In four different centuries has England suffered the pangs of that deplorable kind of war which we are accustomed to describe by the adjective ‘Civil.’ And in each case has the cause of the war been the same—a disagreement as to who should be the ruler of the country’s destinies. In the twelfth century it was a struggle between the King and a would-be Queen, in the thirteenth a struggle between the King and his barons, in the fifteenth a struggle between two royal families, and in the seventeenth a struggle between King and Parliament. It is the fourth of these wars that has gained, from the bitterness of the struggle and the catastrophe which ended it, the additional description of ‘Great.’

Both King and Parliament are among the oldest of our national institutions. In the days of the Angles and Saxons the head of the Government was the King, but his power had not been absolute. There was a body of King’s Counsellors, the Witena-gemōt, who had power to depose the King if necessary, and in whose hands rested the elections to the throne.

No idea of hereditary right to the throne then existed, and after the Norman Conquest the same right of election by the people—expressed through the Great Council—remained. It was not, in fact, till the accession of Edward I. that the principle of hereditary succession to the throne of England became firmly recognised. Edward I. was the first of our sovereigns to become King simply because he was the son of his father, and without an expression of the will of the nation.

On the death of Queen Elizabeth it happened that the throne of England fell to the King of Scotland—a King who may be described as one-fourth English, one-fourth French, and one-half Scots, in blood. It is, therefore, not altogether strange that James I., ‘the wisest fool in Christendom,’ should fail to see things from an Englishman’s point of view, or that he should be unable to understand English customs and English institutions.

Thus it was that the King began to quarrel with his Parliament, and when Charles I. became King in his father’s stead things grew rapidly worse. According to his view, he was King of England by the manifest will of God, and as the elect of God he was bound to consult none but God; while all his subjects were bound to obey his will, as they would the will of God.

But according to the view taken by Parliament, the King was one factor only in the Government. Commons, Lords Temporal, Lords Spiritual—the ‘Three Estates of the Realm’—had the King for their head. He was, as it were, the keystone of the arch, of no power by himself, but of very great power when fitted into his place in the government of the country. Such was the view of Parliament in the early years of King Charles’ reign. Later on the Members of Parliament thought they had made a new discovery—that the arch would hold itself up without the help of its keystone.

When Charles came to the throne, England was engaged in a war upon the Continent. From his first Parliament the King demanded supplies of money to carry on this war, but was told that he must first redress the ‘grievances’ under which the nation suffered. This not being the reply that he had expected, he dissolved Parliament and began to raise money by a system of compulsory loans obtained from all townsfolk who were deemed wealthy enough to provide them. From the town of Hull the two Commissioners, who attended at the Town Hall for the purpose, demanded and received the sum of £332 13s. 4d.

At the same time seaport towns were ordered to provide armed vessels towards a fleet of one hundred ships which was being equipped. Hull’s share was three ships large enough to transport 1350 men.

As his second Parliament proved no more tractable than his first had been, the King now decided to govern without a Parliament at all; and this he did from 1629 to 1640. During this time he continued to raise money by what many people considered to be illegal taxes—such as ship money, or money provided by seaport and inland towns for the fitting out of imaginary fleets; and tonnage and poundage, a levy on every tun of wine imported and every pound’s worth of merchandise bought and sold.

It was only to be expected that some people would object to pay taxes which were said to be illegal. In fact many people were to be found who said, ‘We will pay no taxes which we, through our Members of Parliament, have not sanctioned.’ The famous John Hampden was one of these; and when the King’s Judges said to Hampden, ‘You and everybody else must pay,’ there were scores of people up and down the country who proclaimed openly in the market-places, 'Well, we won’t pay, that’s all.’

Matters were thus getting into a very unpromising condition when, in 1639, the King levied an army of 22,000 men to make war upon the Scots, who had shown just as strong objections to using the King’s prayer-book as the English people had shown to paying the King’s taxes. At the head of this army Charles marched north, and took up his quarters for a time at York, from which place he paid a visit to Hull.

Let us now see what Hull was like when Charles visited it for the first time.

The plan of Kyngeston-vpon-Hvll given overleaf is reproduced from the very carefully drawn plan of a famous Dutch engraver named Hollar, and shows the appearance of the town in 1640. Surrounding the town to the north and west are the town wall and the moat, repaired and cleaned out by royal orders the previous year. North Gate and Hessle Gate span the moat and thus prevent ingress from both the Humber and the Hull. At each of the intervening three gates—Low Gate, Beverley Gate, and Myton Gate—the moat is spanned by a draw-bridge, and at the ends of Postern Gate Street and Blanket Row there are in the moat stakes for the support of bridges.

Within the town wall are plainly to be seen the chief streets and buildings. What was called The Ropery is our Humber Street, which then formed the actual bank of the Humber. Holy Trinity Church is far and away the largest of the buildings. St. Mary’s Church has now no tower, this having fallen in 1540—or, as tradition puts it, having been ‘pulled down to ye bare ground’ by order of the King. The sites of the Black Friary and White Friary are yet unbuilt upon.^[51] The Suffolk Palace, begun by Michael de la Pole in 1384, confiscated to King Henry VIII., and converted by him into a ‘Sitidell and a special kepe of the hole town,’ rented of the Hildyards of Winestead by King Charles I. in 1639, and used as a magazine for military stores, forms an imposing pile of buildings. Its gardens stretch almost as far as the Beverley Gate.

On the opposite side of the river Hull, the ancient village of Dripole has disappeared, and its place is taken by a new line of fortifications consisting of a ditch and wall, the latter strengthened by the addition of two ‘Blockhouses’ and a ‘Castle.’

This line of fortifications, together with a strong bridge over the Hull, was constructed by order of King Henry VIII. when he visited Hull in 1541; and its cost, £23,000, was provided by the King from the revenues of the suppressed monasteries. Large quantities of building materials from the White and the Black Friaries were used in its construction.^[52]

The welcome accorded to King Charles on this his first visit to Hull was most cordial. Outside the Beverley Gate he was met by the Mayor, Aldermen, and Recorder, who delivered to him the keys of the town, to be received back from the King’s hands with gracious words. In the speech made by the Recorder to his ‘Most Gracious Sovereign’ occurs this promise:—

‘We make bold, with the utmost zeal and fidelity that can be, to give your Majesty a full assurance of our most sincere loyalty, and will adhere to you against all your enemies with the utmost of our lives and fortunes.’

Then came the turn of the Mayor, who, in presenting the King with a long ribbon, which Charles at once tied in a knot and placed in his hat, said:—

‘Vouchsafe, great Sir, to accept the emblematic bond of our obedience, which is tied as fast to your Majesty, your Crown, and the Church, as our souls are to our bodies, and we are resolved never to part from the former until we part from the latter.’

But how hollow and insincere these words were was very shortly to be made apparent. Probably Charles himself recognised their tone of insincerity, and was doubtless much better pleased with the ‘purse of curious workmanship, containing one hundred guineas’ which accompanied the giving of the ‘Hull favour.’ That night the King lodged at the house of Sir John Lister^[53] in High Street—that known to us as ‘Wilberforce House’—the next night he lodged at Beverley, and the following day he again reached York.

These events were happening in the month of April, 1639. On the twenty-third of the same month three years later, Charles paid his second visit to Hull. And what a different reception was then to await him!

During these three years the relations between King and Parliament had been steadily growing more strained. Each recognised the possibility of there being in the future an appeal to arms; and each recognised, too, the importance of possessing ‘the most important fortress in the whole kingdom, and its vast magazine, which far exceeded the collection of warlike stores in the Tower of London.’^[54]

It was the King’s misfortune that Parliament, and not he, secured possession of Hull. Early in 1642 the Commons appointed Sir John Hotham, Member of Parliament for Beverley, to be Governor of Hull; and sent him down to take possession of the town, with orders not to deliver it up without the King’s authority ‘signified by both Houses.’ On April 23rd the King himself set out from York on the same errand, taking care to send forward from Beverley an officer charged with the message that the King would shortly arrive to dine with the Governor of the town.

But the result of this message was not what the King had expected it to be. Having consulted Mr. Pelham, one of the two Members of Parliament for the town, Sir John Hotham caused the bridges to be drawn up, the gates to be closed, and the walls to be lined with soldiers. The Mayor and townsfolk were ordered to keep within their houses.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning when the King, with a bodyguard of some three hundred soldiers, arrived before the Beverley Gate, where only three years before he had received such a cordial welcome. Now, when he commanded Sir John Hotham to open the Gate, he was met with a polite refusal. The Governor was very sorry to have to disobey the King’s command, but ‘he durst not open the gates to him, being intrusted by the Parliament with the safety of the town.’

To the offer of the King, that he would leave all his train outside the Gate, with the exception of twenty horse, the Governor proved equally unresponsive.

From eleven o’clock till four o’clock the parleying of King and Governor went on. Then the King ‘retired to a little house without the walls, and after an hour’s stay returned’ and demanded a final answer. Would Sir John Hotham admit the King to ‘a town and fort of our own, wherein our own magazine lay;’ or would he forthwith be proclaimed a traitor?

Sir John chose the latter alternative, and was at once proclaimed guilty of high treason by the King’s heralds. Then the King withdrew to Beverley, and the first act of open hostility between Parliament and King was ended. The Great Civil War had, in fact, begun.