God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  As military preparations in England faltered, the Covenanters, untroubled by such divisions, seemed to be in the superior position. At the English court the preference seemed to be to postpone war for a year, or to limit it to a defensive war. But the Covenanters forced the issue, perhaps in the knowledge that this was their moment.76 The Scottish parliament reassembled, ignoring Charles’s desire for a further prorogation, and carried through further dramatic constitutional changes. In England two years later, when Parliament seemed to be moving in a similar direction, it generated a strong royalist party; but not in Scotland in 1640, although there was some division. The Earl of Argyll had emerged as a dominant figure, and there was some suspicion about his motives and plans, but the Covenanters faced little organized opposition. A General Assembly called in Aberdeen, territory friendly to the King’s cause, was actually free of external pressure to moderate its policies – even there the Covenanters” military and political position was unchallenged.77

  Nonetheless, the Covenanters invaded England with some reluctance. They had been unsure of their reception and had maintained correspondence with the English peers. The question of whether to invade was also divisive in Scotland, and seems to have precipitated the first sign of serious division in Covenanter ranks. The Earl of Montrose had organized the Cumbernauld band, which claimed that the purposes of the Covenant were being subverted by a minority, and promised to pursue the original aims by another means. This was perhaps the first sign of his move towards support of the King, and was certainly evidence of a growing suspicion of Argyll. In the end, the Covenanters probably invaded because of the difficulty of maintaining an army off the land north of the border.78

  As in the first war, we cannot be certain how disabling English foot-dragging was, because at Newburn, the only significant engagement of the war, the crucial problem for the English was not the quality of their men or arms, but that they chose the wrong ground. The Covenanting army may not have been easy to sustain for a long period, so the outcome of a single battle exaggerates the relative importance of the problems on the English side.79 Against this, however, it is a poor army, or one with very limited political capital behind it, that collapses in the face of relatively small casualties. Exact figures are lacking, but it is unlikely that either side lost more than several hundred men: significant for a day, but hardly the destruction of an army said to have numbered 25,000 overall. In the end, the dismal military performance reflected a lack of political will, a product of divisions felt at all levels of English society from the peerage to the beggar turned away by Alexander Powell.

  On the same day that the two armies clashed at Newburn, twelve peers petitioned the King to call a parliament and from that point there is clear evidence of co-ordination between the Covenanters and those anxious to secure the meeting of another English parliament – Nathaniel Fiennes, son of Saye and Sele, was certainly in correspondence designed to secure a treaty and a parliament. Charles bowed to this pressure, summoning a Great Council at York on 24 September. He opened proceedings by announcing his intention to call another parliament, although he took some persuasion that defeat at Newburn necessitated recognition of the Covenanters” political victory.80

  These twelve peers were the most confident of a wider circle of aristocrats opposed to the policies of the Personal Rule: the Earls of Essex, Hertford, Bedford, Warwick, Exeter and Rutland and Lords Saye and Sele, Brooke, Mandeville, Howard of Escrick, Mulgrave and Boling-broke. The Earl of Manchester, a future parliamentarian general, also urged the calling of a parliament. The Earl of Northumberland, another prominent parliamentarian during the civil war, had been in charge of the war effort against the Covenanters. The political role of the aristocracy is a neglected theme in civil war studies, but it has been plausibly suggested that a group of radical peers had ridden this crisis intent on engineering exactly this outcome – an opportunity actually to reduce the King to the position of a Doge of Venice.81 It is certainly clear that Charles’s policies divided the ruling class, and debates resonated outside it. There were imitators of the twelve peers” petition in York and Hereford, although those petitions were not delivered for fear that they would prove fractious, and in London, where the inhibitions were fewer.82

  Once a parliament had been called the City of London advanced £200,000. Delegates from the Great Council, those most sympathetic to settlement with the Covenanters, were sent to negotiate the Treaty of Ripon. Under its terms the Covenanters were to stay in the six northern counties of England and to be paid £850 per day. A full settlement was to await, and be ratified in, an English parliament. In effect, what had been agreed was a ceasefire, pending a treaty in London, and the terms of the ceasefire clearly suited the Covenanters and their English friends – the costs of the army were placed on the English taxpayer, which gave a guarantee that the next parliament could not be a short one. Ripon not only ended the attempt to crush the Covenant, therefore, but also cemented the connection between the fate of reformation in Scotland and the redress of grievances in England. For those in England who were primarily interested in religious grievances, Ripon also established the connection between the position of the English parliament and the future of reformed religion. Influential men, like Pym, took full advantage of this association between the defence of Parliament’s constitutional position and the promotion of reformation.83

  During this crisis the Earl of Lindsey had been presented with a severed toe by a woman from Boston, Lincolnshire. The toe had previously belonged to her husband but he had cut it off so that he would not have to fight. It is difficult to be sure that this was an ideological statement.84 There was nothing particularly new about English military failure or lack of political support: even during the Armada year there were signs of reluctance to support the war effort.85 But the Bishops” Wars proved particularly damaging to Charles’s English regime. Prerogative rule, particularly the use of prerogative powers to secure military resources, had caused significant resentments during the 1630s. Using those same powers to cow the godly Scots was little more popular, and by the late summer of 1640 it had failed.

  It was John Knox, father of the Scottish Reformation, who had asked Heinrich Bullinger in 1554 ‘Whether obedience is to be rendered to a magistrate who enforces idolatry and condemns true religion’. Bullinger had flannelled in response and not surprisingly, for this was the most loaded political question in Reformation Europe.86 It was close to being posed by some of Charles’s Scottish subjects in 1640. Generally recognized obligations to obey both God and the King were coming into conflict in the Prayer Book crisis, as obedience to the King’s commands seemed to offend against godliness.

  Alexander Henderson, leading light in the Covenanting movement, dealt with these questions in his tract ‘Instructions for Defensive Arms’, which is a little puzzling to modern readers in its silences and hesitations. The key question was not whether to honour the King, or to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s, but ‘whether honour should be given to evil and wicked superiors in an evil thing?’ In the normal course of events evil and wicked superiors should be honoured, since they might have been sent as a punishment, but not, Henderson argued, when they commanded evil things. In that case, he said, they could be resisted, even by private citizens, although it would be better if this was done by inferior magistrates. A chief magistrate commanding evil things had stepped out of the line of divine hierarchy so that his inferior was acting in direct response to God.87

  All this is blunt, and bracing. But Henderson was less clear on the more fundamental question: who was to judge when the chief magistrate was out of line? This was really the nub, and a king who accepted the argument about an errant chief magistrate was unlikely to accept that a self-appointed group like the Covenanters should be judges of when it had happened. At least the Covenanters had produced authoritative texts against which the judgement could be made – the Negative Confession of 1581 and subsequent declarations. England, as events over the next two years
showed, lacked such texts. Although it seems to avoid the most pressing question – who should be the judge – this tract was persuasive enough to be reprinted in 1642 for the guidance of English readers facing a similar dilemma. The dangers inherent in opening up these lines of argument, and the reasons for imposing limits on the right to resist, were exemplified, however, by the words of Roger Moore, in Middleton (Westmorland) in 1640: he was accused of saying that if the king commanded him to turn papist, or do anything against his conscience, then he would rise up against him and kill him.88 An unlimited licence to follow conscience rather than to obey the powers that be might quickly lead to chaos if individuals could claim the right to kill a king.

  In the Short Parliament, of course, these questions had not been asked, and the debates were in the main revisiting the grievances of the 1620s.89 But as we have seen, on the streets of London and among the troops going north there were signs that a new and more radical kind of politics was emerging: not just anti-Laudian but in favour of pushing the Reformation further, perhaps openly anti-episcopal. At some point in the summer of 1640 an underground press kicked into life in London, publishing Covenanter texts almost simultaneously with the presses in Edinburgh.90 This could even have been construed as treasonous after the royal proclamation of August 1640 that all those who ‘shall not with all their might oppose and fight against’ the Covenanters would be deemed rebels and traitors. But there was worse. The same press published two tracts arguing that the Church of England was anti-Christian – so corrupt that true believers should withdraw. Instead Christians should separate themselves completely from the established church, forming independent congregations, gathered voluntarily. These arguments had a hinterland in discussions within radical Protestant circles during the 1630s, but now they were breaking cover and they were to be of profound significance to the politics of the 1640s. Even more disturbingly, Samuel How’s pamphlet, The Sufficiencie of the Spirits Teaching, argued that human learning about the scriptures might not be merely wrong but positively dangerous. This cut the ground from under the entire ministry, not just bishops, justifying lay preaching and even suggesting that the minds of the poor and unlearned, whose thinking was unadulterated by human learning, were more receptive to the teaching of the Spirit. These too were radical claims, again with an established heritage in Reformation thought, that were to be of profound significance to the politics of the following decade.

  Perhaps the most inflammatory of the pamphlets produced from this press was Englands Complaint to Jesus Christ Against the Bishops canons. This argued that there was a popish plot which had infected government right up to the King himself, who was personally implicated because he had fallen for the Devil’s snares. To allow such a faction to flourish threatened the people’s laws and liberties, and the good of their souls. This, it was claimed, breached a covenant between the King and the people in existence since the Norman conquest. An argument in this form hinted, to put it no more strongly, at a positive right to resist. These were by no means standard, or normal, responses to the Covenanter crisis, and in arguing for congregational separatism, they were in fact going far further than the Covenanters. It may have been that this press started up having been brought back from Amsterdam, a centre of clandestine and radical publication in Reformation Europe.91

  London crowds mobilized in response to libels, pasquils and papers may also have been consuming the output of underground presses.92 Nehemiah Wallington, a London wood turner and avid reader of the press, was often among the crowds in London in these years. He was an unusually pious man, who paid painstaking attention to his own spiritual well-being and the health of the community in which he lived. He has left hundreds of pages of notes on his own affairs, and on public issues, all seeking to come closer to an understanding of God’s purposes in the world. Among his notes on the canons of 1640 is a paper outlining orthodox resistance theory and relating it directly to the situation of the Covenanters.

  It was in the form of an answer to the concern that for subjects to bear arms against their king ‘upon any pretence whatsoever’ was to resist ‘the powers ordained of God’. It was acknowledged that private individuals could not resist. However, if the King maintained a faction which oppressed the whole kingdom and the ‘people in their law and liberties and most of all in the true religion’, ruling not by law, but seeking to ‘make all his subjects slaves by bringing their souls, bodies, estates under a miserable bondage’; and if the breach could not be healed, and there was no alternative, then it was acceptable for the whole people ‘to stand up as one man to defend themselves and their country’. He noted that ‘this point trencheth upon the Scots at this time’, who were standing to the defence of their laws, liberties and religion:

  when a whole Nation thus universal and unanimously stands up in such a quarrel it cannot but be ascribed to the overruling and righteous hand that thereby thou might both defend the people’s rights and preserve the State of the Kingdom to the King himself and his posterity, which otherwise by oppression and Tyranny would be brought to confusion…

  The royal office was a sacred one, but numerous biblical sources justified the view that kings were bound by the law, covenants and conditions agreed between them and their people. Those that ‘persuade Kings, that they are no way bound, but have liberty to rule as they list, by an independent prerogative these are they that are traitors both to God and to the King, and to the Realm and to the peace and prosperity thereof’.93

  Whether informed directly from the presses or not, the politics of crowds in London and of some of the troops conscripted for service against the Covenanters indicate that English politics were entering some of the more dangerous waters in post-Reformation Europe. Tensions between religious and political duties such as those being experienced in Scotland and England were not unusual in Reformation Europe, and had tremendous radical potential. The classical heritage was rich in resources for those who would oppose tyranny, champion virtue or promote freedom. These may have been some of the books that encouraged Felton to think that ‘it was lawful to kill an enemy to the republic’, or that those who were not free to exercise their own judgement free of interference were in bondage or slavery: an argument that became prominent in 1642. England was not full of revolutionaries in 1640, but its cultural heritage – biblical and classical – furnished materials with which to think radically about political crises when they erupted. And it was true of the popular culture too. Scottish troops on the march through Flodden in 1640 were encouraged by an ancient prophecy of Merlin, circulating in both Latin and ‘Scottish verse’, which could be read as predicting success in their venture. Such prophecies were widely thought to be potential solvents of political order, lending a kind of supernatural authority to resistance, upheaval and changes of regime.94

  It is tempting to dwell on this radicalism because of its implications for the future, and there was very obviously much more at stake in this public contestation than a failure to deal adequately with a ‘Scottish invasion’. But English opinion was on the whole expressed in conventional terms, and seems to have been more divided and irresolute than it was revolutionary. John Castle, for example, drew a ready but not particularly helpful analogy between natural events and the political crisis. Strafford’s crossing from Ireland in 1640 had been rough, and there were fears that the ship might be lost. The ride, and the fear it induced, brought on his gout and he finished his journey to London on a litter. His condition had ruled out the possibility of serving as Lord High Steward of Parliament. A month later, following the failure of the Short Parliament, Castle reached for the obvious analogy: ‘God I trust will guide the rudder of this ship, and give you a healthful body to support the concussions and tossings of these stormy times’. Reporting assaults on their officers by troops in Essex, later in the summer, he concluded equally piously, ‘God amend all, and defend this great ship from breaking upon these rocks’. In June he wrote:

  there is at this time reigning here at We
stminster a disease… wherein they that labour of it, complain of a stifling at heart and distemper in the head; and there is cause to fear that almost generally through the kingdom, the common people are sick of those parts; they labour of a suffocation of their hearts in the duty and obedience they owe to his Majesty’s service and commands, and they are stricken in the head that they rave and utter they know not what against his Majesty’s government and proceedings in the present action in hand.95

  Looking for signs or portents in the natural world was commonplace. For example, English troops in the Borders had been intimidated by an eclipse on 22 May 1639, two days after a skirmish at Wark that marked the first action of the first Bishops” War. Troops summoned suddenly to Newcastle were overtaken by the eclipse, and feared for the worst. John Aston started his journey late in the afternoon, just at the time of eclipse. ‘[I]t was not superstition stayed me, though rumours being then uncertain, and our departure sudden, there wanted not those who construed this eclipse as an ominous presage of the bad success of the king’s affairs’.96 This habit of thought helped to make sense of an insecure natural and political world, but it was not a very effective guide to action.

  The Covenanting movement drew on deep wells of support in Scotland and appealed to English opinion through declarations that circulated in manuscript and were printed by presses in Edinburgh and London. Mobilization in England was supported from the pulpits and demanded action from village officers. Political engagement, in other words, was invited at relatively low levels of society in both countries. In Scotland control was exerted by an oligarchic group, whose authority resided in the Presbyterian church and in the Tables. ‘Oligarchic centralism’ allowed for a degree of co-ordination and ideological control that underpinned a dramatic political success and also set limits to the radicalism of the movement: the whole campaign, in fact, was framed by a document which reflected, and respected, informed Protestant opinion about the limits of legitimate resistance.97 In England, over the next two years, similar tensions were not controlled, and armed conflict was not restrained: as proponents of reformation pushed for more fundamental changes, and accompanying shifts in constitutional arrangements, others pulled back, wary of what this radicalism meant for political order. Greater hesitancy and a lack of clarity about the aims of the opposition to the crown paradoxically led to a much more bloody conflict and, eventually, much greater radicalism on both the royalist and parliamentary sides.