God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  Zealous opponents of popery, those offended by ceremonialism and medieval survivals, were on the other hand branded in conversation, pamphlets and on the stage as Puritans – their hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness were pilloried in stereotypes such as ‘Zeal of the Land Busy’. The term ‘Puritan’ really described a relationship to current orthodoxy rather than a fixed body of ideas. It was a label (often used with hostile intent) for those pushing for further reform, or offended by some aspect of the current settlement: those labelled Puritans in the later sixteenth century were people agitated by different aspects of church practice than those labelled Puritans in the 1630s.36 As Francis Rous put it, the word ‘Puritan’ was an ‘essential engine’ of the attempt to push English religion towards conformity with Rome, a word consisting of only a few letters, but one of which the Devil could make manifold use: ‘this word in the mouth of a drunkard doth mean a sober man, in the mouth of an Arminian, an Orthodox man, in the mouth of a papist, a Protestant. And so it is spoke to shame a man out of all religion, if a man be ashamed to be saved’.37 One man’s Puritanism was another man’s quite reasonable concern about the encroachments of popery – the terms were two sides of a polemical battle about the boundaries of purified Christian practice.

  At stake too was the location of the Royal Supremacy. ‘Puritan’ opponents of crown policy looked to the King-in-Parliament as the seat of the Royal Supremacy – it was a parliament which had given Henry VIII power over the English church – and sought an active foreign policy in defence of the Reformation in Europe at large. Hooker offered an authority for this view too.38 The battle might erupt over any number of issues, and when it did the means of publicity, and handy stereotypes, lay close to hand.

  Print was not the cause of this, nor its only medium, but the growth of printing in England in the later sixteenth century had been associated with the development of a pamphlet culture encouraging open debate of political issues in print. Much printed matter was in expensive formats, large bibles or learned tracts written in Latin and not intended to inspire reflection on current affairs by the vulgar. But there were also genres of cheap print which targeted wider audiences. In particular ballads were produced in huge numbers, illustrated and set to well-known tunes with the intention of amusing but also educating audiences in alehouses and elsewhere. Although literacy in England may have been as low as 30 per cent among the male population, and less than that among the female population, this form of print was not primarily textual. Ballads were sung, and pasted on the walls of village alehouses, their woodcut images offering a spur to the memory of what the text contained. In the second half of the sixteenth century there may have been 4 million of these ballads in circulation – nearly one each for the whole population.39

  Many of these ballads were entertainments, dealing with chivalric stories or romances between young swains and country maids. They also had a didactic function, of course, giving their audiences examples with which to think about, for instance, moral qualities and the dangers of adolescence. Others were intended to educate the populace about the demands of a Protestant life, and, by the 1640s in any case, about tyranny and virtuous government.40 Alongside these religiously improving ballads and stories of civic virtue huge numbers of printed catechisms circulated, teaching people to read at the same time that they offered religious instruction. In the early seventeenth century there were about half a million official catechisms in circulation, as well as three quarters of a million alternatives.41 An unknown number of broadsides – large single sheets illustrated with a woodcut – were also in circulation, again often with the purpose of offering religious instruction that reached beyond the formally literate population. By the late sixteenth century more elaborate works were making their way in a more sophisticated print market – the chapbook. Costing a penny or two, and consisting of up to twenty-four small unbound pages, many of these books also took up the themes of love and chivalry, but they might also seek to edify and inform about more narrowly religious or political issues.42

  In the later sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century there was also a steady growth in the publication of ‘news pamphlets’, alongside ballads and broadsides. They were not serial publications, but were one-off, topical and (at least ostensibly) factual.43 Many of these pamphlets sought to give advice or example about the active Christian life by lending a providential meaning to disasters, murders, monstrous births and unusual natural phenomena. The hand of God could be discerned in the life and repentance of a Puritan, for example, evidence of the need to avoid excesses of zeal, introspection and spiritual pride. Once again, this was a form of print that intersected with a common cultural form – many parishioners were exposed to these providential lessons every Sunday. Print circulated and fixed accounts of events which were at the same time politicized. Its messages were intended to reach well beyond the formally literate.44

  These news pamphlets fed, and fed upon, what was pretty clearly a growing appetite for news, fuelled by rumour and circulating manuscripts as well as print. This caused unease among the country’s governors, but the circulation of news was restrained rather than controlled. Semi-regular news pamphlets, the ‘corantos’ (the name is related to courant), appeared in the 1620s. Forerunners of the later newsbooks, they published news of European affairs, respecting the ban on domestic news but still causing enough concern for them to be closed down during the 1630s. An unfulfilled appetite existed, and reliable news (and reliable guidance as to its meaning) was at a premium, even for those who could pay around £20 a year for the services of a manuscript newsletter writer. For governments the destabilizing effects of the news culture lay partly in the danger of misinformation – ill-founded rumours had played a part in riot and rebellion – and their solution was to try to stop the circulation of news rather than to improve its quality. When governments sought to regulate information, therefore, they were not simply seeking to safeguard hierarchy. It was a losing battle however: it is clear that comment on public affairs was opinionated, common and widely circulated. Libels and seditious verses, penned in response to particular incidents or personalities, circulated in manuscript copies, and news spread orally with the passage of trade around the country. Alehouses and taverns were often alive with the buzz of news.45

  In all this represented an increasingly sophisticated print market, reaching a wide section of the population directly, and much of it intended to be passed on to the non-literate by being read out or sung. Official publications circulated too, pasted up or fixed to posts in prominent places – the marketplace or the porch of the church. They could be deciphered by the literate for their neighbours, reaching into every corner of the kingdom. Oral and literate forms of communication overlapped and informed one another – print seeping into networks of gossip and rumour, rumours and stories finding their way into print from these conversations.46 Central to this world of opinion was religious and political awareness, often attached to critical views of particular events or personalities.

  The Royal Exchange in 1644: a centre of trade, gossip and news

  The royal court was the nerve centre of the political system, the seat of royal patronage and the place at which the fortunes of particular views of church, state and foreign policy were most easily to be followed. Here was another source of the hostility to Buckingham – he had managed to become a favourite both of the old king and of the new, so that those who had hoped he would fall with the death of the father were disappointed. In fact, there was a persistent rumour that the change of master had been facilitated by the poisoning of James I, arranged by Buckingham and even, perhaps, connived at by Charles. At court in the later 1620s ‘new counsels’ were increasingly influential, advising against participation in the European war, advocating support of Laud and the anti-Calvinists, very hostile to ‘popularity’ and in favour of avoiding parliaments. These voices did not have a monopoly at court, but they were increasingly powerful.47

  Parliaments, presses
and crowds offered opportunities to try to pressure the royal court, the affairs of which were a frequent topic of public comment. Periodically since the reign of Elizabeth prominent politicians, including courtiers, had appealed to wider publics, often presenting current political issues in terms of highly polarized language, or the stereotypes of Puritan hypocrite or popish agent of the Antichrist. These stereotypes were associated too with conspiracy theories – in a political system so dependent on personal authority, personal intrigue was an obvious means of securing political ends. Another theme in such conspiracies was the corruption of political virtue by private interest, a politics of commonwealth which drew on classical histories for its view of republican virtue.48

  Meetings of Parliament might stoke all this up, particularly in London. Felton, after all, had been encouraged to murder Buckingham not just by the promptings of his conscience, but by a declaration of Parliament and by what he had read. He clearly moved in a world of easy private connections. Two of his lodging house acquaintances were later examined about the assassination. Elizabeth Josselyn, the wife of a stationer, testified that she and her mother lived in part of the same house as Felton in Fleet Lane, and that she had lent him several books. The only one he did not return was a ‘History of the Queen of Scots’. Like many others she found him a melancholy man ‘much given to reading of books, and of very few words. She never saw him merry’.49 But he had spent two hours discussing a copy of Parliament’s remonstrance with Richard Harward at the Windmill in Shoe Lane. Felton knew a scrivener – a professional writer of manuscript copies – by the name of Willoughby who had written petitions for him in the past. It was from Willoughby that Harward had got his copy of the remonstrance. After the murder of Buckingham, Willoughby was found to have copies of a verse in his desk – ‘Let Charles and George [Buckingham] do what they can / Yet George shall die like Doctor Lambe’.50 Books and declarations could be dangerous things, and they circulated easily in the taverns and lodging houses of early Stuart London. Felton’s own fate, of course, also became a public issue – in his scaffold scene, and in the circulation of opinions and verses about him. In the late 1620s Charles not only turned his back on parliaments and Puritans but on the public too, refusing to resort to print to explain himself.51

  In these public controversies – over religion, foreign policy and prerogative powers – religious, legal and political concerns intersected. This was true at several levels: the fact that prominent Arminians seemed to support a generous view of the prerogative or that Puritans sought also to clip the King’s wings; an argument about how far to emphasize the King-in-Parliament as the seat of the Royal Supremacy; that foreign policy was irreligious and could not be funded because of the corruptions of the court; that harmless ceremonies should be respected as the preference of the monarch and the legal heritage of the church.

  It was a matter of faith that the common law enshrined human reason, arrived at by accretion of the ages. So too the view that the Reformation had been achieved by statute, and that the law was literally omnicom-petent – able to provide solutions to all social and political questions and the ultimate safeguard of civil and religious rights. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this view had been entrenched as governments used the law to widen the scope of their powers. Paradoxically, therefore, as the governments became more ambitious they became more trammelled by the common law – the uses of the prerogative in the 1550s resembled those of the 1620s, but caused much less alarm.52 Part of this mix was a language of commonwealth which drew, ultimately, on the classical heritage that was a standard part of the education not just of Stuart gentlemen but of anyone who had been at a grammar school. This education, broadly termed humanist, informed a sense of public activism among these men as holders of public office and, more generally, as leading figures in local society.53 More theoretical questions were open too: Roman histories of ‘free states’ were widely available in early Stuart England, to the extent that they had become, in effect, works of English political theory, at least in some circles.54

  It is at least possible, for example, that one of the books that Felton had read ‘which defended that it was lawful to kill an enemy to the republic’ was Thomas May’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, published the previous year. Pharsalia was a poem about the civil wars from which Julius Caesar emerged as dictator. It championed the virtues of the republic against Caesar, and dealt with his murder by Brutus. May’s edition was dedicated to figures associated with support of the international Protestant cause and opposition to an extensive view of royal prerogative powers. The poem itself is ambiguous: it is clear about the horrors of civil war but claims that imperial peace is worse; it recognizes virtue in Caesar while despising his victory; it champions the republican armies, but blames their defeat on a lack of will. At one point May commends the war for having produced Nero – critics differ as to whether this is an ironic point or not. But in the context of early Stuart England republican virtue lay in the selfless service of the public, not in government without a king. Readers of Pharsalia could be found on both sides at the outbreak of civil war in 1642, and it was more than possible to read it without approving of Felton’s actions. Nonetheless, May’s translation was sufficiently sensitive, politically, that the dedicatory pages were removed from many of the early editions.55

  Felton’s fate was marked and celebrated in an outpouring of ‘underground verse’, like that found copied out in the desk of his friend the scrivener. This was an important feature of the political culture of the 1620s: poems circulated in manuscript, employing rough verse and expressing anti-courtly sentiments, in marked and deliberate contrast to the refined culture of the court. In Felton’s case there was an ambivalence, akin to his own, between a Christian revulsion at murder and sense of civic virtue in his dramatic act on behalf of the commonwealth. The classical heritage offered a fund of republican thinking, and practical examples, on which those anxious to defend the commonwealth could draw. One of the verse epitaphs to Felton contains very clear echoes of Pharsalia – if Felton had not read May then some of his supporters certainly had. The republican virtues of active citizenship which animated much of the government of the kingdom offered too the resources with which to criticize royal government, and to imagine alternative political worlds.56

  Charles’s policies, then, caused outrage but also outrages. In 1629, Parliament met again, following Buckingham’s death. Hostility to Arminianism and the collection of tonnage and poundage (customs duties with disputed legal status) led to speeches which came close to personal attacks on Charles, and which seemed to make radical claims for the constitutional position of Parliament. Charles moved to adjourn the sitting, but the Speaker of the House of Commons was not allowed simply to call an adjournment by members anxious that they were about to be deprived of a platform. The Speaker was physically held in his chair while resolutions hostile to Arminianism and tonnage and poundage were read. In the meantime the door was barred to Black Rod, who had arrived to end the session.57 For Charles, this sudden dissolution of Parliament was a repudiation of Puritan populism in more than one sense, a solution to the problem posed by the plotting of ‘envenomed spirits which troubled… the blessed harmony between us and our subjects’.58

  Compared to the fraught politics of the late 1620s it could be claimed with some reason that the 1630s were halcyon days in England. Two crucial elements of the situation had changed – the country was not at war, and parliaments were not meeting. The dissolution of Parliament in 1629 signalled the opening of the ‘Personal Rule’, what turned out to be eleven years of government without recourse to Parliament. Without parliaments England was still an informed and participatory political society, in which classical and Christian notions of an active life enjoyed much currency. War, money and religion remained potentially controversial and so the absence of parliaments, and the heated publicity of the late 1620s, was a palliative, not necessarily a cure. It was, though, undoubtedly a palliative and
by 1637 Charles probably had good reason to be pleased with the Personal Rule. England remained much more governable than it had been at the time of Buckingham’s assassination.

  Doing without Parliament was not in itself a violation of constitutional principle. The institution had no continuous existence, but was an assembly called at the royal will for a particular purpose – Parliament was in that sense an event rather than an institution. Parliaments could provide money (only parliaments could grant taxation) and legislation. They might also offer counsel on the basis of wide knowledge of the affairs of the kingdom, and give voice to the grievances of the subjects, asking for redress from the monarch. But the crown had many sources of revenue that were not, formally speaking, taxes; and if there was no need for new laws then there was no need for parliamentary legislation. Parliament was not an executive body, and had no permanent place in government – if the King did not want taxes, legislation or the advice of Parliament there was no obligation on him to call one. In practice, it is difficult to see how such circumstances could persist for long, however: Parliament had no right to existence, but it was not easily disposable either. Nonetheless, James I had called only one parliament between 1610 and 1621, and in the reign of Elizabeth parliaments met on average once every three and a half years, for sessions lasting only ten or eleven weeks. Even during the 1620s, parliaments were in session only 20 per cent of the time.59