God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  Armed petitioning was a well-established form of politics. Leslie’s army, processing in the form of a funeral march for the Bible, had been led by ministers and the greybeards of Scottish society: the soldiers came last. But the soldiers were there, and if the King would not listen to the leaders of the community, then they would have to defend their corner by force of arms. The difficulty was that force, or the threat of it, might be a cure that was worse than the disease – indeed, one that was fatal to the patient. ‘God grant this viperous brood so freely received into the body of the Kingdom, do not eat through the belly of their fosterers; for I assure you where they shall govern we shall find them proud lords’, wrote one correspondent from Newcastle a little more than a week after its occupation by Leslie’s army. A week of Scottish occupation had been an education for the author: ‘For my part, I assure you had I known what I now find, I should have preferred by much to have suffered as a martyr for my religion, than to run the hazard of being a traitor to mine own country’. Manuscript copies seem to have circulated widely.98 The costs of the Treaty of Ripon, and the realities of occupation, created a political opportunity for those anxious for change in England. But the Covenanters” occupation also, potentially, changed the balance of priorities for many English people between the maintenance of normal civil government and the defence of the true religion or redress of secular grievances. England’s tragedy in the coming years was to be that so many continued to feel that they had to make this choice. When they did, the ideals and experience of active citizenship, and of informed Protestant faith, were available to guide them.

  4

  We Dream Now of a Golden Age

  The Long Parliament and the Public Sphere

  Failure in the Bishops” Wars forced Charles to call a parliament which he could not dissolve until the Covenanters were paid and a treaty ratified. From an English point of view this meant that there was now ample opportunity to air eleven years” worth of grievances. When Parliament met in November 1640, therefore, there was plenty to talk about, but that talking was structured by a number of concerns which were already becoming clear. Aside from, or behind, the immediate problems of undoing the religious innovations and abuses of the prerogative during the 1630s there lay an influential body of opinion in favour of further reformation. There were potential tensions in this coalition, however. Over the previous summer pressure for reformation had seemed to threaten political and social decency: a willingness to collude with the Covenanters was by no means the same thing as a desire to import their reformation, or an even more radical one; still less did it imply approval of unofficial iconoclasm. The previous summer had seen politics in the hands, to some extent, of Scottish soldiers inspired by Merlin and led by ministers and English soldiers eager to make a statement of their own about the future of the church. The potential for political debate to spill out of the usual channels was becoming plain: this was true out in the counties but it is revealed most clearly in London, which now replaced Edinburgh as the theatre of events.

  Looking at Wenceslaus Hollar’s 1647 engraving, drawn from an imaginary spot high above Bankside, we see the two sides of the heart of the English kingdom. On the right, below the only bridge, ships are massed on the river, carrying goods into and out of the greatest port in the country. London’s trade was increasingly reaching not only into the Baltic and Mediterranean, but also across the Atlantic and even into the Indian Ocean. London was also an important manufacturing centre, with more diverse trades and industries than any other city in England. With a population of 400,000 it dwarfed its nearest provincial rivals, which mustered only 20,000 inhabitants, and it was second only to Paris in the whole of Europe. It dominated the economy more completely than the capital cities of other major kingdoms and its position was more akin to that of a city republic like Amsterdam or Venice, but with a larger hinterland. On the left, centred on the great medieval buildings of Westminster, is the seat of government, a magnet for petitioners, lobbyists and those with political ambition, as well as increasingly large numbers of litigants. This was the most litigious age in English history, with great tides of suits washing over the courts each year. The market for manufactures, the level of litigation and the expansion of overseas trade reflected increasing domestic wealth. The beneficiaries of increasing population growth were spending on exotic luxury items, manufactures and the pursuit of grudges. London benefited from all three.1

  London in 1647

  This drove a massive expansion of population despite the fact that London was a death trap: year after year the death rate far exceeded the birth rate. A flood of immigration replaced not just the annual loss of population but fed spectacular growth. By 1650 London contained about 8 per cent of the total population of England and Wales. A substantial part of that migration was motivated by a desire for betterment, of course, but an even larger part was probably motivated by hardship. In arable communities farms were getting bigger as those able to profit from rising prices and falling wages bought out their smaller neighbours. These large farms generated profits which helped to create the market for London’s trades and services and therefore fed the city’s growth. These changes also led to improvements in agricultural efficiency, helping to create the food surpluses necessary to support London and other large towns. But they also tended to employ less labour than a larger number of small farms and therefore created conditions which forced young people off the land. One of the places where it was possible to secure a living without land was obviously a town; and the pull of London for that kind of migration was mighty indeed.2

  London was a densely governed as well as a densely populated city. Within the ancient bounds of the City power lay with the Corporation: the Lord Mayor, Court of Aldermen and Common Council. Below them lay the wards, which took on a wide range of administrative tasks. According to one estimate, one in ten adult males in London held office. Alongside these civic offices stood the Companies, which took on a variety of social and welfare roles, integrating a broad swathe of London’s population into a complex associational life. Finally, the City contained a large number of parishes and numerous lectureships. There was not a free market in religious belief, but, on the other hand, an interested worshipper would not have to try very hard to find alternative visions of proper Christian worship. One element of this relatively diverse religious life was a ‘puritan underground’.3

  Beyond the lines of the medieval City walls and the boundaries of Westminster, densely settled inner-city parishes gave way to more sprawling suburbs. Unlike the modern city, however, the suburbs were not havens of semi-rural retreat, but sprawling settlements of new arrivals, often of low status. Here the structures of authority were less well-established. South of the river too, in Southwark and Bankside, the growth of population placed strain on political and religious institutions which had evolved in very different conditions. These places were associated, often without good reason, with a lack of order.4

  This sprawling metropolis was the centre of a demonstrative, theatrical street politics. London crowds had been prominent in politics throughout the sixteenth century and during the 1620s. Particular dates such as Shrove Tuesday, and particular forms of demonstration such as attacks on brothels, formed a recognizable repertoire of protest, which could be used to express political views. Bonfires and street celebrations marked an official Protestant calendar, celebrating the accession of Elizabeth or deliverance from the Armada, but these same celebrations of Protestant triumph might be the means to express more limited victories. Charles I’s ignominious return from Madrid in 1624, for example, a defeat for diplomacy aimed at securing him a Spanish bride, was enthusiastically celebrated in London’s streets as another delivery from popish threat.5

  Talk on the streets, and in the shops and markets, was crucial in unleashing this political energy. Richard Beaumont, an apprentice apothecary, while visiting one of his master’s patients in May 1640, had heard from members of the militia about the assaults on White Lio
n prison and other prisons in Southwark to release those arrested for attacking Lambeth Palace. In conversation with his master’s sister-in-law, who lived by the Old Exchange, he heard forecasts of further intended outrages which were confirmed and augmented in conversation with other apprentices. They in turn circulated the street talk. Back in his master’s shop he passed on the highlights of these conversations to a waterbearer, telling him that apprentices planned attacks on popish royal chapels and the Earl of Arundel’s house, and passing on the rumours about Laud’s conversion.6 London’s streets, it seems, were alive with engaged political comment, and ambitious plans for action. An attack on a bawdy house off Golden Lane also seems to have had some connections with these protests against Laud and Laudianism: two of the main actors, when asked about the recent proclamation against disorders in the City, were said to have replied: ‘tumultuous persons God bless them God prosper them, let them go on’.7 As the disorders in May had demonstrated, action or talk on London’s streets could accelerate, or rarefy, political issues, raising the stakes in public controversies. Behind these events lay a political energy that could only be restrained by the authorities with some difficulty.

  The potential for more direct political interventions by this mobilized citizenry was clearly demonstrated in September, after the defeat at Newburn, when a petition with 10,000 signatures was presented to the King. Like that of the twelve peers, who had petitioned the King on the same day as the battle of Newburn, the petition called for a parliament. Unlike the peers, however, the petitioners were citizens ‘of every condition’ and they added a list of specific grievances in need of remedy, including ship money, impositions, monopolies, innovations in religion and complaints about the sudden dissolution of parliaments. It also contained explicit statements of hostility to the campaigns against the Covenanters. Signatures had been systematically gathered in the City’s wards and at one such venue 300 people queued to read and subscribe the petition, twenty or thirty at a time. Although four aldermen signed the petition, it was not organized or condoned by the Corporation. Indeed, while it was being mobilized, from August onwards, the Privy Council repeatedly urged the Corporation to stop it, but they could not. The Lord Mayor was reported to have refused to present it and on 22 September the Court of Aldermen officially disowned it. It was presented instead by four citizens, including two prominent radical merchants, Maurice Thomson and Richard Shute. Like Captain John Venn, another of those who presented the petition, these men were to be prominent in radical politics in London in the following years.8

  It had been clear in May that the atmosphere in the teeming streets of the City and its sprawling suburbs could be febrile – rumour and argument swirled around the streets and the pressure of the vulgar was felt by those in authority. Mobilization in the City ran beyond the control of the Corporation. The Covenanters, as we have seen, appealed downwards as well as upwards. News of Charles’s domestic political woes was clearly in circulation in provincial England. Political debate was spilling out onto London’s streets and into the provinces. This was not politics as it should be; negotiation in such an atmosphere was going to be difficult.

  When Parliament met, much was at stake for Scotland, England and (in the eyes of many) for Europe at large. The anticipation that had attended the Short Parliament (when the Earl of Bridgewater had paid through the nose for his wife’s place at a window) was reinforced. Sir Henry Slingsby, in Yorkshire, expected ‘a happy parliament where the subject may have a total redress of all his grievances’; John Bampfield, in Somerset, wrote: ‘For ever be this parliament renowned for so great achievements, for we dream now of nothing more than of a golden age’. In part this was a religious hope for redemption, very marked among the godly – Stanley Gower wrote to Sir Robert Harley: ‘We cease not to pray for you and that great assembly… if the Lord turn away our captivity we shall be like them that dream’.9 Exiles returned and foreigners arrived hoping that this was a moment for the perfection of reformation – the eyes of Christendom were now on the negotiations in London.10 Perhaps the most significant fact about the new parliament was that it could not be dissolved – whereas in May no-one could have known that they were witnessing the summoning of the ‘Short’ parliament, it was more obvious in November that they were witnessing the meeting of a long one. The price of the money to pay for the Treaty of Ripon was to be the redress of grievances. And, after eleven years, a relatively unpopular ecclesiastical policy, an invasion from Scotland and the collapse of financial reforms based on the prerogative, there were a lot of potential grievances to hear.

  Elections in the autumn of 1640 were, like those earlier in the year, unusually contentious and eighty-six elections were contested. Since many of these were two-member constituencies, it seems that one quarter of the Commons had gained their seats through a public contest. Inflation had reduced the real value of the property qualification in the counties – fixed at possession of a 40 shilling freehold, which was now a relatively small sum. As a result the electorate was expanding. In the boroughs it was increasingly common to challenge the right of the Corporation to select members on behalf of the inhabitants. Such disputes were referred to the Commons Committee for Privileges, which frequently ruled in favour of wider franchises. As a result of these developments perhaps one in three adult males had the right to vote in 1640, and in many cases they had a choice of candidates too. Although in many elections only two candidates were presented for the two seats, reflecting an aversion to public contests and a preference for ‘selection’ over ‘election’, even where no effective choice was offered to electors there were still opportunities for the middling sort to apply independent pressure. In eighteen counties, and a number of significant boroughs, petitions were drawn up in the name of the candidates, and presented to them for delivery to Parliament. In some cases they had been read out and acclaimed at meetings of the county court when the elections had been organized.11

  It is certainly clear that many members arrived with a powerful sense of the strength of provincial feeling, and of their obligation to represent it. When official business opened in the Commons speaker after speaker presented petitions covering what was quickly to become pretty familiar ground. Among the petitions piled up on the desk of John Rushworth, the clerk of the House of Commons, was the text of a speech by Sir John Colepeper, member for Kent. ‘I stand not up with the petition in my hand, as others have done’, he declared, ‘I have it in my mouth, and in charge from them that sent me hither to present the grievances of the county of Kent’. Like many others he expressed concern about the fate of religion, complaining both of the great increase of papists due to the neglect of the laws against them and of the ‘intruding and countenancing of divers new ceremonies in matters of religion’. This dislike of Laudianism was particularly evoked by the placing of the communion table altar-wise and ‘bowing or cringing to or towards the same’. His complaints against the Convocation, although they included the ‘etc oath’, were primarily constitutional: the canons had been passed by a Convocation which had turned itself into a synod, without warrant, following the dissolution of Parliament. It had, in effect, taken unto itself the power to make laws and impose benevolences. Along with many others Colepeper was also concerned about financial measures of the 1630s, especially coat and conduct money, the rising cost of gunpowder, and the taking of arms from Kent to Scotland the previous summer, which had not been returned. He was particularly bothered by ship money, however, claiming that the legal position on which it was based threatened property rights: ‘If the laws give the king power in any danger to the kingdom whereof he is judge, to impose what and when he please, we owe all that is left to the goodness of the king’. Finally, he complained of the monopolists, ‘a nest of wasps or swarm of vermin which have overcrept the land’ who invaded the households of the English like ‘the frogs of Egypt’. These are the ‘leeches that have sucked the commonwealth so hard it is almost become hectical’.12

  Colepeper fought for
the King in the civil war, like nine of the fifteen other speakers recorded by Rushworth in the collection of these speeches published later.13 Although Colepeper’s language was ripe, and the grievances very serious, there was no constitutional radicalism here, or any clear desire to pursue further reformation. Most of the speeches from these early days make similar recitations of threats to the true religion, bemoan the long intermission of parliaments and the uses made of the prerogative during the 1630s. Many of them attributed these problems to poor advice, and called for a change in royal counsels. But that was it. The programme represented by these speeches, which claimed to reflect provincial opinion in general, was in that sense limited: parliamentary control of taxation, the end of the Laudian experiment, and a balance between prerogative power and other sources of law which gave greater security to the subject.14