Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland - Political and Military Career

Political and Military Career

Falkland's intellectual pleasures, however, were soon interrupted by war and politics. He felt it his duty to take part on the side of King Charles I as a volunteer under Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex in the Bishops' Wars of 1639 against the Scots. In 1640 he elected Member of Parliament for Newport in the Isle of Wight to the Short Parliament. He was re-elected for Newport for the Long Parliament in November 1640, and took an active part on the side of the opposition. He spoke against the exaction of ship money on 7 December 1640, denouncing the servile conduct of Lord Keeper Finch and the judges.

He supported the prosecution of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, at the same time trying more than once to moderate the measures of the House of Commons in the interests of justice, and voted for the third reading of the attainder on 21 April 1641. On the question of the church he urged, in the debate of 8 February 1641, that the interference of the clergy in secular matters, the encroachments in jurisdiction of the spiritual courts, and the imposition by authority of unnecessary ceremonies, should be prohibited. On the other hand, though he denied that episcopacy existed jure divino, he was opposed to its abolition; fearing the establishment of the Presbyterian system, which in Scotland had proved equally tyrannical. Triennial parliaments would be sufficient to control the bishops, if they meditated any further attacks upon the national liberties, and he urged that "where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change". (This was probably said in reply to Hampden during the Root and Branch Bill debate that happened later.) Even Hampden still believed that a compromise with the episcopal principle was possible, and assured Falkland that if the bill taken up to the House of Lords on 1 May 1641, excluding the bishops from the Lords and the clergy from secular offices, were passed, "there would be nothing more attempted to the prejudice of the church". Accordingly the bill was supported by Falkland.

The times, however, were not favourable to compromise. The bill was lost in the Lords, and on 27 May the Root and Branch Bill, for the total abolition of episcopacy, was introduced in the House of Commons. This measure Falkland opposed, as well as the second bill for excluding the bishops, introduced on 21 October 1641. In the discussion on the Grand Remonstrance he took the part of the bishops and the Arminians. He was now opposed to the whole policy of the opposition, and, being reproached by John Hampden with his change of attitude, replied "that he had formerly been persuaded by that worthy gentleman to believe many things which he had since found to be untrue, and therefore he had changed his opinion in many particulars as well as to things as to persons".

On 1 January 1642, immediately before the attempted arrest of the five members, of which, however, Falkland was unaware, the King offered him the secretaryship of state, and Hyde persuaded him to accept it. Falkland thus became involved directly in the king's policy, though evidently possessing little influence in his counsels. He was one of the peers who signed the protestation against making war, at York on 15 June 1642. On 5 September 1642 he carried Charles's overtures for peace to the parliament, when he informed the leaders of the opposition that the king consented to a thorough reformation of religion. The secret correspondence connected with the Waller plot passed through his hands.

Falkland fought for the king at the Battle of Edgehill (23 October 1642) and at the siege of Gloucester. By this time the hopelessness of the situation had completely overwhelmed him. The aims and principles of neither party in the conflict could satisfy a man of Falkland's high ideals and intellectual vision. His royalism could not suffer the substitution, as the controlling power in the state, of a parliament for the monarchy, nor his conservatism the revolutionary changes in church and state now insisted upon by the opposite faction. The fatal character and policy of the king, the most incapable of men and yet the man upon whom all depended, must have been by now thoroughly understood by Falkland. Compromise had long been out of the question. The victory of either side could only bring misery; and the prolongation of the war was a prospect equally unhappy.

Falkland's ideals and hopes were now destroyed, and he had no definite political convictions such as inspired and strengthened Strafford and John Pym. In fact his sensitive nature shrank from contact with the practical politics of the day and prevented his rise to the place of a leader or a statesman. Clarendon has recorded his final relapse into despair:

Sitting amongst his friends, often, after a deep silence and frequent sighs (he) would with a shrill and sad accent ingeminate the word "Peace, Peace," and would passionately profess that the very agony of the war, and the view of the calamities and desolation the kingdom did and must endure, took his sleep from him and would shortly break his heart.

At Gloucester he had in vain exposed himself to risks. On the morning of the First Battle of Newbury, on 20 September 1643, he declared to his friends, who would have dissuaded him from taking part in the fight, that "he was weary of the times and foresaw much misery to his own Country and did believe he should be out of it ere night." He served during the engagement as a volunteer under Sir John Byron and, riding alone at a gap in a hedge commanded by the enemy's fire, was immediately killed.