish the State, but may be employed to the Fomenting some mischievous Attempts, to the Trouble of the publick Peace’.Footnote 14 Such fears were well founded. The raising of funds against the crown jewels was, according to Edward Hyde's History of the rebellion, vital to the realization of the royalist war effort. He noted that by April 1642, Charles ‘had not…one barrel of powder, nor one musket, nor any other provision necessary for an army…nor had he money for the support of his own table for the term of one month’. Indeed, ‘the arrival of all those necessaries’ was expected ‘by the care and activity of the queen; who was then in Holland, and by the sale of her own, as well as of the crown jewels’.Footnote 15
Parliament had already moved to try to prevent the expatriation of the regalia, with the Venetian ambassador reporting in August 1641 that a dispatch had been sent by way of ‘an intimation to the lady, who is entrusted with the custody of the crown jewels,…not to permit them to be taken elsewhere’, and threatening ‘violent measures should her Majesty persist in her original intention to go’.Footnote 16 Yet their warning proved futile, and six months later Henrietta Maria left Falmouth for the Low Countries on her fundraising mission. It remains unclear whether Henrietta departed with both personal valuables and inherited jewels of the crown; indeed, the distinction itself remains somewhat abstruse. More important here, however, is that the queen was clearly understood by both parliament and the London press to be attempting to raise money against objects that belonged to the ‘crown’.
Jason Peacey has recently suggested that latent ideas of a distinction between monarch and realm may have encouraged the recycling and informed the reading of such texts as Sir John Hayward's life of Henry IV, republished in 1642, which declared allegiance to be primarily to ‘the state of the realme’ rather than to ‘the person of the prince’.Footnote 17 These ideas were clearly already in circulation long before they were repackaged as parliamentarian propaganda, but took on new significance with the outbreak of war. Analogously, the notion of a distinction between jewels of the crown and jewels of the monarch was well established by the mid-seventeenth century, but it took until the jewels became bound up with the finances of the royalist war effort for parliament to confront its implications.Footnote 18 Indeed, we may venture the possibility that the crown jewels question itself opened up the opportunity for parliamentarians to articulate ideas about the state in ways that initially appeared relatively circumscribed, but whose logic was potentially revolutionary.
Henrietta initially found the more valuable objects difficult to pawn, in part due to the notifications of parliamentary agents in Holland that the jewels had been expatriated without the king's authority. However, the queen was not without success in her fundraising mission, borrowing what seems to have been a significant sum against the security of some of the jewels – estimated in the papers of George Digby to have been as much as £128,700.Footnote 19 Parliament was attentive to the scheme, and in June 1642, issued a declaration reporting its intelligence that ‘the Jewels of the Crown (which, by the Laws of the Land, ought not to be alienated) are either pawned or sold in Amsterdam…to maintain this intended War’.Footnote 20 Two members of the House of Lords subsequently met with the Dutch ambassador, urging him to request that money and munitions raised in Holland ‘might be stayed there’.Footnote 21 Yet the Venetian ambassador soon reported to the doge and senate that parliamentarian emissaries had seized ‘in the hands of debtors’ some £20,000 raised on the continent, the want of which kept Charles, ‘more than any other circumstance…reduced to his present straitened condition’.Footnote 22
If it was not already, the following month saw the pawning of the crown jewels become a public matter. A pamphlet reporting Strange and terrible newes from the queene in Holland framed the pawning of ‘severall Jewels of the Crowne’ as evidence of the king's intention to wage war.Footnote 23 In October, a further pamphlet was published purporting to contain an intercepted letter sent to the king by Henrietta from The Hague. Addressing Charles, the letter testified that ‘amongst other accommodations…I am to certifie your Majesty, that the Jewels of your Crown are for present receipts engaged to some certaine Jewes of Amsterdam’.Footnote 24 However, the crown jewels controversy was soon drowned out by the rumble of peace negotiations, which resonated throughout the winter of 1642–3. The king's outright rejection of the Oxford Treaty paved the way for a year described by Michael Braddick as ‘the first of the real war’.Footnote 25 Notwithstanding the multiplicity of ideological positions assumed by those involved in the negotiation of the peace proposals at Oxford, and the petitioning and propaganda campaigns that accompanied them, the effect was one of de facto polarization. As David Como has recently shown, the political struggles of 1643 both deepened existing rifts and generated new fault lines, as the growing inevitability of a protracted war brought about increasingly desperate attempts to define its cause or to abandon it altogether.Footnote 26 The result, as David Wootton has noted, was the emergence of an ‘uncompromising political radicalism’ in parliament from the end of 1642, and particularly among men ‘immersed in the constitutionalist debate over the right of resistance’.Footnote 27
Marten's views were more outwardly and unacceptably radical than most, as betrayed by his short detention in the Tower of London in August 1643 for declaring, in defence of puritan preacher John Saltmarsh, that ‘he knew no cause why the destruction of any one family should be put in the ballance with the destruction of the whole Kingdom’.Footnote 28 Though released less than a month later, he was not permitted to sit as an MP until January 1645.Footnote 29 From the fragmentary information that the Commons journal contains about the votes on granting Marten access to the crown jewels, however, we begin to get a sense of how parliament began to splinter more generally, and the issues that caused its deep-rooted fractures to rise to the surface. Indeed, we may go as far as to suggest that this vote represented a moment in which it became apparent that the Civil War was to determine the very future of monarchy itself.
II
There is no record of exactly how individual MPs voted in the motions tabled by Marten in June 1643, but those that acted as tellers are logged in the Commons journal. The process by which tellers were nominated is unknown, though the recurrent partnerships of certain individuals has led to some suggestion that they took on some of the functions of whips avant la lettre.Footnote 30 The tellers for the two votes on the question of access to the crown jewels are certainly indicative of a split along party lines. Those acting as tellers for the ‘yeas’ (i.e. those advocating access to the regalia) in the first vote were Sir Henry Ludlow and William Strode; those for the ‘noes’ were William Pierrepont and John Selden. In the second vote, Sir Peter Wentworth and Sir Christopher Yelverton were the tellers for the yeas; those for the noes were Denzil Holles and Sir John Holland.Footnote 31 A survey of the alliances of these individuals through the 1640s reveals a striking correlation. Those acting as tellers for the yeas tended to be ‘war party’ radicals, enthusiastically pursuing a dictated peace and, more often than not, a dramatic restructuring of political power. Meanwhile, the tellers for the noes were without exception ‘peace party’ moderates, prioritizing the preservation of the polity and pursuing the end to violent conflict at the earliest opportunity.Footnote 32
Ludlow, for example, was an uncompromising parliamentarian and puritan, described by one historian as ‘one of Marten's earliest and strongest allies’.Footnote 33 In February 1642, Ludlow told the Commons ‘that the king is derivative from the parliament and not the parliament from the king’.Footnote 34 Three months later, he was reprimanded by Commons speaker William Lenthall after some exception was taken to his speaking words which ‘had an Aspect towards the King’, reported to have been that Charles ‘was not worthy to be King of England’.Footnote 35 A 1642 royal declaration named Ludlow as one of one of the ‘particular men, who first made the wounds…by contriving, fostering, and fomenting mistakes and jealousies betwixt body and head’ along with nine others, including Holles, Strode, and Marten.Footnote 36 Ludlow was mocked in the aftermath of his censure by a 1643 royalist broadside satirically reporting parliament's response to a London peace petition:
Ludlow died in 1643, but not before inviting his son Edmund, an eventual regicide, into the service of the parliamentarian army.Footnote 38 William Strode, a fellow teller for the yeas, similarly did not live to see the execution of the king, dying in 1645. Until then, however, he had operated alongside Marten and Ludlow as part of the radical group described by the moderate Simonds D'Ewes as the ‘violent spiritts’.Footnote 39 Edward Hyde reported that Strode ‘was one of the fiercest men of the party, and of the party only for his fierceness’.Footnote 40 While emphasizing that the Commons had been ‘bred’ on the notion that rebellion was a sin, Conrad Russell quipped in his study of the outbreak of Civil War that it ‘would be a matter for considerable surprise if William Strode, Sir Henry Ludlow, or Henry Marten could be shown to be principled believers in non-resistance’.Footnote 41
Peter Wentworth was similarly radical, acting, according to Jack Hexter, ‘Again and again’ alongside Marten, Strode, and Sir Henry Vane junior as the ‘leading extremists in the House’.Footnote 42 Wentworth, who had been created Knight of the Bath at Charles's coronation in 1625, was ultimately appointed as one of the judges and commissioners at the king's trial, though he did not partake in its proceedings, nor sign the death warrant.Footnote 43 In 1647, he had acted as a teller alongside both Thomas Rainsborough – later notable for his radical pronouncements at the Putney Debates – and Marten in opposing the reopening of peace negotiations.Footnote 44 Later commenting upon Marten's brief imprisonment by parliament in 1643, Wentworth claimed that his friend's words were ‘such as every mans Conscience told him were true’, but that he was expelled for speaking them ‘when the King was in good strength’ and the ‘luke-wa[r]m’ men were afraid that the ‘whole House might be drawn in compass of High Treason’.Footnote 45 For Wentworth, Marten's mistake was one of strategy, rather than sentiment.
Indeed, the only teller for the yeas that clearly existed outside of this radical group was Christopher Yelverton, who remains a much more enigmatic figure. For Hexter, Yelverton's ideological vacillations on such issues as entreating with the king mark him out as one of the examples par excellence of the so-called ‘middle group’ in parliament, moving between the positions of the war and peace parties.Footnote 46 According to D'Ewes, Yelverton reversed his initial vote in favour of sending peace propositions to the king in August 1643, aligning himself in a decisive second vote with an assortment of parliamentary radicals and moderates that recognized the provisional pursuit of war as the best means by which to force concessions from the king.Footnote 47 It is likely that Yelverton fell into this second category. Whereas Wentworth was permitted to take his seat after the parliamentary purge by forces of the New Model Army under Colonel Thomas Pride in December 1648, Yelverton was one of the secluded.Footnote 48 His will, proved at Westminster in 1653, intriguingly stipulated a burial ‘with the service of the Comon praier booke not affecting any Innovation or the distempred humor of theis disorderdd times’.Footnote 49 It may well be that Yelverton was what Isaac Stephens has termed a ‘Prayer Book puritan’, though such a statement is sufficient to suggest he did not share the Independent zeal of parliament's more radical figures; indeed, David Underdown identified him as a member of the Presbyterian faction in the Commons from 1645.Footnote 50
If Yelverton represents something of an exception among the tellers for the yeas, those for the noes conform rather more to expectation. The most prominent is Denzil Holles, one of the ‘five members’ that Charles attempted to arrest in January 1642.Footnote 51 In spite of initially taking command of a parliamentarian regiment, by the spring of 1643 he had become one of parliament's staunchest advocates for a settlement with the king, and remained so until his seclusion at Pride's purge.Footnote 52 He acted as a teller in the second vote alongside John Holland, who had also taken up arms for parliament upon the outbreak of war. Holland's military involvement was similarly brief: in 1643, he left England to join his Catholic wife, before returning and fleeing again prior to Pride's purge.Footnote 53
John Miller has suggested that Holland's ‘concern for his “country”…embraced a wider, deeper concern for harmony between king and people’ and the relations of duty and necessity that bound them.Footnote 54 Understood in these terms, Holland's political world appears not dissimilar to that of another of the tellers for the noes, John Selden. As one of the period's foremost legal scholars, Selden's writings offer an almost unparalleled insight into the political imagination of a contemporary parliamentarian. Though occasionally interpreted as articulating a realpolitik that prefigured the work of his friend Thomas Hobbes, this did not preclude his practical adherence to a conservative constitutionalism in evidence throughout the Civil War.Footnote 55 According to one recent study, Selden's response to the crisis of the 1640s was ‘essentially conservative and within the existing constitutional framework’.Footnote 56 Richard Tuck has argued that Selden's parliamentary alignment followed from his resolution upon the crisis of the militia in 1642 that ‘the King did not have law on his side, while the Parliament might’, though his commitment was to the vain preservation of a crumbling polity rather than any kind of parliamentarianism per se.Footnote 57 Indeed, by the outbreak of war, Selden had earned the ire of Marten after defending the House of Lords, with Marten reproaching him for ‘denying his own house’.Footnote 58 Selden was much less prominent a figure in the Commons in the 1640s than hitherto, and became increasingly alienated from the business of the House as the conflict progressed.Footnote 59 That he remained in London even ‘in the worst times’ was, according to his friend Edward Hyde, forced by his advancing years, ‘and how wicked soever the actions which were every day done, [Hyde] was confident [Selden] had not given his consent to them’.Footnote 60 It is not known whether Selden was secluded at Pride's purge, though he did not take his seat in its aftermath.Footnote 61
Selden has been identified as ideologically closest to a small parliamentary grouping that included Bulstrode Whitelocke and the final teller in the crown jewels votes, William Pierrepont, and which fought, according to one recent analysis, ‘tooth and nail…any development they regarded as noxious to what was left of the law and the constitution’.Footnote 62 Yet Pierrepont was more politically active during the Civil War than Selden, and in January 1642 was selected to chair the committee that produced the Militia Ordinance.Footnote 63 Pierrepont was repeatedly involved in attempts to reach a settlement with Charles – including alongside Holland and Whitelocke at Oxford in early 1643 – but his later attempts at reaching a peace often brought him into alignment with some of parliament's more radical figures, not least during his attempt to persuade the king to accept the Heads of the Proposals in 1647.Footnote 64 His position appeared to harden as the Civil War progressed, but around the time of the vote on the crown jewels four years prior, Pierrepont was allied with prominent figures within the ‘peace party’, and unsuccessfully sought to flee the country rather than take the Solemn League and Covenant in November 1643.Footnote 65 Historians have taken their interpretative lead from Pierrepont's contemporary reputation as one of the wisest and most moderate of MPs. For Underdown, he can be bracketed alongside Yelverton as one of the so-called ‘middle group’, whose strategies occasionally overlapped with the parliamentary radicals, but whose ultimate ambitions did not; for Valerie Pearl, he was a ‘moderate reformer’ pursuing ‘constitutional guarantees’.Footnote 66 Unlike Selden, Pierrepont was not secluded at Pride's purge, but he refused to take his seat and ‘expressed much dissatisfaction at those Members who sate in the House, and at the proceedings of the General and Army’.Footnote 67
It remains unclear why the tellers changed between the two votes, but this may well be a result of the careful scheming of Marten himself. MPs clearly had a sense of the ways in which the outcomes of parliamentary votes could be manipulated in accordance with the presence or absence of influential figures or factional leaders.Footnote 68 That Selden and Pierrepont – two members reputed for their wisdom and statecraft – were missing for the tabling of the second motion may be no coincidence. It is also striking that the division on the crown jewels bears similarity to the faultlines identified by David Scott as forming at Westminster from the end of 1642. In his analysis, two bicameral groupings are evident in the aftermath of the battle of Edgehill in October: a more powerful and moderate grouping centred around the earls of Northumberland and Holland, and encompassing Holles and Pierrepont among others; and a more radical and godly interest spearheaded by the earl of Manchester and the Viscount Saye and Sele, acting in concert with John Pym, Sir Henry Vane junior, and plausibly Strode.Footnote 69
Furtive bicameral machinations have left few traces in the historical record, with John Adamson suggesting that much parliamentary business took place outside the chamber or at private meetings away from the palace of Westminster.Footnote 70 Thus, it is possible that Marten and his cadre were operating not as isolated radicals but rather in the service of a broader bicameral interest, though the evidence is insufficient to support a definitive conclusion in the crown jewels case.Footnote 71 More certain is that by 1646, Saye and Northumberland exercised control over parliamentary finances through their leading roles on the Committee of Revenue, and the latter – a keen art collector – would go on to profit from the discount sale of the king's collection after 1649.Footnote 72 His opposition to the regicide facilitated his public rehabilitation upon the Restoration, though Northumberland's complicity in these sales, and his broader associations with the ‘violent spiritts’ of the war party from 1644, are indicative of the ways in which the events of Civil War could legitimize action that had previously been unutterable, if not unimaginable.
III
Accounts differ over what happened when Henry Marten returned to Westminster Abbey with parliamentary authorization to break into the royal treasury. Perhaps the most reliable is that of Simonds D'Ewes, who privately reported that upon breaking down the door, Marten and his associates were disappointed, finding nothing ‘of the said roome worthie of ther paines, or sufficient to excuse ther violence, for…hee onlie found some two or three chests of linnen which had been putt in ther long before wth some wearing apparrell; all being of no great value’. D'Ewes, however, believed that damage had been done. He noted that Marten's ‘action occasioned much discourse both in cittie & cuntrie, not wthout some adhæsion of scandall alsoe’.Footnote 73
The most extravagant re-telling of the story appeared in the account of the Venetian ambassador, who reported that Marten had initially brought 300 soldiers to ‘break the gates at Westminster where the crown, sceptre and the royal robe for the king's coronation are preserved’, only to be stopped by ‘lords of the Upper House’. Upon noting that the matter had (again) been brought before the Commons ‘by this same Martin’, the ambassador claimed that MPs had ‘caused possession to be taken of everything and an inventory made directing new keys to be handed over to the Chamber itself and taking the old ones away from the ancient custodians’. The act was framed as one of puritanical frenzy, accompanied by the destruction of organs and choir stalls, a conspiracy ‘for the destruction of the kingdom and its greatness’.Footnote 74 The proliferation of such a version of events was propelled by the royalist press, which wasted no time in whipping up a storm. The political valence of the crown jewels ensured the episode could easily be spun into an effective piece of propaganda by those eager to expose Marten's seditious intentions.
The leading royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus claimed that there was indeed a ‘private roome’ in the abbey where ‘His Majesties Crownes, and Scepters, and other ensignes of state, used antiently by the Kings of England at their coronations, have beene accustomably kept’. It reported that upon Marten's initial failure to gain entry, the ‘rabble’ attending him ‘said plainely they would take out the crowne to crowne His Majesties youngest sonne the Duke of Glocester’, only to be chastised by Marten as ‘a company of fooles, to talke of having Crownes or Kings, of which there was to be so little use in the times to come’. This was, for Aulicus, the most ‘memorable’ aspect of what was mockingly referred to as Marten's ‘brave exployt’. Its outraged correspondent further railed against the Commons’ subsequent decision ‘that the Regalia should be seized on…under pretence that there were many superstitious things exceeding fit to be removed’, and presciently warned that ‘the King himselfe will be taken shortly to be some superstitious monument of decayed divinity, and so thought fit to be removed’.Footnote 75
The editor of Aulicus was Peter Heylyn, a chaplain-in-ordinary to Charles, an outspoken defender of Laudian reforms, and a leading royalist propagandist.Footnote 76 At the outbreak of war, he was a prebendary at Westminster Abbey, though it is unlikely that he was present when Marten gained access to the treasury.Footnote 77 That did not stop him further embellishing Aulicus’s extravagant claims in his posthumous history of Presbyterianism, published in 1670. In Aërius redivivus, Heylyn implicated poet, pamphleteer, and parliamentarian soldier George Wither in the crown jewels episode, claiming that Marten ‘forced open a great Iron Chest, took out the Crowns, the Robes, the Swords, and Scepter’, and:
With a scorn greater than his Lusts, and the rest of His Vices, he openly declares, That there would be no further use of those Toys and Trifles. And in the jollity of that humour, invests George Withers (an old Puritan Satyrist) in the Royal Habiliments. Who being thus Crown'd, and Royally array'd, (as right well became him) first marcht about the Room with a stately Garb, and afterwards with a thousand Apish and Ridiculous actions, exposed those Sacred Ornaments to contempt and laughter.Footnote 78
Significantly, both of Heylyn's accounts establish a clear link between the ultimate fate of the crown jewels and that of monarchy itself. Given that D'Ewes's private version of the thwarted break-in made mention only of Marten's sheepish capitulation, it seems unlikely that he actually made the scandalous declaration there was to be little use for crowns or kings. It seems equally improbable that upon accessing the treasury he found anything of great value, let alone a crown. Yet it is noteworthy that Marten's desire for access to the regalia was framed in republican terms. This can only be explained by a combination of both the immediate context of ideological polarization within the Commons after the failure of peace negotiations in the winter of 1642–3, and the political force inherent in the royal regalia itself.
IV
In the concluding remarks to his influential monograph celebrating a ‘cultural turn’ in the political history of early modernity, Kevin Sharpe observed by way of justification that ‘Representations and images of rule’ formed part of the contemporary ‘theatre of politics’. The risk of such an impression, however, is the implication that the material artefacts of authority were essentially symbolic objects, employed only to project or reflect a pre-existing supremacy. In other words, these artefacts appear as mere gimmicks for the manipulation of the monarchical image, ornaments that play a part in the exercise of power but not its constitution in the first instance. Though Sharpe conceded that ‘the audience helped shape the show’, his theatrical trope assumes and essentializes the distinction between the actors and the onlookers, the political agents and those external to them. The art of ‘representation’ follows, rather than forms, the power relations prefigured by his metaphor.Footnote 79
In contrast, what the crown jewels case demonstrates is that such artefacts as the crown jewels were not mere signifiers of power, or theatrical props at the disposal of the courtly elite, but were instead widely understood as the very objects from which power flowed. This gave them a force that could be both a tool of, and a tool of resistance against, royal authority. Such an understanding of the essential materiality of power has been advanced by political philosopher Giorgio Agamben, for whom the material trappings of authority do not merely symbolize power, but constitute it in the first instance. In Agamben's own words, ‘imperial sovereignty is, in its very behavior, in its gestures as in its apparel, both hierarchical ceremonial and insignia’.Footnote 80 That radical and moderate parliamentarians disputed the crown jewels question so vigorously is because the regalia bore a material efficacy, reifying potent political principles that were interpreted and employed to very different ends during Civil War.
As Janelle Greenberg has argued, the 1640s marked a moment in which ideas about England's ‘ancient constitution’ were turned to justify ‘rebellion, regicide, and republicanism’ at the same time as being invoked by royalists to emphasize the historical basis of the king's supremacy over parliament.Footnote 81 The malleable tenets of ancient constitutionalism were rooted in the so-called laws of Edward the Confessor, alongside an assortment of other venerable medieval texts. Greenberg has demonstrated the particularly predominant position the Confessor's laws held for royalists and radical parliamentarians alike, as a central axiom that determined both the origins and bounds of royal and parliamentary authority.Footnote 82
That the Confessor's laws maintained their political valence into the seventeenth century was publicly evident at Charles I's coronation in February 1626, at which the king, in his coronation oath, swore to uphold ‘the lawes and customes and franchises granted to the Clergie and to ye people by the glorious King St. Edward’.Footnote 83 The Confessor's spectral presence was further conjured at the coronation by the very regalia bestowed upon the new monarch. An account of the spectacle written by herald John Bradshaw related the new king's being invested with ‘Saint Edwards Robes’, and, later in the ceremony, ‘the Scepter of Saint Edward’.Footnote 84 The crown held the same mystical significance. A narrative of Charles's coronation written by heralds Elias Ashmole and Francis Sandford declared that it was the ‘Crown of that Prince [Edward] put upon his Head’ by the officiating bishop William Laud, while Peter Heylyn, in Aërius redivivus, noted with outrage that the regalia treated with such flagrant disregard by Marten and Withers at Westminster Abbey had belonged ‘anciently’ to Edward.Footnote 85
It is apparent that the crown was a particularly significant object; more so than the other accoutrements invested in the monarch at their coronation. Immanent to the act of crowning was a mystical, perhaps intangible, efficacy vital to the inauguration of the monarch's reign.Footnote 86 Bradshaw, in his account of Charles's coronation, recounted with great solemnity the moment in which Laud, ‘hallowing the Crowne setteth it on the Kings head with a Speciall prayer…Then his Matie thus Anonynted Invested and Crowned riseth from the Chaire’, in the Great Hall of Westminster Palace, as king.Footnote 87 It is crucial here to emphasize the link between the coronation oath and the moment of coronation – the specific instant of being crowned – for it is in the nature of their relationship that the ancient constitutionalist wrangling lay. For some radical parliamentarians, the king's oath – which, crucially, was sworn before the king was crowned – was a precondition of kingship, and indicative of its inherently contractual nature. For such theorists, Charles's reign was entirely conditional upon his upholding that to which he was bound by coronation oath; hence Sir Roger Twysden affirming from prison at the outbreak of Civil War that ‘both king and subject did, by swearing to each other, mutually make a solemne compact together, and establish their agreements on his taking the crowne’.Footnote 88 The crown was invoked by Twysden as more than mere metonymy. Rather, the artefact itself authenticated the king's right to reign according to the pact made with his people prior to the moment of coronation. The crucial implication was, of course, that Charles's possession of the crown, and therefore right to rule, was entirely conditional on his adherence to the oath, and that the people represented through parliament reserved the right to revoke the crown if the oath was deemed to have been broken.
There was another potentially radical aspect to ancient constitutionalism and the royal regalia. The very materiality of the crown jewels embodied the difference between the king's person and his office, and represented how the powers of the body politic were brought to bear on the corporeal body natural only at the instant of coronation. Such ideas appear to have had widespread currency, and could be used to express both the origins and limits of monarchical authority. Prior to the coronation of Charles II in 1661, for example, Fifth Monarchist leader Thomas Venner declared that ‘he could not commit Treason because the King was not yet Crown'd’.Footnote 89 As has been well established, the division between the body politic and body natural was extremely troublesome for royalists. Ernst Kantorowicz's classic study of this dualism identified a direct lineage between its sixteenth-century affirmation in English legal discourse and the revolution of the 1640s: it was, he argued, precisely the notion of the ‘king's two bodies’ that produced the possibility of the ‘Puritan cry’ of ‘fighting the king to defend the King’.Footnote 90 It is therefore unsurprising that the royalist hack Heylyn railed against this ‘strange division of the King from himself, or of his Person from his Power’ in his 1643 tract The rebells catechism, by whose logic he indignantly deduced that ‘a traitor may kill Charles, and not hurt the King’.Footnote 91
Royalists attempted to surmount the problem with an affirmation that while the body politic and body natural were distinct, they were nevertheless inseparable: to attack one was to attack the other. Such a notion was given clear expression by royalist judge David Jenkins in the mid-1640s, who emphasized that ‘the body politick and the naturall body of the King make one body, and not divers, and are inseperable and indivisable’.Footnote 92 A similar elision is evident in the writing of Jenkins's fellow royalist Sir Dudley Digges, who argued in a text published in 1643 that the monarch's oath was a voluntary act of self-constraint designed to ‘sweeten [the] subjection’ of the people, but that in no way endangered ‘his person nor regall authority’. For Digges, though political power originally rests in the people, once such a people had ‘by solemne contract devested it selfe of that power…they cannot upon what pretence soever, without manifest breach of divine ordinance, and violation of publique faith, resume that authority, which they have placed in another’.Footnote 93 Against radical parliamentarian interpretations, therefore, Digges did not hold that the crown could be revoked after it had been invested in the monarch, whether or not the coronation oath was held to have been broken.
Such conflicting principles came down to incompatible interpretations of the ancient constitution. For David Cressy, disagreements over the true meaning of the coronation oath meant that it ‘encapsulated’ rather than clarified the ‘ambiguous relationship between the king and people’.Footnote 94 But ambiguous though these most fundamental of political ideas were, it is this very ambiguity that sharpens our understanding of the controversy caused by the prospect of parliamentary custody of the royal regalia. The question had clear constitutional implications. From James VI and I's notion of ‘constitutional monarchy created by kings’, to John Selden's ‘mixed monarchy’, and even John Lilburne's rhetorical assaults on the ‘Norman yoke’, English legal history was repeatedly invoked in order to substantiate an array of claims towards the origins of political sovereignty.Footnote 95 It was precisely because of their vital position within these debates that the question of access to the crown jewels aroused such passion in the Commons. Even the simple prospect of new locks being ‘set upon the Door’ of the royal treasury may have implied Charles too was under parliamentary lock and key, and, more fundamentally, that parliament reserved the right to revoke his crown.Footnote 96
It is unclear whether it is possible to speak of Marten, Ludlow, Strode, and Wentworth as republicans in June 1643, though it hardly seems surprising that parliamentarians pursuing a radical reshaping of the polity would seek to strike at the heart of the objects that legitimized and perpetuated monarchical power. As Sergio Bertelli has argued, ritualistic acts of violence can signal more than merely ‘canceling out the previous state’, and rather indicate a symbolic ‘regeneration’. Indeed, according to Bertelli, they can occasionally signal both simultaneously.Footnote 97 In short, Marten's actions may not only have been motivated by a straightforward republicanism, but rather a desire to return to an ancient, even timeless past that vindicated notions of parliamentary supremacy, just as parliamentarians could also turn to the ancient constitution to justify rebellion against their king.
V
The more immediate parliamentary context of the crown jewels votes encompassed ongoing discussions over how it was supposed to legislate without the royal great seal, which had been surreptitiously removed to the king's court at York in June 1642.Footnote 98 Deprived of the seal, parliament, in the words of the Venetian ambassador, found it ‘impossible to meet the ordinary requirements of civil justice’, and the following May they resolved upon the manufacture of a seal of their own.Footnote 99 Yet the issue rumbled into June, and on the very day of the first vote on parliamentary access to the crown jewels, an incensed William Strode had launched into an attack on the prevarication of the upper chamber over the ‘broad seale…saying, That the Lords did but like Lords wth some other particulars of the like nature’.Footnote 100 Marten predictably stood alongside Strode as a leading advocate of parliamentary supremacy and the acquisition of what he referred to as ‘the supream badge of supream power’.Footnote 101
When the question had been put to a vote the month prior, Denzil Holles and Sir John Evelyn were defeated as tellers for the noes by twelve votes, and parliament resolved that ‘a Great Seal of England shall be forthwith made, to attend the Parliament, for Dispatch of the Affairs of the Parliament and Kingdom’.Footnote 102 The backlash from both parliamentary moderates and royalists was fierce. Within the Commons, MP John Maynard – who played an instrumental role in the organization of riots by royalist sympathizing apprentices and demobilized soldiers at Westminster in 1647 – argued that there was ‘no end in making a new Great Seal unlesse they intended making a new king’.Footnote 103 Later recalling the manufacture of the counterfeit seal, Peter Heylyn condemned parliament's decision as an act of ‘High Treason’, echoing the pronouncement of the short-lived royalist parliament at Oxford and a royal proclamation.Footnote 104 Charles responded with a declaration that used the crown as metaphor, accusing parliament of having taken ‘the three most glorious jewels in our Diadem, Our power to doe, Our justice to inforce, and Our mercy to pardon, three such inherent Prerogatives that as without them We are no King’.Footnote 105
Theoretical scholarship on the political valence of seals of office betrays striking similarities to the suggestions made here about the significance of the royal regalia. For Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, seals were socially operative insofar as they translated ‘notions of transcendental hierarchy into organizing principles of earthly domination’; and facilitated the reproduction of the political order through the creation of an abstract notion of ‘kingship’ independent of the king himself.Footnote 106 As was the case with the crown jewels, the seal was imbued with the gravity of the ‘ancient constitution’, extending monarchical authority outside of the body natural. Edward Hyde later reported that the objections of the Lords to assent to the parliamentary seal resulted from it having been ‘in all times before understood to be the sole property of the king, and not of the kingdom, and absolutely in the king's own disposal’.Footnote 107 In the words of Sean Kelsey, the seal was ‘a recognisable guarantee of the authenticity of the sovereign's appointment, gift or adjudication’.Footnote 108 The question of a parliamentary seal was, therefore, inherently bound up with possibility of parliamentary sovereignty. As with the crown jewels, it was through the necessity of controlling the material artefacts of power that parliament was brought into confrontation with the ultimate problem of its relationship to monarchy.
Even moderate parliamentarians could not help but be caught up in the question of how parliament could legally act in the absence of the king. As Kantorowicz argued, ‘the king body natural in Oxford had become a nuisance to Parliament; but the King body politic was still useful: he was still present in Parliament, though only in his seal image’.Footnote 109 Parliament's solution was paradoxically an innovation that simultaneously sought to preserve the symbolic structure of power. The seal commissioned by parliament differed from the existing great seal only in the date inscribed upon it; it still featured both the portrait of Charles, and the Stuart coat of arms.Footnote 110 The king's authority was thus preserved in spite of the absence of the king. For the more radical parliamentarians, however, this was almost certainly a symbolic form of the conscious fictions to which Christopher Hill has made reference: a way of masking revolutionary intentions within established and conventional discourse.Footnote 111
The great seal problem was clearly much more immediately bound up with the urgent need for parliament to extend its legislative capabilities than that of the crown jewels. However, the contiguity of the votes suggests that this was a moment in which radical parliamentarians identified an opportunity to launch more general claims to the control of the material sources of royal power. At the same time, the fierce response betrays an awareness that not only the king, but monarchy itself, was the target of the assault.
VI
The crown jewels question gained a fresh urgency as it came to be bound up with the matter of funding the parliamentarian war effort. In February 1643, parliament imposed a national tax, the weekly assessment, and its bricolage of a financial apparatus would soon come to encompass the sequestration of the property of its enemies. The following month, it granted itself the power to confiscate ‘the estates of such notorious Delinquents, as have been the causers or Instruments of the publike calamities’, and by September it had passed a remarkably radical ordinance ordering the Committee of Revenue to appoint agents for the seizing of all and every of ‘His Majesties, the Queens, and Princes Honours, Mannors, Lands, Tenements, and Hereditaments, Rents, Arrerages of Rents, Revenues, and Profits whatsoever’.Footnote 112 The status of the royal regalia under this ordinance was unclear.
A week earlier, the Commons had ordered on the express wish of the Lords that two ‘sequestrators’ – MPs John Gurdon and John Trenchard, presumably members of the Sequestration Committee – be present upon the seizing of property in Whitehall, ‘to see that none of his Majesty's own proper Goods be seized, or meddled with’.Footnote 113 By October 1644, however, the exigencies of war had shifted the bounds of acceptable conduct in a more revolutionary direction. The want for supply among forces in the home counties drove parliament into considering for the first time the raising of money against the royal regalia. This initially took the form of an ordinance for the ‘melting down, and converting into Coin, all the Plate, gilt and silver, in the Tower, belonging to the King’, though there was some disagreement over whether parliament had the authority to tamper with the regalia, and whether melting it down would return the greatest yield.Footnote 114 MP Laurence Whitaker recorded in his diary that as it was ‘Alleaged to be Ainchant plate belonging to ye Crowne’ it was ‘not to be sold away’, and that it was of such ‘curious workemanship’ that it was worth ‘thrice as much’ intact as molten.Footnote 115 Pawning, rather than melting or selling the regalia outright, may have initially been seen by moderate MPs as an expedient fudge, freeing them from accusations of regicidal ambitions while still raising funds to prosecute the war. The Commons referred the issue to a committee to resolve upon the matter of the jewels.Footnote 116
Two days later, the Commons ambiguously authorized that ‘all such Plate, both of Silver, and of Silver and Gilt, as belongs to the King’ was to be sold, pawned, or melted into coin, and that Master of the Jewel Office Henry Mildmay was to deliver it up. The order was said to have been made upon the authority of both the ‘Lords and Commons in Parliament’, notwithstanding that the Lords had refused to give their immediate consent.Footnote 117 This potentially situates the crown jewels question within a more broadly unfolding conflict, as part of an inter-cameral struggle between the Lords and Commons that resulted in a number of MPs declaring the assent of the upper chamber to be unnecessary in the passing of ordinances.Footnote 118 Parliament's unilateral manoeuvre only intensified the storm at Westminster, and soon messengers from the upper chamber arrived at the Commons to request a conference with MPs over the issue. D'Ewes himself attended the Lords, and subsequently noted that their first, somewhat superficial objection to the ordinance was on the grounds of the low financial return. More fundamental was their second objection: that it was a violation of the ‘honour of the Crowne, & was with the Crowne to come to the Prince who had deserved no ill’.Footnote 119 Perhaps even more acutely than when Marten had first tabled his motion for access to the regalia a year prior, there were concerns that the destruction of the plate was bound up with the fate of the monarchy per se.
As an alternative, the Lords proposed that the money be raised through the sum to be paid by the royalist John Tufton, earl of Thanet, for the recovery of his sequestered estate.Footnote 120 But rather than abandon the plan to melt down the jewels, the Commons built Thanet's fine into a deal with a committee at Goldsmiths’ Hall – the headquarters of the Committee for Compounding with Delinquents. Thanet initially agreed to pay £5,000 of an £8,000 fine, with the remaining £3,000 borrowed by parliament from the committee against the security of as much of the royal regalia as would cover the cost. The resolution stipulated that if the sum had not been repaid to the committee by Thanet within the month, it ‘shall be at Liberty to melt the same’. This opened up the opportunity for MPs to both have their cake and eat it: henceforth they could blame Thanet's non-compliance for any destruction of the crown jewels. Mildmay subsequently delivered the plate into the committee in question.Footnote 121
Predictably, a month later, at least £1,000 remained outstanding, and the Commons ordered that the committee ‘do forthwith melt down the King's Plate delivered unto them out of the Tower, upon Order of this House’. Within a week, the task had been carried out – without any mention in the Lords journal – and the money raised made at the disposal of the Committee of Both Kingdoms.Footnote 122 A document attributed to Henry Mildmay, likely from 1645, confirmed that ‘Last yeare ye Parl. melted 13,000oz. of ye office plate’ to fund its war effort.Footnote 123
VII
The crown jewels continued to concern parliamentarians into the Interregnum. There is no further record of their destruction during the Civil Wars, and in 1647, parliament referred intelligence that the jewels were ‘endeavoured to be Sold or Pawned…and the like not to be had again’ to a ‘Committee to take care to prevent the Imbezeling of the Crown Jewels’.Footnote 124 Such reticence does not appear to have lasted beyond the regicide. Extant evidence attests to trustees of parliament breaking into the Jewel House after Charles's execution in 1649 and removing, inter alia, three crowns and two sceptres.Footnote 125 According to Arthur Jefferies Collins, jewels ‘which had done duty at the consecration of at least six sovereigns’ were destroyed at the Mint.Footnote 126 Perhaps the most famous rejection of the artefacts of royal authority was, however, Oliver Cromwell's rejection of the crown in 1657, in keeping with the generally austere civic ceremonial of the republic.Footnote 127
No longer bound by claims to be defending the king, parliament was able to destroy more prominent artefacts of the royal regalia than had hitherto been possible. Aware that the authority of monarchy was liable to lay dormant in its material traces, the republican regime had a preference to melt the regalia rather than sell it intact. Such violence dealt by parliamentarians both during and after the Civil War appears to have played at least some role in the memorialization of the revolution after the Restoration: Henry Mildmay was referred to in a printed satire as ‘The Knave of Diamonds’, and during a Commons debate in 1660 over the allocation of funds for the purchase of new regalia for Charles II, William Prynne suggested that Mildmay might pay for the replacements, ‘having, as he said, stolen the former’.Footnote 128 Mildmay was eventually committed to the Tower for his complicity in the sale of the regalia, and died in Antwerp after being sentenced to exile in Tangier.Footnote 129
This extended history of the crown jewels, however, lies beyond the purview of this study. In establishing the relationship between the royal regalia and parliamentary affairs of the early 1640s, it has sought to demonstrate how the valence of these objects ensured their prominence in crucial considerations of the very cause for which the Civil War was being fought. The case serves as a paradigmatic example of how the exigencies of war drove an ideological escalation, forcing parliamentarians – both reluctantly and otherwise – into innovative and potentially revolutionary pronouncements on their relationship to the material artefacts of the monarchical body politic. This was only possible as a result of the aesthetic foundations of power; of the fact that early modern people understood these material objects to be politically efficacious.
When Henry Marten attempted to break into the treasury at Westminster Abbey in June 1643, contemporaries agreed that there were implications for the very institution of monarchy. But what seems to have started as an ambitious enterprise of the Commons’ most ‘violent spiritts’ quickly came to be supported by more influential and moderate figures within the Commons immediately concerned with the prosecution of the parliamentarian war effort. The vital role of these objects in mythologizing and legitimizing royal power, however, meant that the implications of their sequestration were liable to stretch further than may have been intended. It may be that with the destruction of the regalia, the abolition of monarchy itself became altogether more imaginable.
